Demi Moore may have waited a long time for her first Oscar nomination, but if she does actually win for The Substance on Sunday, she’ll have the Academy Awards equivalent of a hole in one: Her first win off of her first nomination, and for a consensus choice for her career-best performance, no less. Nice and neat.
Of course, part of Moore’s Oscar narrative is that a win would be nice, but not particularly neat. Moore didn’t get such glowing notices during her self-proclaimed “popcorn actress” heyday, and when she became Hollywood’s highest-paid actress because of that stardom, her notices got worse. She stepped back from Hollywood as she approached middle age, which is the time where one of those Oscars really comes in handy. In other words, her career hasn’t been quite so storied as, say, Jodie Foster or Emma Thompson – similar-aged actresses who, along with Meryl Streep and Susan Sarandon, seemed to appear in some combination as the Best Actress nominees near-annually during Moore’s superstar era. Those actresses were able to build up more legend-appropriate mystique, while Moore looked, for a while, more like a passing trend.
But now that Moore’s big Oscar play is explicitly about her character feeling discarded by her entertainment-industry employers, Moore’s career is undergoing something of a re-evaluation. So it’s worth asking: Was any of her previous work overlooked by the Academy?
The answer for the majority of her most famous roles is a resounding nah. Moore undoubtedly brings something to movies like Ghost, Indecent Proposal, and Disclosure, but it’s more her charisma and committed intensity rendering semi-horrible scripts watchable than powerhouse acting further elevating good material. In many cases, the roles simply aren’t there. Following Ghost’s massive success, however, Moore did give a couple of her best performances. One is in a bona fide blockbuster and awards contender: A Few Good Men, where Moore plays Joanne Galloway, a JAG attorney who assists the callow Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) in his defense of two Marines accused of murder. At the time, a weird number of reviews focused on how Moore and Cruise’s character never clinch their professional relationship into a romantic one. This wouldn’t be particularly unusual today, in a serious drama or, especially, a Tom Cruise vehicle, where the star appears increasingly monklike with age. And given that A Few Good Men was written by Aaron Sorkin, the lack of romance between coworkers would probably be considered a major relief today. But in 1992, for better or worse, Moore was known for playing love interests, and co-starring in a huge romantic hit (and played a lot of parts focusing on her body and/or sexuality afterward).
It’s too bad this minor detail stole focus, because Moore leverages her toughness and seriousness to perfect effect as Galloway; she and Cruise make a terrific team, cutting through Sorkin’s show-offy dialogue in a way that keeps it sharp and witty. Ultimately, she does some thankless tasks (initially nudge the Cruise archetype into making more of an effort, then sitting on the sidelines for his big courtroom confrontation) believably, with energy as crisp as her uniform. Did she truly give one of the five best supporting-actress performances of 1992? Hard to say. But Marisa Tomei famously (and deservedly) won for that year as the only American in a category otherwise populated with Brits and Australians; maybe one more American in the five would have been warranted. (She was in good company, at least; director Rob Reiner and Cruise himself were not honored for the Best Picture nominee, though Jack Nicholson scored an expected Best Supporting Actor nomination.)
The year between A Few Good Men and Ghost, Moore had one of her worst professional stretches as a regular big-studio presence, starring in a trio of movies that barely added to a tenth of Ghost’s numbers: The horrific comedy of Nothing But Trouble, the dismissed whimsy of The Butcher’s Wife, and Mortal Thoughts, a neo-noir that happens to be the only project where she really shares the screen with Bruce Willis, her husband from 1987 until 2000. (They both did voiceover for Beavis & Butt-Head Do America, and Willis had a cameo in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, in which Moore co-starred.) Mortal Thoughts also happens to feature one of Moore’s best performances, as an extremely New Jersey gal being interrogated at a police station over a case involving her best friend (Glenne Headly) murdering her lout of a husband (Willis). It’s not the kind of picture that attracts awards attention, and 1991 was a competitive year (Thelma & Louise alone took up two Best Actress spots), but then again, when was the last time anyone on Earth watched Bette Midler in For the Boys?
Regardless, Mortal Thoughts, which is currently streaming on Tubi, is a solid early-’90s noir that, like a lot of its 1940s ancestors, brings in elements of dark comedy and domestic melodrama, which Moore navigates particularly well; for such a glamorous performer, she’s surprisingly convincing as a Jersey hairdresser. Moore clearly had a taste for then-contemporary versions of noir; The Juror, from 1996, is a much less successful version of that model, in part because her character isn’t really allowed any moral failings, turning the movie into more of a stalker thriller. Mortal Thoughts isn’t necessarily less outlandish than The Juror (well, maybe a little); it’s just vastly better-judged as both a character drama and a stylish, tense thriller.
Moore had a more traditionally Oscar-y role during her early-2010s slate of indie movies – a supporting part in Margin Call, a financial drama from 2011. As the only woman in a room of high-powered financial execs as the 2008 crisis unfolds, Moore is a key member of the ensemble, and could have easily swapped in for, say, Jessica Chastain in The Help at that year’s Oscars. (Then again, Chastain herself could have taken that slot with one of the many better movies she made in 2011.) Moore was doing some good and largely unheralded work in the early 2010s; it’s not particularly Oscar-y, but she’s quite charming as a similarly hard-charging head of a fake family assembled to sell lifestyle goods to their neighbors in The Joneses, which is less satire than rom-com pairing her with David Duchovny.
Of course, rom-coms with David Duchovny are not how anyone gets nominated for Oscars, much less wins them. Then again, body-horror satire that ends with torrents of goopy viscera isn’t supposed to be an obvious awards play, either. Moore’s career has had the usual ups and downs, but she deserves a lot of credit for never fully giving in to the awards industrial complex. If she makes that hole-in-one, she can truly own it.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
