2004

Marie and Bruce

Juliane Moore and Matthew Broderick get nasty in Marie and Bruce

By Brooke Hauser, Premiere

It’s lunch hour for the cast of Marie and Bruce, and everything seems a bit . . . off. Sure, there are the usual wilting buffet options, but it’s hard to tell what city we’re in, let alone what decade it is, given the motley crew occupying the room: an Amazonian drag queen, a sixtysomething diva sporting a headdress and hot-pink sari, and two Julianne Moores.

Not to be confused with her stand-in, the real Julianne Moore sits patiently before a vanity mirror as a stylist combs out her signature amber waves. In this adaptation of Wallace Shawn’s 1979 play, she and Matthew Broderick star as warring mates who make an Edward Albee couple seem happily married by comparison. Directed by Tom Cairns (making his big-screen debut), the under $3 million film chronicles 24 hours in the life of the titular pair as they curse, berate, and humiliate each other in increasingly fresh and profound ways.

“[Studios] would read it and say, ‘This is awful! These people are terrible!’ ” Moore says. “And we would go, ‘It’s a comedy.’ And they’d go, ‘Are you kidding?’ ” Fortunately, actor-director Campbell Scott came to the rescue in 2003 when he took the screenplay to Holedigger Films (Roger Dodger), which immediately sparked to the film’s originality, and lack of contextual clues.

For instance, today’s scene, shot in a Queens loft, unfolds at a cocktail party at the end of a blisteringly hot day in a city that resembles New York, but isn’t. Likewise, the party guests resemble various hip Manhattan characters, but aren’t. Even the dialogue is distorted. “[Bruce] talks very fancy,” Broderick says of his character, who in this scene turns from milquetoast to man of the hour. “A lot of ‘wells’ and ‘reallys’ and ‘actuallys’ and ‘errs.’ Today is horrifying. I have five pages of me blathering away, which I’m terrified I won’t remember.”

“It’s an unusual piece, almost like an experiment,” Cairns says of the production’s strange and dreamy milieu. “It’s not set in outer space, yet it’s not social realism. We deliberately tried not to be specific.” He sighs, adding, “It’s such a hard thing to talk about without sounding totally pretentious.”