Woman on The Verge

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

When Julianne Moore picks up a screenplay, she doesn't read it so much as listen to it. "If I can hear it rhythmically or hear the voices in my mind, then I feel like I can do the script. If I can't hear it, I can't do it." And, she adds, no re-reading is likely to alter this first, "instinctual" response.

This reliance on her ear is an oddity in a time when most actors, choosing a role, depend on that anatomically (and emotionally) imprecise region that lies somewhere between a hungry gut and a yawning ego. But it has kept Moore busy (21 features since 1992) and won her an Oscar nomination (for Boogie Nights) and the respectful regard of directors ranging from Steven Spielberg (The Lost World) to Robert Altman (Short Cuts), if not yet the kind of stardom that can carry a picture.

That could be about to change. For at 38, she finally has a role in which, as she puts it, "I got to carry the main part of the story." This is in writer-director Neil Jordan's faithful, curiously compelling adaptation of Graham Greene's novel The End of the Affair.

Moore plays Sarah Miles, the wife of an unutterably dull civil servant (Stephen Rea) who enters into a dalliance with an intense, emotionally greedy novelist named Maurice Bendrix (a fiercely glowering Ralph Fiennes). Set in wartime London and the grayish postwar years, it is, to borrow Greene's favorite word, a routinely "seedy" coupling. Until the afternoon when, taking a break from their lovemaking, Maurice steps out of the room and a buzz bomb strikes. She thinks he's dead, drops to her knees and prays: if God will spare him, she will give him up. Whereupon Maurice returns to the bedroom, stunned but intact.

Sarah makes good on her promise. And Greene makes good on the theme that dominated his best work: "the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God." Maurice, of course, is outraged by Sarah's disappearance--and sets a private detective on her. He's looking for an earthly explanation--a rival lover--not an unearthly one, for Sarah's defection. For her part, Sarah remains unsure what has happened to her. Was her prayer answered? Or was Maurice merely knocked out by the explosion?

This is the point at which greatness enters Moore's performance. Sarah will die--of tuberculosis--in this state of uncertainty, but with both her husband and her former lover attending her deathbed--touched, perhaps, by some dim, unspoken understanding of Sarah's acceptance that grace has befallen her. The final irony is that it is the worldly Maurice who will be given the last piece of the puzzle, near-irrefutable evidence of her saintliness.

One suspects he'll do his best to deny it. What can't be denied is the austerity and reality in which Jordan anchors his mystical topic or the way Moore, as the director says, "enters the being of upper-middle-class British life without a ripple," catching perfectly the "unknowable" nature of her character. "I've never seen anybody approach a part with less baggage," he says.

But then Moore always travels light. And fast. This year she has already given us the coolly scheming Madame Laura Cheveley in An Ideal Husband and the bumbling sister Cora Duvall in Cookie's Fortune. Soon to come are a guarded Midwestern mother shattered by the accidental death of her child in A Map of the World and a confused trophy wife in the hugely anticipated Magnolia. These roles confirm the salient fact of her career--its astonishing range. They also suggest that Moore, settled down with director Bart Freundlich (The Myth of Fingerprints), and the mother of a young son, could go on quite happily even if The End of the Affair, which is an airless, unfashionable sort of movie, doesn't propel Moore to true stardom. "I just want to work, basically," she says. "The notion that anybody can plan a career is a fallacy unless you're making $20 million a picture."

Besides, she knows she has something stars rarely enjoy: the freedom to flounder, to not know precisely where a character is going to land. Something she says about her Magnolia character applies to her Sarah. "Playing somebody who doesn't know what she's feeling is hard." But it is also, she says, "exciting." And for audiences, alert to an actress who spends her reserves of moral and psychological ambiguity both wisely and passionately, entirely enthralling.

--With reporting by David E. Thigpen/New York

With reporting by David E. Thigpen/New York