In the opening chapter of ‘Revolutionary Road’, Richard Yates’ classic 1962 novel of postwar suburban discontent, the young parents of a Connecticut commuter town form a community theatre and put in a show, an initiative meant to show that they didn’t leave their creative ambitions behind when they moved out of the city. The failure of their first performance looms through the rest of the story as a symbol of their thwarted aspirations in a domestic cultural wasteland, and reifies a dichotomy still understood in American culture, between city (edgy, striving, artistic) and suburb (family-oriented, stultifying, conformist).
In Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut, another community theatre production proves more transporting for a different suburban housewife: Mona (Julianne Moore), who tries out for her sleepy New Jersey town’s production of Nosy Neighbors, a fictitious musical set in in an apartment building of “New York City – the recent past,” a throwback vision of the Big Apple, with rats in the walls and a multiethnic cast of grouches and dreamers, full of grit and excitement. Mona’s role is Miss Danielle, the building’s tough-broad superintendent – think a distaff Luis, from Sesame Street – who moves the disparate dramas along, costume in a bright-red boiler suit accessorised with a tool belt, from which a toilet plunger’s handle protrudes like the scabbard of a prop sword.
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As housewife Mona, Moore’s performance is equally a throwback. She’s the other half of the late 20th century city-suburb dichotomy, wearing a quilted housecoat as she cooks perfect meals for her ungrateful teenage children and oblivious husband who just wants to sit on the toilet and do his crossword puzzle in peace. This repressed domestic goddess is a role Moore has assayed before, notably in Todd Haynes films that also play with midcentury archetype. Moore initially gives Mona a meek way of moving and a sweet, timid voice, both speaking and singing, that’s maybe an octave down from the apologetic and almost inaudibly high voice she gave Carol White in Safe.
In a development that could also be taken from a Haynes movie, Mona is transformed through performance. Eisenberg stages the early days of rehearsal in swirling wide-eyed single takes as Mona is swept up in the charged anxiety of creative risk and the excitement of her high-energy found family of theatre kid outcasts. Under the demanding tutelage of director and company demigod Jerry (Paul Giamatti, a salt-cured ham), she comes out of her shell.
With her kids about to graduate and leave home, “what’s my motivation” is the question for Mona the mother; it is also the question for Mona the actor, as she goes deeper into character and becomes a Method pain in the ass. She sheds her inhibitions, trying to live the part of the lonely but plucky Miss Danielle, eventually leaving her family and moving into a rat-trap flophouse, like a fugitive housewife of the early feminist movement to pursue her new creative vocation. She starts acting like a caricature of the difficult actor: refusing to say lines when she can’t find the truth, arguing with her director, overruling makeup and wardrobe, and disrupting her costars with her diva-like behaviour.
The impossible and self-absorbed Method actor is a stereotype everyone knows; Eisenberg’s humour depends on recognition and exaggeration, not satire or absurdity – there’s even a fright-wig gag, punctuated by a scream when Mona sees herself in the mirror, like something Lucille Ball would do. Eisenberg is a frequent contributor of “Shouts and Murmurs” pieces to The New Yorker, and the way The Debut exhausts the comic possibilities of each chapter of Mona’s evolution in turn feels very much like a magazine humor piece, written by someone accustomed to sustaining each joke only for the duration of a single paragraph.
Characterisations are broad, and the bouncy and agreeable tone is not so different from the tone of the stage musical within it; the movie grins its way through tropes so saturated that Eisenberg doesn’t have to explain them, or risk losing anyone. The real city that Mona runs off to is just like the city in Nosy Neighbors, a raspy-voiced desk clerk and bums on the sidewalk just outside, warming their hands over a fire lit in a garbage barrel, an image of urban decline handed down over multiple generations of movies.
The musical, invented by Eisenberg for the film, also demonstrates his facility with the familiar. The lyrics are full of cliched expressions of romantic yearning and punny enjambments; Eisenberg himself plays the character who wakes up next to a flight attendant, like Bobby in Company, but the bouncy, clever sentimentality is less Sondheim than, say, Avenue Q.
Very much a homage to Moore’s body of work, the role of Mona is also an elaborately mounted showcase to her talent. Both these elements are most present in a centrepiece sequence that drew applause at early film festival screenings: an improv exercise in which Jerry demands Mona, as Miss Danielle, convince him to hand over a rent check – he’ll only do it when he believes her. Exhorted by Jerry to go deeper and deeper, Mona’s voice drops, her shoulders bristle, her internal monologue unblocks until Miss Danielle’s deep pathos shoots loose in a florid and desperate torrent – over the course of about three minutes, Moore goes from Safe to Magnolia.