Chloe

When David (Liam Neeson) misses his flight home from New York and, as a result, the surprise party his wife Catherine (Julianne Moore) has planned for him, Catherine is forced to swallow her disappointment and any suspicions and return to the waiting guests. Reading a text message sent to David's phone the following morning from one of his female students, Catherine's fear grows. More suspicious than ever that David is having an affair, Catherine seeks out Chloe (Amanda Seyfried), an escort, hiring her to test David's fidelity.

Chloe is a very solid thriller. Extremely engaging and incredibly entertaining, this story is ultimately about human nature and instincts. The film really grabs your attention and visually, it's quite a feat. The minimalistic sets and the way it was shot give this film a really modern and slick look. I feel like I should warn that there's quite a bit of nudity and somewhat graphic scenes but nothing outrageous or out of place.

Moore was absolutely terrific, she has proved her value already but here she delivers possibly one of the best performances of her career. Seyfried was quite a surprise. Her performance was subtle but very efficient and she seems a very promising young actress. Liam Neeson was not nearly as good as he usually is but it's understandable considering his wife died during the shooting of the film.

As I said, Chloe is a very solid and well done film. Unfortunately it has one major flaw, the predictably of the plot. I saw the twist coming from a mile way and I think any avid movie-goer will too. Still, it was a great watch, very entertaining and extremely well acted. Worth seeing.

7/10

2/6/18. I decided to catch this because Julianne Moore has been such a surprise in recent years. Her range is phenomenal! Ever since she won the Oscar for 2015's "Still Alice" (watch it!) I have been trying to catch her other movies. She can pretty much play anything, if given the chance. I'm glad I caught this one. Moore plays a doctor who suspects her husband (Neeson) is cheating on her. She hires an escort (Seyfried) to seduce him. In the process, Moore and Seyfried become sexually involved. Only Moore could have pulled off the complexity of her character, a woman torn between too many desires that threaten to overwhelm her. Worth catching.

Thinking about film and how it works is made easier when you have two films that in some way are similar.

Here we had an original French film that was really quite effective. It powerfully gave us the inner dance of two conflicting souls of the performance of Woman. It was delicate, took fewer risks than we would allow, but impressed by its structure and intent.

Now it is transferred to the English language, a transition that usually and unnecessarily dulls the edges. The filmmaker is Atom Egoyan, who has made at least one essential film. I should say "director" rather than filmmaker because this has none of his precise confusion, none of his danger. He clearly is a director for hire, with someone else having commissioned a compete rewrite.

We still have two women and a husband. We still have fragments of the situation. But the whole thing is restructured. We no longer have an inner exploration, puzzlement, self- negotiation. We no longer explore humanness. Now it is all external. These really are two competing women in a traditional thriller model. Instead of allowing the structural drift into internal issues, we now have a son who plays an essential role, establishing an external observer.

This is a mess. The writer previously did well in being and writing a tortured woman. For some reason, the producers thought that was what "Nathalie" needed. Gosh, what a bad calculation! And that's with Julianne Moore, who could have made the original into life- altering art.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

If anyone was suited for remaking the French film Nathalie, it was Atom Egoyan, whose deeply twisted and occasionally perverse studies of sexuality, expressed through an apparently cold directorial eye, go hand in hand with a script that emphasized words over images (though there is a bit more flesh in the English-language transition). Hence the rather brilliant Chloe, whose prime accomplishment lies in its being less showy and pretentious than the director's previous foray into erotic secrets, the ambitious Where the Truth Lies.

Set in Egoyan's home town of Toronto, Chloe tells the story of the eponymous call girl (Amanda Seyfried) who is hired by gynecologist Catherine Stewart (Julianne Moore) when the latter starts to suspect her husband (Liam Neeson) is having an affair. Chloe's job is to casually approach him and see if he falls for her charm, thus indicating his propensity for adultery. However, as the girl's reports get more and more graphic, Catherine realizes she has put herself in an awkward position, one that it will be difficult to get out of.

A fascinating hybrid between psychological drama and erotic thriller (there's a vague hint of Fatal Attraction throughout the movie), Chloe is a rarity due to its attempt to analyze sex and its consequences without necessarily resorting to openly titillating imagery (a characteristic Egoyan shares with another Canadian maestro, David Cronenberg). The only downside of this approach is the same flaw that was much more evident in Where the Truth Lies, namely a deliberately slow pace that affects the thriller aspects but enhances the emotional poignancy, something that comes off as a paradox given the seemingly cold subject matter.

Furthermore, there is no coldness to be found in the carefully crafted performances: Neeson and Moore play the troubled couple with conviction, especially when things start getting more complicated (Moore's suspicious wife is a tour de force turn that should have received some award recognition), but the heart of the film lies, quite predictably, in Seyfried's hands, and she rises to the challenge by proving that she can do Big Love-style quality work on the big screen, embodying a complex, intriguing character light years away from her roles in Mamma Mia! and Mean Girls.

Overall, Chloe is a very good movie: sexy without being gratuitous, psychological without getting pompous and, like its title character, delightfully surprising.

Chloe (2009)

*** (out of 4)

A successful gynecologist (Julianne Moore) begins to think that her husband (Liam Neeson) is having an affair with a much younger woman so she hires a prostitute (Amanda Seyfried) to try and seduce him. The prostitute begins a relationship with the husband so that she can give all the details to the wife who in return begins to have strange feelings towards the woman she hired as well as her husband. This isn't the first erotic movie from Egoyan who splashed on the scene years earlier with EXOTICA, another rather bizarre sex story. This film here isn't all about erotic feelings, although there's certainly a lot of sex talk. I think the most fascinating aspect of the film is Moore's character who is much older in years but seems to be lacking just about everything else. When the relationship starts out we never see the husband and hooker together. The story draws its power from the relationship that blooms between the wife and the hooker. This is so interesting because we're never really given the motives of the wife outside she wants to know if the husband is a cheater. She finds this out rather early yet she keeps sending the prostitute out to get more info. The press for the film milked the fact that Moore and Seyfried ended up in bed with a rather passionate sex scene. This sequence contains two obviously beautiful women yet the scene isn't about the sex but the drama of what their characters are feeling. I think the film never makes too much sense in what it's trying to do but perhaps that was the point. The point to keep us off guard and not sure where the thing is going to go. For the most part I enjoyed the seduction and bizarre relationship, although I must admit that I thought the final fifteen-minutes just went way too far. I'm really not sure if a film and story like this needed an ending or if any ending could have worked but the one they selected just came off way too weak. The best thing about the movie are the performances by the three leads. I've always been hit and miss on Moore as in one film I'll find her to be excellent but then the next I'd see her as lazy. There's no question this here ranks as one of her best performances because of the wide range of emotions she goes through. Her character goes through all sorts of ups and downs and I thought the actress handled them beautifully. I really enjoyed seeing how she handled this character who is pretty much going through a mid-life crisis while figuring out new things about her own sexuality. Neeson is also excellent in his role, although he's not got as flashy a role. Seyfried turns in a terrific performance as well as you have no problem believing her in the role and the level of sexual maturity she provides is certainly a highlight. I thought she and Moore did a terrific job together and you can feel everything their characters are going through. The "twist" in the story is one I caught fairly early on in the picture so if you don't pick up on this I'd say you'd enjoy the film even more. Even though CHLOE is a complete success I do think the performances make it worth sitting through.