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