Jesse Eisenberg’s last two directorial efforts – the prickly comedy When You Finish Saving the World and the slightly softer A Real Pain – are small films rooted in the real world. They have their little idiosyncrasies, their bits of cinematic flair, but they keep their feet grounded in the here and now. For his third film, Eisenberg has said goodbye to all that (or most of that) and run headlong at the surreal and the absurd, borrowing from Charlie Kaufman and other oddballs to tell a small story in a big way.
The Debut is about a repressed housewife, Mona (Julianne Moore), who decides to audition for a role in a community theater production of a musical called Nosy Neighbors, one of those gassy Manhattan trifles that were so ubiquitous on Broadway a half century ago. Mona’s kids are about to fly the nest, and her husband barely seems to notice her when she’s standing right next to him. So why not have a little creative adventure?
From that setup, Eisenberg could have gone to the obvious place, staging a sweet dramedy about a humble act of artistic expression opening Mona’s eyes to all the possibility of life outside her little bubble. He does do that, in part, but he also wants to take things to a darker place. The film gradually morphs into a study of actorly obsession and vanity, as Mona takes the Stanislavksi-esque teachings of the play’s director, Jerry (Paul Giamatti, doing his wearily charming thing), to extremes perhaps not seen since Black Swan.
That’s a clever idea: a director watching in horror as the monster he’s created threatens to lay waste to his production. The trouble is, none of this, not the nice story of blossoming passion, nor the acidic satire of pretentious artistes, unfolds in an environment that looks and feels anything like the dimension all of us are currently living in. Eisenberg has unrooted the film in time – there is lots of 1980s decor, but some more modern clothing; we see nary a cellphone, but there is no other specific period detail – and has his characters behave in archly cartoonish fashion.
A movie needn’t be situated in plain reality, of course. But Eisenberg is inconsistent in his quirky abstraction. The Debut toggles too frequently between recognizable humanity and the mores and attitudes of whatever other-place Eisenberg has invented.
Which undercuts both the parody and the pathos; without a reliable reference point, it’s hard to know what, exactly, we are meant to think and feel about anything happening on screen. Or, rather, it’s hard to connect to the sentiment that, I’m surmising, Eisenberg is trying to get across: a wry and bleary appreciation for the thrill and risk and silliness and beauty of making art. Still, it is fascinating to watch Eisenberg expand his purview like this, taking a swing at the grand and busy techniques of marquee film-makers like Kaufman, like Ari Aster, like Alejandro González Iñárritu.
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