Helga without the H

Almost every year I attempt (with varying degrees of success) to watch as many Oscar nominees as possible before the ceremony. I post half-assed reviews here on my blog, and then at the end I write up some sort of silly analysis, predictions, reactions, etc. The quantity and quality depends entirely on how much time and energy I have each year, and I’m not gonna lie, this year’s already starting pretty dang rough! But let’s see how it goes. Today we turn to:

The Substance

[5 nominations for best film, actress (Demi Moore), director, original screenplay, and hair/makeup]

Oh my God. Where do I even start with this one…

I guess the first thing you need to know here is that this is NOT a family-friendly movie. Sweet lord. I haven’t seen that much nudity and gore since [insert joke here.] This thing was one of the most over the top films I’ve ever seen when it comes to in-your-face imagery. So many breasts everywhere. So much disfigurement. So many medical-esque close-ups that would make a combat doctor squeamish.

The next thing to know is that I think I loved this movie?

And the most important take-away when it comes to Oscar Binging is… this is NOT an Oscar movie. No way. It was campy and crazy and a total blast, but it ends there. I’m shocked this received a single nomination for anything, let alone a whopping 5, and in big categories.

This movie felt like the best student project after sophomore year. I actually went to film school, believe it or not, and dropped out because I sucked at it. In film school, while all the other majors were sitting through exams at the end of term, we were sitting through screenings of every film student’s biggest project that term (from freshman intro crap to senior theses.) Almost everything was garbage, but there were always one or two students in the entire program who you realized actually deserved to be here. Someone who had all the same limited resources we did, but knew how to actually use them to produce something visually different, and who knew how to tell a compelling story with very little. In this case, they took that film school weirdo and gave them 2 A-list Hollywood actors (Demi Moore and Dennis Quaid, who I’m frankly shocked to see in this film given the last stuff I saw him in were cheesy inspirational sports movies), plus a gargantuan make-up budget. The movie starts off great, but with vibes of trying a little too hard. The very first shot tells the story of an aging starlet by simply showing her Hollywood star being created, then trampled on. That was solid. Then we spend some time setting up the premise, where our starlet discovers and injects a mysterious substance that creates an entirely second, super-young human out of herself.

This beginning is campy and silly and establishes right off the bat that you should expect zero logic or realism out of this movie. Our starlet never actually pays for the substance as far as we can tell. She apparently also is super famous and rich but doesn’t have any household staff (and cleans her own house using a vacuum from the 1960’s) or friends or family. She is sent medical equipment with no instructions beyond cards with size 200 bold font that say “STABILIZE,” but she knows exactly what she’s supposed to do with it all, including performing several feet worth of stitches. She lives in a condo building that for some reason has a random empty space behind one of her walls that she turns into a room. Later in the film (spoiler alert, she begins to physically deteriorate) she’s too decrepit to walk, but then is literally running and doing stairs and carrying shit and stooping under things in the next scene. Her boss who fired her hands her a box of her belongings a whopping 2 weeks after firing her, that he just happened to be carrying around in the exact moment she popped into her studio. Billboards advertising a New Year’s Eve show don’t say “January 31st,” they say “tomorrow” as if Billboards are only displayed for 24 hours instead of 24 weeks or months. Every single details in this movie is unrealistic and nonsensical. Every single one. Which left one wondering- does it even have anything to say?

Presumably this movie is a feminist comment on the world’s obsession with youth. Interestingly enough it’s not even an obsession with beauty, because, frankly, Demi Moore is prettier than her substance-induced spawn. Older? Yes. But just look at their teeth. Moore’s teeth were immaculate in this film. I mean perfectly straight and proportional and shining pure white. Whereas Margaret Qually’s “Sue” had giant buck-tooth chompers, with clearly-visible yellowing at the gums whenever she pulled back her lips into an eerie grin. That’s about as close to subtly or nuance as this film got, though. This film didn’t feel like it was making a statement about youth/beauty so much as it was using it as easy fodder to do some gross-out scenes. Our script, though light on dialogue, wasn’t clever or subtle; it smashed us in the skull with a sledgehammer. For example, every single male character was just gross as fuck every time they opened their mouths. From “at fifty it stops” to “pretty girls smile” to “too bad her boobs weren’t in the middle of her face instead of that giant nose.” (Paraphrasing all of these- I can’t remember the exact phrasing.)

Our main character(s) never grow(s) or learn(s.) They remain only obsessed with their bodies and nothing more. They spend an unusual amount of time walking around naked or in cute panties. They early on learn the repercussions of misusing the substance but proceed to misuse it anyway. And they act against all common sense to continue using it. Moore’s character learns that she can cancel the service at any time, but she decides to continue, and it’s not remotely clear why she would do this when she knows it’s just fucking her over. The two halves are presented as if they do not live each other’s experiences; indeed they clearly hate one another, and so there’s no reason why the older version would want to continue given she doesn’t get to live vicariously through the young body. The story just starts to fall apart here, and with it, any ability to salvage it as an Oscar contender. There is a glimmer of hope at one point for our young-version protagonist Sue, when all of the cast and crew of her TV show (mostly men) focus on a giant monitor showing footage of her mostly-exposed ass and barely-covered lady bits. She suddenly gets uncomfortable and feels violated, and it looks like maybe, just maybe, she’s realizing that it’s not actually good to be valued solely for your youth and fuckability. But then she pulls a chicken thigh from her bellybutton for some reason and wakes up from a nightmare and goes back to being her terrible stupid self.

For the last quarter or so of the movie, everything goes off the rails. All the carefully crafter storytelling, gone. This film escalates and escalates as the conflict between our two halves grows and grows. The aging scarlet is getting grosser and grosser physically, and the young version is getting grosser and grosser as a person. It’s when we hit our climax that it felt like the movie stopped trying to be good. Instead it went “Let’s use the entire remainder of our budget and storytelling to just gross everyone out with as much wacky disgusting bloody gore as possible. Send the script supervisor home!” At this point I gave up. Escalation is great, and over-the-top endings are great. But our entire premise got thrown out the window when…
[SPOILER ALERT!]…
one half tries to kill the other, then inexplicably tries to save her, then they’re both alive at the same time for some reason even though that should be possible within the confines of what little rules of logic the film set up for us, then one of them tries to kill the other one even though this means they would both die because, as they’ve both been reminded over and over and over again throughout the film, they are the same person. This scene killed me.
The resolution to this scene, at least, brought us a new plot point that I appreciated as it set up a great idea for the ending (I won’t spoil this one.) But then as we’re executing that ending, things just explode. Literally. People and boobs (so many boobs) are just getting firehosed with blood. It was absolute mayhem. The most over-the-top ridiculous filmmaking in human history. Something middle school boys would make if they had skills and a budget, and absolutely NOT Oscar-worthy material.

I went into this movie really really hoping that I would come away thinking that Demi Moore deserved to win for best actress. I love Demi Moore. Holy cow did I love her in GI Jane! And I think I’d heard a story somewhere that, in her GG acceptance speech or an interview, she said how she’s never received a single acting nomination for anything she’s done in her entire career, and early on people in the business told her she would never be a serious actress but was just a pretty face, etc, and how getting this recognition now for this film is validating and proof that you can follow your dreams and ignore the haters, etc. She’s also been off the radar for a while (I believe dealing with alcoholism, if I’m not mistaken), so seeing her back in the limelight again is great. Alas… I think she was perfectly adequate in this role. She played the character exactly as written. While her character literally transformed, most of that transformation was due to prosthetics more than her acting. Think of the movie Split, where James McAvoy (who somehow has zero Oscar nominations ever????) transforms from a man into a monster, but achieves it mostly by acting. That’s not what Demi was doing. In the end, this just wasn’t a meaty enough role to warrant an Oscar, let alone a nomination.

The hair/makeup nomination makes sense for pretty obvious reasons. Though, at the same time, once we get into the REALLY over-the-top stuff at the end, our starlet no longer looks like a living being, but looks like a person wearing prosthetics. So a fun prop, but not really effective. On the flip side… an actual boob comes out of this creature and drops on stage which was absolutely hilarious. That boob-drop alone deserves some sort of award. Maybe I change my mind. Maybe this movies should win every award. Just for its extreme dedication to boobies all over the place.