Benedict Andrews (2019)

As Renee Zellweger racks up awards for Judy, it’s not easy even to find a central London cinema showing Seberg, in which Kristen Stewart plays another ill-fated Hollywood star, though of a different generation from Judy Garland, and differently abused.  Once you’ve seen Benedict Andrews’s film, its low profile is understandable.  Wikipedia describes it as a ‘political thriller’ rather than a biographical drama but, if so, the thrills are in short supply (in spite of a score by Jed Kurzel that repeatedly insists the action is exciting).  In fact, Seberg struggles along in a no man’s land between the two genres.

The screenplay, by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, conforms to the current biopic fashion of concentrating on a short, crucial period in the subject’s life rather than working through the whole of it.  In the late 1960s, Jean Seberg made financial donations to various civil rights and political organisations, including the Black Panthers, and had a short-lived relationship with Hakim Jamal, co-founder of the black nationalist ‘US’ group.  As a result, she became a person of interest to the FBI and a target of its counter intelligence programme (COINTELPRO).   This is the main focus of the film, which starts with Seberg returning to America from Paris – it seems at the height of May 68 – where she’s been living with her second husband, the novelist Romain Gary (Yvan Attal), and their young son (Gabriel Sky).  The narrative climaxes a couple of years later with her return to France, the first of Seberg’s attempts to take her own life, and the death of a two-day-old daughter:  Seberg insists that her premature labour was triggered by the FBI-generated fake news that the baby’s father was a Black Panther[1].  Closing titles summarise the circumstances of how Seberg died – in 1979, at the age of forty.  The French authorities deemed this probable suicide, though with ‘unresolved issues’.

The lack of further biographical context here is a mistake, deriving from the film-makers’ shaky assumption that plenty of the audience will know plenty about Jean Seberg’s life, forty years after her death.  Back in Hollywood, she argues with her agent (Stephen Root) about what her next movie should be.   She wants something left field.  He insists she’s ‘America’s sweetheart’, that the public wants to see her in conventional roles.   Even if that was the case, it doesn’t square with the impression the film has immediately created – an impression that builds on what prior knowledge of Seberg the moderately well-informed viewer is likely to have.  She’s best remembered nowadays for A bout de souffle – as a ‘French New Wave icon’ (IMDb), even though the character she plays in Godard’s classic is an American.  Benedict Andrews introduces her in Seberg in Paris, with a husband who’s twenty-five years her senior and a French cultural heavyweight.    Kristen Stewart’s chic beauty and tense economy of gesture and expression further disguise Seberg’s identity as a Midwest girl made good.

Andrews does include, by way of a brief prologue, mock-up footage of Seberg as Jeanne d’Arc – in chains, about to be consumed by flames.  This obviously prefigures the ‘martyrdom’ of Jean rather than Jeanne that Seberg will describe.  Even members of the audience already aware that Seberg made her movie debut in the title role of Otto Preminger’s 1957 version of Shaw’s Saint Joan may not know the circumstances of her casting.  Preminger wanted an unknown.  A nationwide talent search attracted 18,000 hopefuls.  Jean Dorothy Seberg’s name was entered in the contest by a neighbour in Marshalltown, Iowa.  If Andrews and the screenwriters had given some idea of their heroine’s unassuming origins it might have made her targeting by the FBI, barely a decade later, seem more dramatically bizarre.

Seberg’s casting in Preminger’s picture was confirmed a few days before her eighteenth birthday.  Kristen Stewart, although now approaching thirty, can easily pass for younger but, once the prologue is done, Seberg presents an already cosmopolitan figure.  Stewart is such a sophisticated presence that it’s no surprise at all that Jean Seberg is engagée.  There’s nothing in the film to make her politicisation unexpected or remarkable.  Stewart’s own cinema trajectory – from the Twilight franchise to success in French films (Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) and Personal Shopper (2016)) – might seem to resonate with Jean Seberg’s.  She’s physically very suitable for the role and wears her late-1960s wardrobe well (the often amusing costumes are by Michael Wilkinson).  But Stewart has no scope for showing the development of Jean Seberg’s personality.  This seriously reduces the interest and impact of her performance.

This is more frustrating because Seberg devotes – or, rather, wastes – plenty of time on a clichéd plot worked up around a fictional FBI operative called Jack Solomon (Jack O’Connell).  He becomes disillusioned with his surveillance work on Seberg pari passu with a somewhat muffled infatuation with her, gazing at her (that is, Kristen Stewart’s) face on the screen in A bout de souffle.  Jack’s wife Linette (Margaret Qualley), who wants to be a doctor but is stuck with being a homemaker, is horrified to discover a cache of photographs of Seberg lying around the kitchen.  So, presumably, would J Edgar Hoover have been horrified to know one of his men was taking work home in this way – yet Jack refuses to discuss it further with Linette on the grounds that his assignment is top secret!  The conception and writing of the role leave no doubt that it’s a makeweight but Jack’s on screen a lot, even so.  Jack O’Connell’s low-key playing might have been more effective in a smaller part; as it is, he comes over as colourless.  As a more straightforward FBI brute, Vince Vaughn is more vivid.  Colm Meaney overdoes the nastiness as his and Jack’s boss.

The attention give to COINTELPRO goings-on obscures two other linked, semi-comical aspects of the material – Seberg’s affair with Hakim Jamal (Anthony Mackie), and the disjuncture between the kind of movies roles she wanted, and those she actually got to play, at this stage of her career.  Born Allen Donaldson (and a cousin of Malcolm X), Jamal was a pin-up of the Black Power movement.  There’s a hint of his and Seberg’s being attracted to each other as stars in their respective spheres – but no more than a hint. Anthony Mackie plays Jamal well but the part is underwritten.  Seberg seems more interested in showing him, like Jack Solomon, wronging a loving wife (Zazie Beetz).  Jamal also seems a realisation of Seberg’s desire to make an interracial love story picture.  Instead, she ends up in Paint Your Wagon, Airport and, more fatefully, Diego Callahan.  It’s bad enough that she was roped into projects like these.  It’s verging on adding insult to injury that Jean Seberg is now commemorated by Benedict Andrews’s wasted opportunity of a film.

23 January 2020

[1] While filming the Western Diego Callahan, Seberg had a fling with a Mexican student revolutionary.  Although Gary, with whom she split soon afterwards, publicly insisted that the baby girl who died so shortly after birth was his, she was actually the Mexican student’s.