Maps to the Stars hits a limited theatrical run today.
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| "Okay kids. This is what an orgasm looks like." |
David Cronenberg’s Maps
to the Stars is not for everyone, nor should it be. Picking up where Cosmopolis left off, the 71 year old Canadian auteur’s 21st
feature joins David Lynch’s Mulholland
Drive and Bernard Rose’s ivansxtc in
its savage, cynical excoriation of Hollywood and its unsavory miscreants’
synchronized paths towards self-destruction.
Where Lynch used surrealism to satirize studio hypocrisies by equating
moguls with mobsters and Rose transposed Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich to a drug addicted Hollywood agent,
Cronenberg applies his sterilized detachment to an ensemble cast of characters’
mutual downward spiral. At first it
seems like an aggressively self-aware swipe at over privileged celebrities at
the end of their rope, dropping names of major Tinseltown players with
similarly snarky pans across the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles,
California. But just when you think you
know what Maps to the Stars is really
about, it shifts gears and takes its band of outsiders down a dark and
disturbing path of psychosexuality and extreme violence.
Formally speaking, David Cronenberg’s sustained cool
distance provides a perfect framework for the jet black hilarity on display,
with longtime collaborator Peter Suschitzky’s aseptic cinematography
symmetrically poising Maps’
antagonists under a surgical lamp. One
of the fascinating detours in editing for Cronenberg is how he cuts away from
Howard Shore’s ethereal white noise of a score.
Take for instance a dispute between the film’s disfigured and unhinged
rabble rouser Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) and her limo driver Jerome (Robert
Pattison, fresh off of Cosmopolis). As the angered Agatha storms off, the camera
follows her as the soundtrack builds to a shriek before abruptly cutting
away. Masterfully controlled
technicalities aside, Maps to the Stars notably
sports one of Cronenberg’s most eclectic casts to date.
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| "With these gloves, no one will ever be able to tell that I'm the one that stole your sandwich." |
Working for the first time with Cronenberg
are Julianne Moore as a strung out actress living in the shadow of her late
abusive starlet mother and John Cusack as a self-help therapist who may harbor
more skeletons in the closet than he leads on.
A startling newcomer is Evan Bird as a 13 year old child star with too
much access to wealth and drugs but not enough guidance and love from his
parents, ala Macaulay Culkin or Drew Barrymore.
And of course what would a modern Cronenberg effort be without his
ghostly muse Sarah Gadon, providing the neurotic proceedings with an eerie
tightrope walk between life and largely death.
Maps
to the Stars will no doubt frustrate and even infuriate
many viewers not accustomed to Cronenberg’s clinical and heartless approach to the
material, following through an initially amusing premise poking fun at derailed
actors towards a logically nihilistic end.
Cronenberg had been working on Maps
for six years as financing continued to fall through before turning his
attention to Cosmopolis, which had
its own share of monetary difficulties.
Cronenberg always referred to Maps
to the Stars as a hard sell and he’s not lying. Much like Cosmopolis, from beginning to end the arctic master
stands outside the plight of a collective you can neither endear to nor
empathize with. The aberrant content of
the film’s second half will put off many, though Cronenberg die-hards will find
a chuckle of appreciation at the use of a Genie Award as a weapon. A sequence of self-immolation rendered via
CGI runs the risk of distracting some not onto the intentionally jokey artifice. That said, as a Cronenberg effort Maps to the Stars represents the
self-driven intellectual artist at the height of his jaded snide with his
blistering critique of the darkest alleyways of contemporary Hollywood.
-Andrew Kotwicki