Jesse Eisenberg’s comedy about a housewife who disappears into a community theatre musical is often funny and never quite sure what it is arguing. Julianne Moore is the reason to go, and she is reason enough.
Mona has an empty house and nothing pressing to do in it, so she auditions for a musical at her local community theatre. The director, Jerry, treats the production as if the fate of the art form depended on it. That is the whole set-up of The Debut, which Jesse Eisenberg wrote and directed, and it is by some distance his strangest film. It starts as a comedy about amateur theatre and becomes a film about what happens when a person gets lost inside a part. We liked it a good deal. We are less sure it knows what it thinks.
Julianne Moore plays Mona, and the film lives or dies on her, so it is fortunate that she is as good here as we have seen her. She plays the timidity first, and plays it without asking for our sympathy: Mona is a woman who has spent years being easy to overlook and has come to expect it. Then the part takes hold and Moore lets it take hold completely, and the transformation is both ridiculous and, somewhere underneath, upsetting. We laughed at her more than we expected to. Then, in a scene we will not describe, we found we had stopped laughing and were simply watching her face, and were not entirely comfortable with how we had got there.
Paul Giamatti’s Jerry is the other engine. He is the sort of director who exists in every amateur society in the world, the man who has read about the Method and believes it is his to dispense, and Giamatti plays him without a wink. The confrontations between Jerry and Mona are the funniest stretches of the film, partly because neither of them is joking. Around them Eisenberg has assembled a company that includes Halle Bailey, K. Todd Freeman, Colton Ryan, Bonnie Milligan and Bernadette Peters, and he gives himself a part as Todd. Eisenberg and Emile Mosseri are credited with the music, and the musical the company is rehearsing is the film’s own invention, which spares it from being a joke at any real show’s expense.
The film’s most interesting decision is that it changes shape as Mona does. Drew Daniels’s camera and Robert Nassau’s cutting stay plain and unfussy while she is a nervous newcomer, and then, as the part swallows her, the film gets odder, less tethered, more willing to go somewhere surreal and stay there. It is a bold move for a comedy that could have coasted on its cast, and it is the thing that separates The Debut from the dozen other films about a small production going wrong.
It is also where the film loses its footing. Eisenberg has two ideas about Mona. One is that acting has set her free. The other is that it has eaten her. Both are good ideas, and the film wants credit for both without choosing between them, so when it reaches for a statement about what art does to the people who take it seriously, the statement comes out muffled. The stranger passages are executed with confidence and we admired them, but by the last stretch we were not sure whether we were meant to be worried for Mona or cheering her on, and we do not think Eisenberg was sure either.
The obvious comparison is Waiting for Guffman, and Eisenberg has plainly seen it. He is kinder than that film was. Nobody here is a fool for wanting to be in a show; the joke is never that these people are amateurs, only that they are human, and the film’s warmth towards the whole scrappy enterprise is real. Anyone who has ever stood in a draughty hall waiting for their cue will recognise every person in it.
It is 105 minutes and a 15 certificate, mostly for language. Most critics have been warmer than we are, and we understand why, because Moore is doing something you do not see often. We would send you for her, and for Giamatti, and for the pleasure of a comedy that takes a risk in its second half even if it does not quite land it. If you have ever directed an amateur production yourself, you may want a seat near the exit.
