Eisenberg’s bizarre tale of catharsis through art is genuinely original and impossible to ignore.
Finding a hobby you enjoy could be the single most important part of life, especially as you age and perhaps inadvertently fade into the background. Jesse Eisenberg’s third directorial effort The Debut makes a strong case that this is true but also how compromise is the competing yet necessity remedy to a life stuck at either end of the spectrum. He has crafted his most ambitious and complex effort to date in a thrillingly unique take on artistic purification and finding your voice.
Unassuming and meek housewife Mona Friedman (Julianne Moore) lives an invisible existence making dinner and tagging along to vapid meals with friends with her dismissive husband Howard (Patrick Fabian). Her two young adult kids don’t seem all that bothered with her either and she drifts about the house like a ghost. That is until, without any experience, she auditions for a role in a local community play led by rambunctious jaded theatre director Jerry (Paul Giamatti) and finds a new lease of life that engulfs her world in more surprising ways than she ever could have imagined.
The set up sounds like a classic tale of a woman who is used to being walked all over finally learning to stand up for herself but Eisenberg’s precise vision makes this something else entirely. There’s an unknowable skewering of reality both in and outside of the play which gives the film a bold experimental feel that takes time to adjust to but becomes wholly enveloping.
The play ‘Nosy Neighbours’, a musical about two people in an apartment block falling in love, is knowingly silly but all the eclectic cast give it their all just like they’re doing a sellout opening night of ‘Phantom of the Opera’. From Mona’s cold existence she is suddenly thrust into a world of exuberance, the lead Stef (Halle Baily) constantly lifts her up and the group make real efforts to include her. They’re saccharine and over the top but Eisenberg is purposefully reminding us that like their work, life is also a performance and a mask and it is how we placate and navigate people that gives our lives meaning.
Much of the success of this strange approach and Mona’s eventual method adoption of her side character, building manager Miss Danielle, rest of Julianne Moore’s astonishing performance. She has been one of our best working actors for quite some time now but this is truly up there with one of her best performances yet. Mona is played with a heartbreaking fragility but is not afraid to go big and can switch from funny to pathetic to a real spinning wheel of emotions of a dime. She manages to make Mona’s eventual improvement from her terrible audition to her persevering competence fully believable amongst the weirdness. When Mona blossoms like a complex flower growing in a bed of soil using spiked fertilizer it feels fully earnt and we’re always rooting for this plucky underdog even when she oversteps her mark.
Giamatti is a worthy foe as Jerry, managing to be loathsome yet vulnerable in a similar way to his character Mr Hunham in The Holdovers or a Gene Cousineau from Barry with less early career success. The pair compliment each other perfectly and act as mirrors to each other’s lives, as if they are intersecting and providing each other with the all important balance to become whole people. No-one can act perfectly in every situation and that is ok, but if we take control of our lives while exercising some sort of restraint, we should be just fine.
4 / 5
The Debut is a step up in both form and storytelling from Eisenberg and stands as his most challenging and best film to date.
