With recent Critics Choice, Golden Globe, and Screen
Actors Guild awards, Demi Moore seems well-positioned to take home a
Best Actress statuette at tomorrow night’s Oscar ceremony. It’s a far cry from
her career from the Eighties through the early aughts, when her scant critical
acclaim was signaled by the five “Razzies” “honoring” the worst in contemporary
cinema in the prior year.
The Substance is
by no stretch of the imagination cheerful, and, after seeing the movie a few
weeks ago, I found a bit of trivia disclosed before the movie (36,000
gallons of fake blood for just one scene) a severe understatement of
its grossness and goriness.
But give Moore props for taking on such a risky
role—one that requires her, at age 62, not only to disrobe even more than she
did, onscreen and on a Vanity Fair cover, three decades ago, but also to
channel a career’s worth of frustration and rage over the male gaze.
The Substance itself
has been far better received than another dystopian horror film that it
resembles in several fascinating ways, Seconds. Moreover, the
star of that 1966 sci-fi shocker, Rock Hudson, didn’t win anything like
Ms. Moore’s plaudits. The relative reception of these two deeply downbeat
dramas says much about the changing expectations of audiences and critics.
The resemblances between the two
movies are multiple and, at times, uncanny, including:
*an aging middle-aged protagonist at a crossroads,
profoundly dissatisfied and at a dead end in life;
*a mysterious stranger who tells the protagonist about
the possibility of being a younger self;
*the stranger follows up on the stranger’s tip by
going to a secretive organization that warns that, though the rewards of the
new life are amazing, certain instructions must be followed—or else;
*the bodily transformation that follows is as bloody
and disgusting as the big screen permits;
*despite the rewards reaped from the new life, the
protagonist still feels empty inside—in fact, worse;
*the protagonist tries to end this experiment in the
fountain of youth;
*that attempt is—well, no spoilers!
The greater success enjoyed by The Substance
might have something to do with its specific application to Hollywood. Many
actresses—and, I suspect, even some male matinee idols—surely identify with
Moore’s “Elisabeth,” a former box-office star who loses her most recent gig as
a TV fitness guru because of the crime of turning 50.
Comic relief, such as it is, comes from the caricature
of the agist, sexist TV exec (played by Dennis Quaid) who fires Elisabeth and,
after a much-hyped search, hires as her replacement her second, transformed
self, “Sue” (played by Margaret Qualley).
No such opportunity for laughs exists in Seconds,
and its put-upon central character, Arthur Hamilton, a Scarsdale banking
executive who laments his lost youth and dream of an artistic life, hits
squarely at mainstream suburban life in mid-Sixties America.
Hudson, believing he could not realistically play both
Arthur and the younger self he becomes through plastic surgery, Tony Wilson,
lobbied director John Frankenheimer to split the parts among himself and an
older actor (who ended up being John Randolph).
Even so, Hudson regarded his part as complex and
challenging enough that he could pivot away from the Douglas Sirk melodramas
and Doris Day rom-coms that had boosted him to the upper echelon of Hollywood
leading men.
The role was a career changer, all right—almost a
career ender. Moviegoers stayed away from this film with such grim subject
matter. It was even greeted with hostility by European critics at the Cannes
Film Festival, who were more open to unusual subject content than their
American counterparts.
It was bad enough that Hudson fell off his box-office
perch and that he would have to resort to TV (McMillan and Wife) to
revive his career. But, unlike Ms. Moore, he was unable to distance himself
sufficiently from his character.
At one point, perhaps as a gay man, finding the role
of a character filled with buried emotions to be too close to home, he went
into an unplanned crying jag in one scene. Frankenheimer had to close the set
to allow Hudson to regain his composure.
Several decades later, Seconds would be
regarded as prophecy—a cult classic not just anticipating the counterculture
that bloomed the following year, but also the false hope of spiritual and physical
rejuvenation nourished by the baby boom generation (depicted so graphically in
an actual rhinoplasty operation that the cameraman fainted).
Frankenheimer wryly observed that his paranoid thriller was "the only movie, really, that's ever gone from failure to classic without ever having been a success." But it remains so unrelentingly bleak that many viewers (including myself) have found the going so rough that we couldn't make it all the way through.
In that sense,
if not its box-office performance and Hollywood’s possible highest honor for
Ms. Moore, The Substance shares much in common with this prior bit of disturbing cinematic fare.
