Julianne Moore: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

3. Maggie "Amber Waves" €“ Boogie Nights

Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights is a much better film than it has any right to be. Who'd have thought that a comedy-drama set in the 1970s porn industry could be so vivid? And yet, against all odds, it was. Moore plays the brilliantly named Amber Waves, who is kind-of like the Farrah Fawcett (it's the 70s, deal with it) of porn, but she's now slumming it in seedier low-paying jobs just to keep up her lifestyle. Moore's tortured Waves is a brilliant portrayal of success and excess in the 70s, made all the more tragic by the fact she's driven by the need to fund her extravagance and cocaine habit. Yet despite the tragedy, there's also some genuinely funny moments from Moore in the various porn scenes of the film. However, that's not the best part of her role €“ that particular laurel has to go to the scenes with her child where she's fighting for custody in the courtrooms with her vengeance-fuelled husband. The scene where she's told she's an unfit mother because of her work in the porn industry and cocaine habit is genuinely heartbreaking and again grants us a moving display of subtlety from Moore, who silently accepts her fate. Moore's the only likeable female character in the whole film, and that's no accident. She and Anderson work hard together to create a three dimensional and layered character, who could quite easily have been just a bimbo airhead. But here she's not €“ she's an actual person facing real problems and difficulties, showing Dirk Diggler that the industry is not quite as glamorous as it seems.