Demi Moore refuses to fade away quietly

Coralie Fargeat's 'The Substance' puts Moore through the wringer and gives her the spotlight

- Uday Bhatia

age then makes his big offer: a million bucks for a night with Diana—no aftermath, no strings. ‘It’s just my body,’ Diana explains. ‘It’s not my mind.’ I was glad to have that cleared up, though it does raise an interesting question: How much would you pay for an evening with Demi Moore’s mind?

This is Anthony Lane’s 1993 review of Indecent Proposal in The New Yorker. It’s mean in a way that stings, switching from character to actor at the moment of punchline. I don’t mean to single out Lane, one of the great comic stylists of film criticism. Most working critics have said worse, and less musically. We don’t often imagine actors, especially big stars, reading reviews and feeling hurt. But it must happen more than we think.

Something last week made me rethink Lane’s jab. Demi Moore won the Golden Globe for Best Actress, for her role as the ageing actress in The Substance, a wild body horror film by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat. In her acceptance speech, Moore recalled how, 30 years earlier, a producer calling her a “popcorn actress” coloured her idea of herself. “I made that mean that this (award) wasn’t something that I was allowed to have. That I could do movies that were successful, that made a lot of money, but that I couldn’t be acknowledged, and I bought in and I believed that. And that corroded me over time, to the point where I thought, a few years ago, that maybe this was it.”