“I used to be that way, I used to be younger,” says Catherine Stewart (Julianne Moore) after extolling the youthful beauty of Chloe (Amanda Seyfried), the escort she has hired to test her husband’s fidelity.
She could just as well be lamenting the general lack of roles for ageing actresses once they are said to have lost their sex appeal – which is to say the collective lust of the 18- to-35 male demographic – but then again, like Meryl Streep, this terrific actress has a universal appeal and a sincerity in performance that keep her firmly in the limelight.
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Chloe
Directed by Atom Egoyan |
Matched here with Seyfried, Liam Neeson (as the husband, David) and Max Thieriot (as their son), Moore is as enthralling as ever in the role of a woman who sees her happy family life flashing before her eyes when she begins to suspect her husband of having an affair.
Desperate to do something, even if only to confirm David’s infidelity, she turns to Chloe. However, the girl seems to have her own designs, and Catherine’s simple plot quickly spirals out of control.
Seyfried is as perfect a Chloe as Toronto-based director Atom Egoyan could have hoped for, a dulcet-voiced Lolita whose anime eyes positively overflow with sultry precociousness – move over, American Beauty’s Mena Suvari! Yet she frequently comes close to stumbling over uncomfortable dialogue (which some of the other actors can’t quite seem to get the hang of, either).
The plot goes on to strain credibility throughout its second and third acts, and for all that we never get a sense that the stakes are particularly high, so while the unfolding drama won’t lose your interest, it’s hardly pulse-pounding. When things do veer toward physical confrontation – a climax thankfully more in line with One Hour Photo than the off-putting, violent excess which capped off Panic Room – it comes out of the blue.
Chloe plays like a love letter to Toronto, its plot nestled in the swank of Yorkville, its scenes set before the CN Tower, the ROM crystal, and the AGO (among others), and featuring any number of passing streetcars. Egoyan even throws in a plot device referencing London-based indie band Raised by Swans, who also appear on the soundtrack.
But as a psychological “erotic thriller,” Chloe never quite unbalances the audience enough to call our heroes’ sanity into question, so with nothing more hanging in the balance than a wealthy doctor’s good name, it simply isn’t all that thrilling.
In painting an initially cozy portrait of the Stewarts and then trying to take them down Revolutionary Road over paranoia and infidelity, Egoyan dabbles in the usual film/TV clichés about the nuclear family unit, but he always treats the characters with an earnest respect which gives them a certain depth even when they are enacting narrative truisms and coughing up awkward lines.
At times, Chloe wants to be Mulholland Drive (hello explicit lesbian love scenes!), and at others it plays up the espionage like a domestic James Bond film, all while serving up a modern stalker story laden with sexual intrigue.
As a thriller, Chloe is a bit of a let-down, though it scores points simply on the basis of restraint (remember the hysteria of 2005’s Derailed?). But as a drama and an encomium to the city and culture of Toronto – which appears all too often in Hollywood films but rarely playing itself – it is more than serviceable.