Going into “Chloe,” you’ll probably be expecting, well, something.
This is, after all, an Atom Egoyan film, a director who has an admittedly spotty track record (did anyone even see “Adoration”?) but one that always produces at least interesting work. Around the time of “The Sweet Hereafter,” it seemed like he was maybe the most captivating Canadian filmmaker this side of David Cronenberg, but as it turned out — not so much. Still, if he did it before he can do it again, and even when he belly flops, like with the campy, candy-colored detective movie “Where the Truth Lies” (which “Chloe” bears some passing resemblance to), he does so in a truly spectacular way. Plus, the movie was written by Erin Cressida Wilson, who authored the underrated romantic fetish comedy “Secretary” (she also did “Fur,” but the less said about that, the better). So there was at least the option that it’d be somewhat insightful. Oh, and then there’s the widely publicized fact that Na’vi-eyed cutie Amanda Seyfried shows some skin (although not as much as you’d expect, but enough for Mr. Skin to be happy).
So, any way you slice it, you probably have a legitimate reason for expressing at least a casual (or maybe pervy) interest in seeing “Chloe” which makes the fact that it careens from a slickly photographed, emotionally involving romantic drama to an off-the-rails erotic thriller all the more tragic.
The film stars Liam Neeson, who plays a professor that somewhat improbably has a job at a college in New York, even though he lives in the snowy hinterlands of Toronto. When he fails to make a connecting flight home, thus blowing a surprise party his wife (Julianne Moore) had set up for him, she becomes angry and suspicious and begins to wonder if maybe Neeson stuck around New York to have a fling with one of his comely young students.
Thus Moore hatches an ingenious idea that somewhat mirrors a dopey subplot from Mike Judge’s recent lame duck comedy “Extract;” she decides to hire a local prostitute (Amanda Seyfried) to flirt with her husband. If he flirts back or attempts to make sexual contact, then Moore will know that Neeson is a lying Irish fuck. (God, just typing out the plot rundown makes it painfully obvious how stupid it really, truly is.)
As is the case in these types of movies, Seyfried (sporting a fur-lined hooker coat that would have seemed dated in a similar movie produced in the late ’70s) does more than just flirt with him. They begin to have a passionate affair, with Seyfried reporting back to Moore like she’s confessing to her C.I.A. handler, with vivid descriptions of their trysts. All Moore can do is listen. Seyfried is, after all, her incredibly sexy Frankenstein monster.
The early sequences in “Chloe” unfold with a kind of eerie stillness, which is appropriate given the wintery surroundings. Egoyan knows how to beautifully capture the emotional gulf that separates us, whether it’s caused by a horrible bus accident, the genocide of an entire people, or the suspicions of infidelity between two formerly loving people. He gets a lot of mileage out of very real situations, like the way that Neeson shoos an online conversation off his computer screen when Moore walks into the room, and the kind of white lies and half-truths that can amount to a crippling situation.
But as the movie chugs along, any attempts at emotional realism are forgone, replaced with an increasingly ludicrous set of phony erotic thriller pieces that end up punctuated, somewhere in the last act, with a bizarre and totally crippling plot twist. There may be a whole lot of skin, with sex permeating every nook and cranny of the plot (we haven’t even mentioned that Moore works as an OBGYN and that their teenage son is sexually active and is apparently in therapy for some unknown affliction). But no matter how aggressively Egoyan piles it on, nothing in “Chloe” ever feels all that erotic. Instead, it’s just kind of queasy and desperate.
Gone are even the minor stylistic flourishes that kept “Where the Truth Lies” from being unwatchable. Here, things are played completely straight, which makes some of the later sequences even funnier (there were bursts of unintentional laughter at our screening, which seemed to mirror the Toronto reaction and a screening another Playlist writer attended in Montreal). There are early indicators in the film that this thing could fail spectacularly, like the fact that the family lives in this bizarre, space age glass cube that looks more like an HSBC bank than an actual home, or that Seyfried is the first high priced hooker we’ve seen on film who uses a bicycle as her mode of transportation. But no one could have predicted how dazzlingly this thing fails.
It’s one thing knowing you’re making what is essentially a Z-grade cable thriller like “Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction” and taking that conceit to the absolute breaking point, but it’s quite another thing to tackle it like it’s some deep, important drama and thus negating any kind of enjoyment (kitsch or otherwise) that we, as an audience, could have taken. The 90 minute run time felt like a 3 hour slog. The actors perform admirably (it’s hard not to enjoy the three leads, Seyfried in particular) and Egoyan’s eye remains as stylish as ever, but when it’s in the service of something that’s so, well, limp, it’s hard to get excited. [D]