Be Careful Who You Love

Nobody seems to be on the fence about “Chloe,” a movie that’s either pornographic pulp or a misunderstood masterpiece. The truth probably resides somewhere in the middle, though it must be said that the movie’s defenders are closer to it than its critics. “Chloe” is about as erotic as movies get, but it doesn’t use sex merely as a plot device – the love triangle at the center of the drama here isn’t motivated by sex so much as it is enslaved by it. You have to wonder if that’s what the three of them had intended all along.

Liam Neeson plays a professor whose female students keep hitting on him, but what’s more interesting than their advances is the suspicions they arouse in his wife, a gynecologist named Catherine (Julianne Moore). When he doesn’t make his flight home and misses the birthday party she planned for him, she starts to think he’s having a fling behind her back. She keeps these thoughts to herself until she meets Chloe (Amanda Seyfried), a whore who she bumps into one night at a restaurant. Catherine makes a desperate proposition to her: She wants Chloe to hit on her husband and see how he reacts, then report back to her with all the juicy details.

They prove a little too juicy for her to handle – Chloe tells her that she’s cheating on Catherine with her, and that although he feels guilty, he can’t help himself. Catherine has everything she needs to confront him, but she tells Chloe to go on seeing him anyway, and keeps meeting with her to find out what they’re doing. What’s funny is that by sleeping with Catherine’s husband, Chloe makes her feel more attached to him than ever.

This is one of those movies where everybody involved helps make it work – Erin Cressida Wilson’s script gives the material the maturity it needs, and director Atom Egoyan finds tension in the most unlikely places. It’s the actors who do most of the heavy lifting, though, and it’s fascinating to see what both Moore and Seyfried do with their characters. While it’s true that in the scene where Catherine tells Chloe that they should stop doing this, Seyfried’s reaction as Chloe feels too eccentric, it’s the only sour note in a performance that’s truly amazing, so much so that her very appearance becomes part of her character.

Moore is just as hypnotic as Chloe’s suspicious client, and rather than try to make her seem cool and calculating, she stays true to the character beneath all the plot twists, and finds a woman who’s powerless in the face of her own emotions. That’s the way love goes, I guess.