<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" EVEN THE PEOPLE WHO WILL FLOCK to see Hannibal probably expect it to be trash, but why should Anthony Hopkins care? He already has his knighthood and his Oscar, two prizes that eluded Richard Burton, his fellow Welshman and early exemplar. He could probably teach his pet schnauzer to play Hannibal Lecter, assuming he owns one and it could be trained not to blink. But Hannibal the Cannibal is also Hopkins&amp;#039;s most--in fact, his only--crowd-pleasing role, letting him renew contact with the big audience that seldom turns out to see how Sir Anthony keeps himself busy otherwise.  Since I never found much to admire in The Silence of the Lambs, which I had a hard time taking as anything more than a Chucky movie for grown-ups, I won&amp;#039;t be surprised if I end up preferring Ridley Scott&amp;#039;s frankly mercenary sequel to its overpraised precursor. A go-to guy if ever there was one when it comes to polishing junk to gleam like silver, Scott has never been accused of undue concern with humane values, making him less likely than original director Jonathan Demme to fib to himself about what he&amp;#039;s up to as he goes about delivering the Grand Guignol goods. All the same, I&amp;#039;m clearly not the target audience, since I&amp;#039;m one of the quixotic few who will line up for Hannibal mainly because Julianne Moore is in it. After Jodie Foster passed on reprising her most famous role--as did not only Demme but scriptwriter Ted Tally, leaving Hopkins reunited with only his straitjacket--a number of actresses reportedly turned thumbs down on replacing her. But Moore was so eager to play Clarice Starling that she dropped out of M. Night Shyamalan&amp;#039;s Unbreakable to grab the part, and we&amp;#039;ll soon find out if pissing off our new-age Alfred Hitchhike was worth it. That Clarice is still the flashiest, most challenging female role in sight ten years after Foster played her doesn&amp;#039;t do Hollywood much credit. If Moore&amp;#039;s usual career pattern holds, she&amp;#039;ll deliver one more exquisite performance in a movie that doesn&amp;#039;t quite deserve it--and to which she will end up being oddly peripheral. For going on a decade now, she&amp;#039;s been one of the most interesting actresses in movies, but also one of the most puzzling. Along with gifts that make hash of the usual distinctions between intuitive screen acting and accomplished technique, she&amp;#039;s got a face whose unpredictable alternations between masking and mapping her characters&amp;#039; feelings the camera dotes on. Yet she&amp;#039;s never made herself indelible to the great American public, and that&amp;#039;s only partly because today&amp;#039;s dumbed-down, woman-hating movies don&amp;#039;t have room for the complex, discomfiting modern heroines that Moore&amp;#039;s talent leaves you pining for her to play. The other reason, paradoxically, is that being more intriguing than her movies often makes her look as if she&amp;#039;s putting on airs--even when, with a weird blend of ambition and diffidence, she&amp;#039;s doing her damnedest to fit in. A similar quality got Katharine Hepburn tagged as box-office poison for a spell in the thirties, and Moore is under the added disadvantage of being less commanding. On top of that, she&amp;#039;s working in a movie era when even a new Audrey Hepburn might strike studio execs as too unsettling for the audience&amp;#039;s peace of mind. It&amp;#039;s symptomatic of Hollywood&amp;#039;s mistrust of women that an actress like Moore, who can effortlessly convey intelligence onscreen, is often cast instead as an ethereal na\u00EFf--in vapidly life-affirming variations on Amber Waves, the earth-motherly cokehead she played in P. T. Anderson&amp;#039;s overrated, mush-brained Boogie Nights. (While sentimentalizing the porn industry was at least a new twist, I didn&amp;#039;t believe for a second that Anderson knew what he was talking about.) At the same time, Moore&amp;#039;s very versatility has also worked against the emergence of a star persona stable enough for moviegoers to get a handle on, not least because you never know what kind of movie she&amp;#039;s going to pop up in next. She&amp;#039;s tried everything from action flicks to comedies high and low to indie chamber dramas, showing a catholicity of taste that only her poise has kept this side of looking slightly desperate. And she&amp;#039;s been luckier than some. After all, Moore did get an old-fashioned showcase for noble great-lady acting last year. Too bad it was in Neil Jordan&amp;#039;s solemnly ridiculous adaptation of Graham Greene&amp;#039;s The End of the Affair. As the adulterous wife caught between Stephen Rea as her drab stick of a husband and Ralph Fiennes as her glowering stick of a lover, she gave her only dull performance so far, tending to her English accent as if it were an ailing puppy and letting her wardrobe play the character for her--except, of course, in the sex scenes, which Jordan made slightly gamy in an attempt to conceal the material&amp;#039;s triteness. What Greene&amp;#039;s admirers never seem to realize is that terse kitsch is still kitsch, even--or especially--with Greene&amp;#039;s peculiar brand of Catholicism getting hauled out at the climax to turn a hill of beans into the Mount of Olives. Yet Moore&amp;#039;s inability to invent a character where the script failed to provide one was atypical, since she usually tries to play a human being even in stories without much use for them. Six years ago, opposite Hugh Grant in Nine Months, which could have been acted by two Pez dispensers with no great loss, she was at least radiant, believably pregnant, and far readier than director Chris Columbus could be bothered to notice to treat her character&amp;#039;s pains and joys as emotions rather than plot gimmicks. Even when she subbed for Laura Dern in Steven Spielberg&amp;#039;s slovenly Jurassic Park sequel--either because she didn&amp;#039;t know that nobody remembers the actors in movies like The Lost World or because she was counting on it--Moore seemed to be the only person on the set who&amp;#039;d ever seen a Howard Hawks movie and knew how the thing was done. While gamely pretending to be Barbara Stanwyck in the banter that killed time between rampages, she even managed to conjure up a halfway plausible affection for Jeff Goldblum, although Goldblum was evidently too sunk in despondency over what in hell had happened to his career to respond. Even so, that&amp;#039;s the only time I can recall her evidencing much pop flair, and it was of a faintly archaic kind that only made her seem--what do you know?--slightly out of place. As a rule, Moore&amp;#039;s big lack is her inability to communicate any sense of fun to the audience, a gift that requires, if not a cheerful embrace of vulgarity, then at least an amused tolerance of it. She&amp;#039;s a far more natural movie actress than Meryl Streep, whose dread that the camera might capture behavior she hasn&amp;#039;t planned induces her to build whole characters around the distinctive ways they fidget. Yet the actresses are alike in approaching every role with the same conscientious spirit, even when casualness might make things jazzier. Within the confines of a given part, Moore can be admirably daring and spontaneous, but she&amp;#039;s reticent about giving any impression that she might be more than a conduit; she doesn&amp;#039;t have a star&amp;#039;s effrontery about adding her own personality to the mix. In movieland--where Streep spent years being cast as a foreigner because graduating from Yale&amp;#039;s drama school made her seem like the next thing to one in bizzers&amp;#039; minds--the mere fact that Moore learned her craft onstage is enough to make her somewhat exotic. While I&amp;#039;m generally not much for self-conscious celebrations of theatrical magic, to see her as Yelena in Vanya on 42nd Street, Louis Malle&amp;#039;s filmed record of Andre Gregory&amp;#039;s legendary workshop production of Chekhov&amp;#039;s Uncle Vanya, is to be left agog at the paltry use that Hollywood has made of her.  It takes a while to get the drift of Moore&amp;#039;s performance, because the whole point is that Yelena leaves it to others to define what she&amp;#039;s like and then, out of a blend of generosity and indifference, does her best to fit the bill. While few actresses could have resisted underlining the pathos of a condition so close to that of their own profession, Moore plays her utterly without self-pity, even in a climactic exchange with Brooke Smith&amp;#039;s Sonya that may be the perfect Julianne Moore moment. When Sonya asks, &amp;quot;Are you happy?&amp;quot; she answers, &amp;quot;No&amp;quot; with a delighted smile--either from relief that the question is so simple or because she&amp;#039;s amazed that anyone could actually wonder. Her only first-rate movie role came relatively early, as the shut-in in Todd Haynes&amp;#039;s Safe. She was so convincing as an emotional somnambule that the performance may have limited Hollywood&amp;#039;s subsequent perceptions of her, in the same way that Hilary Swank will probably have trouble shaking off the ghost of Boys Don&amp;#039;t Cry. Otherwise, Moore hasn&amp;#039;t had much more than moments. She got to play a memorable scene of hysteria in Anderson&amp;#039;s silly Magnolia and a phenomenally jittery, grief-stricken one as the neighbor whose daughter Sigourney Weaver accidentally lets drown in A Map of the World, in which the beautiful shadings of unexpectedly infantile defenselessness she found in a simple line like &amp;quot;You scared me&amp;quot; made it maddening that her only function in the rest of the movie was as the beaming proof that Weaver&amp;#039;s character was actually a Good Person. Most notoriously, in Robert Altman&amp;#039;s Short Cuts, she ranted at screen hubby Matthew Modine while dressed only in a shirt cut to frame her pubic area fore and aft--a typical bit of cruelty on Altman&amp;#039;s part, since it was impossible to tell if Moore&amp;#039;s nervousness was the actress&amp;#039;s or the character&amp;#039;s.  One reason to be struck by Moore&amp;#039;s desire to play someone as isolated and exposed as Clarice Starling is that, whether from taste or an instinct for refuge, she&amp;#039;s usually gravitated to ensemble pieces, in which she often ends up being the person you wish the movie had been about. In An Ideal Husband, she didn&amp;#039;t settle for just getting her brittle laughs; on a small scale, her Mrs. Cheveley was a woman tragically trapped by her mistakes, and when Rupert Everett proposed to Minnie Driver instead, you wondered if you&amp;#039;d missed the plot turn when his character went blind. As the snappish, unhappily married daughter in Bart Freundlich&amp;#039;s dysfunctional-family drama The Myth of Fingerprints, she was so much more compelling than ostensible hero Noah Wyle that it was baffling when the climax left her situation unresolved to focus on Wyle&amp;#039;s all too pat escape from hearth and home. Since, in this case, the movie giving Moore short shrift was written and directed by her longtime romantic partner, you really do find yourself thinking that she just can&amp;#039;t win. The irony is that Clarice, the dogged pursuer who subsumes her anxieties and drives in a professionalism she doesn&amp;#039;t know is slightly creepy, may be a role Moore was born to play--but she&amp;#039;s already been played, more or less definitively to most moviegoers&amp;#039; minds, by someone else. While I doubt that Hannibal will be the breakthrough she deserves, that doesn&amp;#039;t mean I can&amp;#039;t dream of some future Oscar night when I&amp;#039;ll see Baba Wawa turn to Moore and ask, &amp;quot;Are you happy?&amp;quot; And Moore, smiling radiantly, will say, &amp;quot;No.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a1579/moore-julianna-0301/>