A marriage far from heaven

The party is in full swing; it’s a glittering Manhattan shindig swarming with freaks, lunatics and trendsetters. Julianne Moore walks distractedly past the twisted wire sculpture, barely noticing the tall black transvestite in a leopard-skin miniskirt or the earnest socialite declaiming about the miseries of the poor. Moore heads for the well-stocked bar, where the bartender suggests she order a “Malaysian Tuesday” because “people say it prevents death.” As she surveys the gala with a mixture of bewilderment and terror, the cocktail seems like an inviting anodyne.

This party scene, which is actually being filmed just across the bridge from Manhattan in an abandoned warehouse in Long Island City, is the centerpiece of a new indie film, “Marie and Bruce,” adapted from a play by Wallace Shawn about a troubled day in the life of a New York married couple, played by Moore and Matthew Broderick. Among the other cast members are Bob Balaban (who originated the role of Bruce in the 1980 stage production at the Public Theater), Campbell Scott, Julie Hagerty, Griffin Dunne and Kenneth Lonergan, the writer-director of “You Can Count on Me.”

Shawn, who wrote the screenplay with director Tom Cairns, a British television and theater veteran making his film debut with “Marie and Bruce,” notes that parties are central to many of the plays he’s written over the last two decades. “What trekking in the Himalayas might be for some people,” Shawn says, “going to parties is for me. They’re a wild and frightening landscape.”

This sense of awe may have its roots in his childhood. The son of New Yorker editor William Shawn, he often attended his parents’ dinner parties, where celebrated writers and artists congregated. “I went to quite a few parties as a child,” Shawn admits, “and each of the guests loomed rather large. There was something fascinating and dizzying about those evenings.”

Shawn’s involvement in the movie needs no explanation, but what are Julianne Moore and Matthew Broderick doing at this particular party? Both of them are hot commodities at the moment. Broderick teamed with Nathan Lane in one of the most successful musical pairings of all time in “The Producers” (the pair are about to reprise their roles on Broadway), and he’s about to start work on the eagerly anticipated remake of “The Stepford Wives.” Moore received Oscar nominations last year for her roles in “Far From Heaven” and “The Hours,” and she’s one of the most sought-after of American actresses. So what impelled them to make this tiny indie movie with no distributor and highly uncertain box-office prospects?

For Moore, the project has been something of an obsession ever since she was in college and heard a fellow student perform the play’s opening monologue -- in which the heroine leans over her sleeping husband and bitterly enumerates all his shortcomings -- in drama class. “I still remember that as a great piece of writing,” Moore says. Years later, when her film career was taking off, she appeared with Shawn in “Vanya on 42nd Street,” which he adapted from Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.”

She and Shawn became friendly, and she told him of her enthusiasm for “Marie and Bruce.” At that time there were already plans to turn it into a film with Holly Hunter and John Malkovich. “But that fell apart -- luckily for me,” Moore says. Moore, who has two young children with her husband, film director Bart Freundlich, said she responded to the piece partly because of its insights into long-term relationships.

“The film is really about the nature of intimacy and the elasticity of love,” she asserts. “It asks how far you can push someone you’re involved with.” Broderick concurs that the film offers unusual perceptions about marriage and relationships. “What you do with your mate when you’re alone is often strange and eccentric,” he says. “You have your own distinctive ways of communicating, and I think this script captures that.”

Unlike Moore, however, Broderick was initially reluctant to commit to “Marie and Bruce.” In fact, when he first received the script, he turned it down. “I was devastated,” Moore says. “I didn’t want to do it without him. I just had an instinct that he was the right person for the part. He has the necessary comedic instinct, but he also has the intellect and the ability with language.”

“I’m not great at reading scripts,” Broderick confesses, “and when I first read this, it seemed like I got beat up by Julianne for 70 pages. I wasn’t sure I wanted to play that.”

Finding the laughs

Broderick’s wife, Sarah Jessica Parker, and a friend urged him to reconsider, and he agreed to meet with Moore to discuss it further. “I hadn’t really seen it as a comedy,” Broderick says, “but when we started to read it out loud, that came through.”

Eventually Broderick signed on, and Holedigger Films, a New York-based company that also financed “Roger Dodger” and “The Secret Life of Dentists,” backed the project. After years of delays, it finally came together so quickly that Shawn had another job in Los Angeles when shooting began. He co-stars in Disney’s latest theme park-inspired extravaganza, “The Haunted Mansion.” “I’m No. 5 on the call sheet,” Shawn says with some delight. That meant he could fly back to New York for only a few days at a time, during breaks from the Disney picture.

Shawn seems ebullient on the set. “Julianne and Matthew do 10 unexpected things every minute,” Shawn says. “Movies can seem so planned out. You can feel the weight of all the money spent. But these actors know how to keep it alive, keep it new. And Tom is a director who’s always ready for a surprise.”

Cairns and Shawn had worked together several years ago on a production of Shawn’s play “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” which Cairns directed at the Almeida Theatre in London. Cairns was excited by the idea of reimagining “Marie and Bruce” as a film. “I’m not in the business of writing Wallace Shawn dialogue,” Cairns says, “but I thought I could do something with the visuals.” So they decided to write the script together. Cairns recognizes that it won’t be easy to encourage audiences to venture out to see such an acerbic portrait of a disintegrating marriage. “It helps that Matthew and Julianne are inherently likable,” Cairns says. “The material is pretty high-octane stuff, but you’re accepting of those two actors in a friendly way.”

The presence of those stars may indeed generate interest in the film that it wouldn’t otherwise attract. But one still wonders if “Marie and Bruce,” which will premiere at Sundance early next year, will stand out from the glut of esoteric, low-budget films that play a few festivals and then sink into oblivion.

Shawn recognizes that the market for independent films is far more hazardous than it was more than 20 years ago, when “My Dinner With Andre,” the film he conceived with theater director Andre Gregory, became an unexpected art-house hit. “We had a very courageous and unconventional distributor in Dan Talbot,” Shawn says. “He was content to let it play for six weeks before it had an audience. If he had closed it after two weeks, as distributors are prone to do today, it would be just one more in the pile of completely unknown films.”

Moore claims to be unconcerned about the movie’s box-office prospects. “People will say ‘Far From Heaven’ or ‘Election’ tanked if they only took in $15 million,” she observes. “But it’s worth remembering that quite a number of people still saw those movies.”

“The only problem is that ‘Election’ cost $20 million,” Broderick counters. “You have to be realistic about the business. But there are a lot of people who come up to me and mention ‘Election’ or ‘You Can Count on Me’ as films that they loved.”

Broderick points out that for an actor, it can be liberating to take a vacation from Hollywood filmmaking and work on the fly. “We’re filming eight pages a day,” he notes. “Yesterday we did a six-minute take. That’s so unusual. You feel pumped up and proud of yourself when you’re done. I’m glad Julianne talked me into doing the movie.”

Moore believes that the film does have potential to please an audience. “I think it’s entertaining,” she insists. “Not everybody is going to like it, but that’s OK. You don’t have to be all things to all people. I’m just thrilled that they’re actually making a movie of one of Wally’s plays. It’s exciting for actors and for audiences to be exposed to this incredible language.”