Monthly Archives: April 2016

  • Maps to the Stars

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Cronenberg (2014)

    David Cronenberg has been quoted as saying, with reference to his latest film, that:

    ‘Hollywood is a world that is seductive and repellent at the same time, and it is the combination of the two that makes it so potent.’

    The seductive aspect is entirely absent from Maps to the Stars.  Working from a screenplay by Bruce Wagner, Cronenberg presents Hollywood as a viper’s nest.  Its denizens are egomaniacs who are both vicious and paranoiacally insecure, haunted by the ghosts of those who’ve abused them or whom they’ve exploited or kicked out of the way on their way to the top.  The inherent incestuousness and ardent destructiveness of the place are realised literally and, in relation to the dramatis personae, pretty well ubiquitously.  One of the main characters is a middle-aged, brittly voracious star actress called Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore).  As a child, she was physically abused, Mommie Dearest-style (and worse), by her movie-legend mother Clarice Taggart (Sarah Gadon), who died in a fire.  Scared that her own career is on the skids, Havana is now desperate to star in a remake of one of her mother’s best-known vehicles.  The part goes to someone else; when this other actress’s young son drowns in a swimming pool and she drops out of the film, Havana dances with delight.  Stafford Weiss (John Cusack) is a TV-celebrity, best-selling psychologist with plenty of high-profile clients.  Stafford and his wife Cristina (Olivia Williams) are maniacally ambitious for their adolescent film star son, Benjie (Evan Bird), whom Cristina manages; at the age of thirteen, Benjie has had a spell in rehab and is making a comeback.  His elder sister Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) is a pyromaniac.  Badly burned in a fire that she started, Agatha was banished to Florida by her parents.  At the start of Maps to the Stars, she returns to Hollywood, anxious to renew contact with her family, and gets work as Havana Segrand’s personal assistant.  Agatha also strikes up a relationship with Jerome Fontana (Robert Pattinson), a would-be actor and would-be writer who earns a living as a limousine driver.

    In the last twenty minutes of the film:

    (1) Havana gets Jerome to have sex with her in the limo;

    (2) Agatha kills Havana by repeatedly beating her over the head with a golden statuette in the star’s home (it naturally suggests an Oscar but probably wasn’t allowed to be an exact replica);

    (3) Benjie is responsible for seriously injuring a junior co-star (Sean Robertson), whom he’s scared will upstage him – and whom he assaults while hallucinating that the boy is the ghost of a girl (Kiara Glasco) whom Benjie visited, when she was terminally ill in hospital, as a publicity exercise;

    (4) it’s revealed that Stafford and Cristina married and started a family without realising they were brother and sister;

    (5) Cristina burns to death;

    (6) Agatha removes her mother’s wedding ring, gets Benjie to remove their father’s and conducts a little ceremony in which she and her brother exchange the rings, and consecrate their lives to one another – reiterating lines from Paul Eluard’s Liberté (heard earlier in the film) to give the vows a bit of cultural class.

    This outbreak of melodramatic incident isn’t typical of most of Maps to the Stars and the uneventfulness of the story naturally shifts the focus to the people in it.  The cast is hard to fault.  Julianne Moore plays Havana with horrifying aplomb.  Young Evan Bird is insidiously eccentric.  Mia Wasikowska is disturbing because she makes Agatha amiable, even likeable.  Robert Pattinson supplies a welcome suggestion that Jerome might be capable of functioning in a world less pathological (and hermetically sealed) than the one being described.  But, since David Cronenberg’s and Bruce Wagner’s insight that Hollywood is peopled by monsters/inadequate human beings is wholly unsurprising, the actors’ efforts seem futile.   There’s evidently a continuing appetite among film critics for this kind of ‘exposé’ of life in the American dream factory; and some reviewers have predictably praised Maps to the Stars as jet-black comedy.  It seems to me of no interest whatsoever.  (If the turnout in Red Lion Street Screen 6, on a Thursday afternoon, was anything to go by, the public appetite for the film doesn’t match the critical one:  I was half the total audience.)

    The rot of the Los Angeles sunshine, the nauseating excess of privilege and costive self-pampering –  epitomised in a scene in which Havana Segrand sits on her toilet, producing nothing but noisy farts – are what you expect when a film-maker is covering this territory. David Cronenberg can certainly do repellent (this film is as lowering and alienating as what I saw of Cosmopolis).  He may render the hateful qualities of Hollywood with a more garish sense of disgust than did some of his predecessors.  But Maps to the Stars amounts to nothing more than par for the course.

    2 October 2014

  • Manhattan Murder Mystery

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Woody Allen (1993)

    It’s a little too long but Manhattan Murder Mystery is effortlessly entertaining.    You take Woody Allen’s facility for writing roles and dialogue of the kinds in evidence here so much for granted.  His proven expertise in creating self-aware, hyper-articulate New Yorkers encourages the assumption that it must come easily to him – and that more of the same is no kind of challenge.  The murder mystery dimension is a good idea because it provides a plot on which to hang the splendid dialogue, even if Allen and Marshall Brickman, who co-wrote the screenplay, don’t engage it with the story as much as they might.  The murder element also provides a turn of events that interrupts and spices up the relationship of Larry Lipton (Allen), who works in publishing, and his wife Carol (Diane Keaton).  The film rarely lets you forget that Carol and the couple’s friend Ted (Alan Alda), at least, are people with time on their hands.  The conviction that their quietly affable neighbour Paul House (Jerry Adler) has murdered his wife (Lynn Cohen) – a conviction which Carol embraces long before her husband but which he eventually shares – intensifies, modifies and distracts the Liptons from the tensions in their marriage.

    Manhattan Murder Mystery has many funny moments but nothing scary – except for one bit that’s a combination of the two.  This occurs while the Liptons are trapped in the lift of a hotel where they’ve just discovered a corpse in a bedroom.  You get the feeling that the writers enjoyed concocting the murder plot as an intellectual exercise but although it’s the cause of most of the action it doesn’t feel integral to it.  In the closing stages, we get two helpings of explanation of what actually happened – both courtesy of the smart and self-regarding Marcia Fox (Anjelica Huston), one of Larry’s authors and, as far as Carol is concerned, a rival for his affections.  (Ted has corresponding status in Larry’s mind.)   Anjelica Huston delivers these expositions with panache:  she seems to express Woody Allen’s preference for getting all this detail out of the way in one go rather than have it take up too much of our or his attention over the course of the film.  The second time we get the explanation it’s somewhat different from the first but it comes over largely as a reprise of (and reward for) Huston’s witty theatricality.

    Although the suspicion that the people here are fundamentally more preoccupied with their personal relationships than with detective work supplies a bit of edge, it’s Woody Allen’s neglect of suspense and momentum that makes Manhattan Murder Mystery feel protracted – and made me feel pleasantly drowsy at times.  Yet all the performers are so assured and expert – and their enjoyment of what they’re doing is so palpable – that it hardly matters.  There’s a sequence in the closing stages when Larry, Carol, Ted and Marcia are trying to trick Paul House into an admission of guilt through playing to him over the phone a recording of words spoken by his suspected mistress (Melanie Morris).  This scene fuses, very satisfyingly, a sense of the four characters playing a game with a sense of the four actors having a ball.   (And Jerry Adler is first rate as Mr House.)   The relaxedness of this film may well have an autobiographical explanation:  the role of Carol was written for Mia Farrow but the real-life marital situation between her and Allen evidently made another screen appearance together impossible by the time the picture came to be made.   Except for a cameo in Radio Days, Diane Keaton hadn’t appeared in an Allen film since Manhattan (1979).  Renewing their comic partnership successfully must, in the circumstances, have been powerfully relieving and nostalgic (‘Seems Like Old Times’ …)   The climax to the story takes place in the old cinema Mr House owns, where an Orson Welles film is playing.  I felt inadequate not recognising it – it’s The Lady from Shanghai.

    16 January 2012

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