The IMDB Files: Demi Moore
An irregular feature. This is a sly reup from last year. Give ‘em hell, Demi.
Also in The IMDB Files:
Has Demi Moore’s career been given the feminist once-over before? Her characters usually did unusual things, not so much in service of any plot. It’s more like you got these little glimpses of her life, like Bill Watterson did with Calvin’s mom. He said he tried to let you see in certain strips little things she liked doing before Calvin barged in. Demi regularly had something going on, or to put it another way she had interesting jobs and motives, at least. Among post-Code actresses that makes her a common misfit.
This happened in the nineties, mostly. In Ghost she’s a TriBeCa sculptress. In Disclosure she’s a tech witch with designs on top-down sexual economics. In The Juror she’s a single mom who also does niche installation art that basically glamorizes chicken wire. Rob Reiner placed her as a Navy lawyer in A Few Good Men; Ridley Scott isolated her as the first female Navy SEAL in G.I. Jane (before turning it into a Christ parable and ruining everything.)
Striptease was onomatopoeia for the editorial Demi. Indecent Proposal got her a job as a realtor, but that one really gets lost in a smelly white cloud of mosquito-spray, as Adrian Lyne tries to pretend he is not bloodless.
Not all of those movies are really really good and Moore is not really really good in all of them. But those are all really really good roles, even when they’re ancillary to anything going on as in Ghost or Indecent Proposal. A better-written The Juror would have sunk her art deeper into her character; that novel, by George Dawes Green, is top-hat by me. Much better than Disclosure, which is better-adapted and in which Demi is kind of fantastic. Meredith Johnson was radical in 1994 and she’s really radical in 2011.
Every left-of-center girl I ever knew sort of likes Demi and I like to think I know why.
