Quendrith Johnson

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent

If you saw Margot at the Wedding (2007), you know Jennifer Jason Leigh has lately developed incredible charm and depth, but in director Jane Weinstock's new movie The Moment, she is outstanding.

Her performance as Lee, the divorced war photographer who spirals into post-traumatic distress with psychotic aspects, is nothing short of clinically brilliant.

When Leigh as Lee says "I can't trust what I am seeing," you start to get the surreal picture of her predicament.

That being, the moment she may or may not have killed her boyfriend (played by Martin Henderson, from horror's The Ring). And, this movie it has Meat Loaf in it, seriously, as the investigating detective.

That would be the Texas-born crooner who also killed in The Rocky Horror Picture Show as "Eddie" The Biker.

"If I finish a scene and I don't know what happened, it's going to be okay,"  said Meat of his method of acting. "It's the best compliment when people don't know I played the character. Meat Loaf as they know it is completely gone, and the character takes over."

Weinstock tells a kind of set tale you would expect in a Meat Loaf story. "He was great. He worked for a couple of days then he went away to Germany," she said, "where he proceeded to break his foot. So when he came back, (Meat) was on heavy medication and unable to walk. Luckily it was a seated scene, or series of scenes actually.  He was a real trooper."

Loaf like Leigh had to dig into the recesses for this film.

"I wanted her to really go there," Weinstock revealed. "(Jennifer) has played very different kinds of characters. I have never seen her quite do this. There would be times when I wanted her to go in a different direction. Sometimes she would, sometimes she wouldn't. She had a lot of feelings."

Daughter of the late Vic Morrow, this is one actress who has a long history not just growing up in Hollywood but setting about to carve her own identity apart from his success. You've likely seen her in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), The Coens' Hudsucker Proxy, In The Cut directed by Jane Campion (The Piano), maybe Hubert Selby Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989), Mendes's Road to Perdition, or in Robert Altlman's Short Cuts and Kansas City, or more probably in the Gen-X thriller Single White Female (1992) directed by Barbet Schroeder. 

But, as mentioned, something transformational has happened to Leigh in the past decade - which saw the end of her marriage to Margot director Noah Baumbach, and motherhood, as well finding herself in an extraordinary way in The Moment.

And it is hard to watch, that's why so few directors ever tackle heavily depressed women on screen. Jennifer Jason Leigh bravely lets the "real" show the moment her character realizes the secret to life is resilience. 'Live through this' is the theme of Weinstock's feature, which had its critics earlier this year when it ran in festival screenings. 

"We did get a great review in the Village Voice," Weinstock points out, meaning that publication's stance outweighs some of the others. 

The Moment perhaps requires some working knowledge of the inner mechanisms of gender-specific issues. 

So, unless you know someone who has bottomed out in motherhood, or accidentally (or on purpose) shared a lover with a daughter, this movie will come across like reading someone else's fortune cookie. It may not apply to you, but when zero-affect Jason Leigh makes her arc from the pit of black hallucinatory PTSD to daylight - in the much less-obvious war zone that the domestic front can be - it is no less than stunning.

And then there is the amazing Alia Shawkat, a Palm Springs-born actor/performance poet. Shawkat even has her own arty webiste http://mutantalia.com, and has already rung up some cred as a young performer of merit, singled out early on lists touted by Variety and Hollywood Reporter. 

Shawkat's filmography includes Drew Barrymore's Whip-It,  Ruby Sparks with Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan, The Runaways (Kristen Stewart starrer), and if you look closely, Alia played one of the war-refuge kids in Three Kings with George Clooney.

But the best endorsement comes again, from the Moment's director, who knows how to cast an actor.

"We read a number of different young actresses. But I never believed that they could kill someone," Weinstock deadpans, "I never thought of them as someone capable of murder. Alia came in, and she had this kind of intensity. She seemed like the one."

Next time you hear someone say "they killed in that role," now you know what they mean.

Next up for Weinstock? "The next thing I am doing is primarily a drama, early 70's, about the Sexual Revolution and the effect on a family of two parents and 16-year-old girl."

The Moment opens June 20 at The Sundance Sunset, 8000 Sunset Blvd., in West Hollywood, followed by a Q&A on Friday and Saturday nights with Director Jane Weinstock, co-writer Gloria Norris, and Producer Julia Eisenman. 

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