Oscar Winner Loses Her Mind in Bonkers Comedy About Acting

Courtesy of TIFF Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain (which earned Kieran Culkin a Best Supporting Actor Oscar) was a nimble balancing act, infusing its somber Holocaust-themed drama with the sarcastic and neurotic wit for which its writer/director, as an actor, is known.

Attempting to pull off the same trick twice, alas, proves beyond his reach, as The Debut (screening at the Toronto International Film Festival) leans heavier into surreal comedy and yet never finds a suitable tone for its wannabe-moving and sorta-kinda satiric tale of a housewife who goes looking for herself on the stage.

Julianne Moore’s game lead performance aside, it’s a case study in simultaneously going too far and not far enough.

In a small New Jersey town that’s as unreal as everything else in (and about) the film, Mona Friedman (Moore) coasts through a stay-at-home life in which she’s ignored and dismissed—often with a condescending sneer—by her husband Howard ( Better Call Saul ’s Patrick Fabian) and her twin kids, who are on the precipice of leaving for college.

For reasons that are never dramatized, Mona auditions for the small part of an apartment building superintendent named Miss Danielle in a community theater production of the musical Nosy Neighbors , whose director Jerry (Paul Giamatti) is renowned in the area for being equally tough and gifted.

Mona has no talent, and her audition is a flop, but, as befitting her zombie-ish headspace, she still hopes she can nab the gig.

Weeks later, she visits the theater, and Jerry curtly informs her that rehearsals are already in full swing with their reliable favorite, Serena Cherry (Bernadette Peters).

In response, Mona drives home and weeps madly in her driveway.

However, a few hours later in the middle of the night, Jerry calls with out-of-the-blue news: Serena has abandoned them—Mona is now Miss Danielle.

Eisenberg’s staging of this momentous turn of events makes it seem like Mona is hallucinating, and that impression persists when she arrives at the theater the following morning, and the show’s assistant director Piotr (Eldar Isgandarov) and star Stef (Halle Bailey) treat her with over-the-top kindness.

Yet the longer it continues on the same weirdo wavelength, the more it becomes apparent that Mona’s circumstances are not a figment of her deranged-by-domestic-misery imagination—rather, everyone’s bizarrely chipper enthusiasm and supportive behavior is merely part and parcel of the film’s preferred heightened form of reality.

This revelation isn’t quite disappointing (since casting everything as a dream would be hackneyed), but it is baffling, given that it renders the proceedings knowingly phony.

Worse, it’s simply not funny, due to Eisenberg refraining from pushing the action into completely bonkers territory.