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| Demi Moore, midway through The Substance |
By Dominique Paul Noth
The current publicity blitz in favor of Demi Moore is not totally accurate. Though best known since the 1980s as movie eye candy and making more headline for her liaisons with Bruce Willis and Ashton Kutchner than for her filmic range, she did attempt to deepen her acting chops in “G.I. Jane,” “A Few Good Men” and “Ghost,“ reportedly taking home as much as $11 million a film outing. She emerged still thought of as eye candy with smooth line readings, not an actress worthy of Meryl Streep type accolades.
The current huzzahs are for her willingness in her 60s to look both beautiful and as deformed as the ugliest witch in literature. This has helped The Substance win a surprise nomination for best film Oscar with Moore also earning a best actress nomination, bolstered by her surprise win in that category at the Golden Globes.
Oscar notably chose her rather than Nicole Kidman in Babygirl, Pamela Anderson in The Last Showgirl (yes, a similar plot device in a less honored film about an aging sex symbol) and Angelina Jolie as Maria, which I reviewed at http://urbanmilwaukee.com/2024/12/29/movies-maria-is-a-star-vehicle-for-angelina-jolie/
Also nominated as the only woman among the five best Oscar directors is European cinematic specialist Coralie Fargeat, while (in not-a- surprise) the film is also up for its main strength, a best makeup and hair-styling Oscar. (The film is available for TV streaming customers and because of the nominations should be making a resurgence at Milwaukee movie theaters.)
The shocker comes when you try to define The Substance. At its base it is a sci-fi film, if we broaden the definition of sci-fi to include a scientific breakthrough that doesn’t exist. By this definition, “The Man in the White Suit” – a 1951 Ealing Studios satire starring Alec Guiness – is sci-fi, since a chemist invents an ever-enduring thread, which up-ends the British labor system. Similarly, The Substance attacks society’s fixation on the alluring young body by inventing a series of tubes, pumps and plastics that allow an aging person to create, out of their own body, a younger more beauteous replacement, with each partner alternating weeks in charge.
Now on the one hand this is intended as deep social criticism of our cosmetic fixation on youth and beauty, with Dennis Quaid in a delightful over-the-top performance as a studio boss blowing smoke and chewing shrimps right into the audience face as he rhapsodizes about the ratings appeal of female beauty. On the other hand, the film is no more illuminating about the scientific process than an animation fantasy.
Moore is the amusingly named Elisabeth Sparkle. Even at 50 (in the film) she uses her lithe body in Jane Fonda type gym classes to retain her nubile-inspired fame. (You get the feeling that, in the real world, the current media is the leading perpetrator of the body fixation issue, since their news stories are in awe that Moore in her 60s can still look so good in a gym suit playing 50.)
Sparkle senses her grip on public adulation is waning and decides on The Substance process, which involves opening her backbone in bloody cinematography to eject a younger version of herself – the talented actress Margaret Qualley, who becomes the flirty new eye candy. Despite their need to cooperate, the young is trying to get rid of the old and vice versa.
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| Margaret Qualley midway through the film. |
That is an understatement. Now I’ve been hanging out with a young crowd that loves horror movies and rattles off the shrieks and scares in many movies I have yet to see, since I went through that horror craze decades ago.
Frankly I think this one is more likely to inspire puking among this younger crowd – or laughter rather than reverence.
Fargeat, a European expert in this genre, has conceived a story that mixes soft-porn voyeurism (what the trade calls “a T and A show” for tits and asses) with genuine repulsive wreckage of the human form, so that Moore smears her mouth and converts her glowing hair into ragged gray strands while Qualley wonders over the turkey leg that pulsates inside her anus.
From surgical stitches to bloody stumps, the full range of Hollywood special effects are employed, though amusingly at key moments of the body transformations Fargeat relies on the old 2001: A Space Odyssey light show trickery of speeding objects.
As giving over as Moore and Qualley are to having their naked bodies – with and without realistic prosthetics -- exposed to the camera and having their ugliest behavior live side by side with their physical appeal, we the audience are mostly watching the effects dispassionately, recognizing that nothing is too intimate for this moviemaker. And nothing is actually real.
Moore may deserve some applause for going over to the darkest side of her image. Qualley and Quaid also have fun acting moments. But this film didn’t deserve its Golden Globe honors or anything from the Oscars, except maybe makeup. But it sure knows how to play the audience for both indulging and criticizing our society’s emphasis on youth.
About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic as well as editor in charge of its arts and entertainment staff.
He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives still at milwaukeelabor.org. In that role he won top awards yearly.
A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.
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