Jesse Eisenberg has made his most significant debut to date. There is a delicious irony at the center of “The Debut,” Eisenberg’s third feature as a director, which world premiered at the Telluride Film Festival: it is a film about a nobody who attacks a bit part as if it were the role of a lifetime — and it arrives as one of the fall’s genuine best picture contenders, ready to make Oscar darlings out of Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti. Rebecca Keagan of NBC News moderated the Q&A with Eisenberg, Moore and Giamatti.
It was Giamatti’s first time seeing the film. Call it Eisenberg’s “Black Swan” by way of “Whiplash” and “Waiting for Guffman,” the whole fever dream staged inside a faux musical and relocated to a New Jersey rec center. Moore plays Mona Friedman, a meek housewife who hasn’t sung in front of anyone since church choir and is unexpectedly cast in a community-theater production — then transforms into a zealous method actor willing to wage war over a marginal role.
Giamatti is Jerry, the tyrannical director billed, without irony, as the biggest name in New Jersey community theater. It is funny, then feral, then unexpectedly moving and it confirms that the filmmaker who won Kieran Culkin an Oscar with “A Real Pain” knows exactly how to build a showcase around actors. A24 sets it for Dec. 11, a release date that signals a studio going long — and A24 knows this walk.
Twice it has turned an unlikely film into a best picture champion: “Moonlight,” which stunned the favored “La La Land and “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” an absurdist multiverse comedy that had no business winning and won anyway. Start with Moore, who has quietly become the film’s frontrunner-in-waiting. She is a five-time nominee with a single win — “Still Alice,” more than a decade ago — and Mona is the sort of tragicomic tour de force that reintroduces a great actor to voters who may have forgotten how much they owe her.
She plays it balls to the wall, fearless in the way of Natalie Portman or Cate Blanchett at full tilt. On Telluride’s Saturday afternoon screening, she drew spontaneous applause in the middle of two separate scenes — the kind of response that tells you everything. A sixth nomination is automatic.
The win is the question, and the recent past is on her side: the modern Academy has grown notably comfortable handing out second — and even third — acting Oscars. Anthony Hopkins for “The Father,” Emma Stone for “Poor Things” (Stone, tellingly, produces “The Debut”), with Frances McDormand and Sean Penn all tripling up in recent years. A second Moore statuette would surprise no one.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
