 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 | 🎙️ EPISODE 590: 11.03.22 This was the one Cronenberg movie I had the least amount of expectations for (mostly just from the poster) but — and I don't even know why I'm shocked anymore — this man is just a fount of surprises. Because it's really really fucking good. An overt satire about Hollywood brimming with a lot of weird energy, terrific performances and symbolism. Heady and entertaining, comical and rich, what a surprise! Coming off the heels of the limo-centric Cosmopolis, we begin here in — you guessed it — a limo. But it's not elaborate, glamorous or high-tech. Hell, it's not even stretched (there weren't any available — wink wink). And who's that BEHIND the wheel? None other than the protagonist and passenger of said previous film: one Robert Pattinson... |
The passenger here is Agatha, played by the amazing Mia Wasikowska. She's just returned from a stint in Jupiter, Florida, recovering from major burns suffered in a fire. They go look at the Hollywood sign. Nothing in this movie is subtle. It's meant to hit you right over the head.
While Agatha is clearly our main character, this is a true ensemble piece, which feels rare for a Cronenberg production. We're introduced to Julianne Moore and John Cusack next, engaging in a bizarre form of therapy...
Cusack plays a therapist and author named Stafford Weiss, not quite a 'cult-leader' but somebody with definite aspirations for such. His anti-forgiveness mantra seems to contradict his general new age persona and that's the point. This is a world of contradictions where truth and fairness always take a backseat to fame and the bottomline. Moore plays Havana Segrand, a well-known but fading movie star, the daughter of an abusive mother, a Hollywood legend in her own right who died young (in a fire) named Clarice (played by Cosmopolis's Sarah Gadon). She never had the chance to fade away and, thus, is a star and an icon eternally.
Havana sees her mother as an apparition, the first of several ghosts the audience meets...
Again: there's nothing subtle about any of this and there doesn't need to be. The film presents these ideas on the surface so that it can tuck even bigger ones below.
Stafford and wife Cristina (the great Olivia Williams) are parents to a child star named Benjie who has gained notoriety for his role in a huge hit comedy called Bad Babysitter. This character is played by an actor named Evan Bird who, in the most fitting twist of all, gave up acting IRL after the release of Maps to the Stars! He'd seen enough haha. In the film, he's seen his own stock rapidly fall after drug-addled, tabloids-laden exploits. He's great in the role, constantly chugging an energy drink called Cobalt and berating his agent for telling him the wrong disease a sick girl in the hospital he visits is battling...
It's so hilarious and cynical. The girl dies and Benjie is visited by her ghost and she recites a poem by the Paul Éluard. We see Agatha quoting the same text immediately after...
Here we start to see the subtext, the larger themes hidden in this satire. From Éluard's own comments on the work ("Liberté")...
I thought of revealing at the end the name of the woman I loved and for whom this poem was intended. But I quickly realized that the only word I had in mind was the word Liberté ("liberty"). Thus, the woman I loved embodied a desire greater than her. I confounded it with my most sublime aspiration, and this word Liberté was itself in my whole poem only to eternalize a very simple will, very daily, very apt, that of freeing oneself from the occupation. [Source]The studio is weary about casting Benjie in the Bad Babysitter sequel. He and his mother have a meeting to discuss...
Benjie goes to a party and has a totally normal conversation with his friends...
All of the jokes are so over-the-top and crass that the movie is daring you not to find them funny. But this is a sick, fucked up world and we don't need to LoL to get that. We cut to Havana having a threesome which ends in tears when she envisions her dead mother. She exclaims that she "makes a lousy dyke." This of course parallels the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her own mother. (As well as the themes of incest which will be flushed out later.)
We then see Agatha doing a little dance as Stafford speaks on the TV in some kind of infomercial...
What he's saying is important: “After we’ve wept, after we’ve suffered. After we’ve exhausted the fountain of memory, bloodied our hands at the walls of our parents’ house.”
On a tip from Carrie Fisher (boldly playing herself in this farce), Havana agrees to interview Agatha for her new personal assistant position...
Agatha comments on the *walls* which leads Havana to tell a vapid story about the Dalai Lama. There's so many lovely through-lines between the scenes here. Agatha gets the job. She's questioned about her burns — which she lies about (a "planetarium" accent, LoL but also GENIUS) — and Havana talks about her own mother's fiery death.
Agatha meets Robert Pattinson at a diner and asks him out...
The reveal that her parents are brother and sister and that she wants to write a "mythological" screenplay is a major red flag, obviously. But this is also a major plot point. The audience never really knows whether or not to believe Agatha, but she's not lying here. Pattison shuts down her advances and she leaves him with a "fuck you." His character is the closest thing we have to an average, somewhat normal individual. But this is still Hollywood. He's not willing to pursue any relationship unless there's something personally advantageous therein.
We then see Benjie in therapy. He begins to talk about the apparition but the barely-there counselor pivots to something else...
This sister he speaks of is Agatha. It's not meant to be much of a mystery but the film keeps it under wraps just long enough to make it feel like one. It's a classic movie twist, a cheap way to make the audience feel good. But wrapped inside this send-up, it works completely in an elevated manner. Stafford and Cristina become aware that their daughter's back in town and they are both visibly shaken. But for different reasons, and with vastly different responses. Cristina's anguish is visceral and motherly, but Stafford's is cold and business-minded. He warns his son who's secretly reading that same Éluard poem tucked inside a copy of his father's book...
We then see Havana attempting to meditate as she listens to a voicemail from her agent. She has been trying to get the part in a new movie about her mother, in the role OF her mother. Julianne Moore's facial expressions as she hears that she's not getting the part and her subsequent freakout in Lotus position are a masterclass...
While filming Bad Babysitter 2, Benjie starts to take issue with his younger, scene-stealing co-star...
Later, Havana runs into the actress who got the part of her mother and we see levels of smug, fake smiles and phoniness not previously registered on film...
But back at home, she can't hide her anger and defeat and she begins to slide off the rails. She's on the warpath and tasks Agatha with moving some plants for no reason...
Seriously, almost every scene in this movie is gold.
Havana's anguish turns out to be short-lived, however, as her agent arrives and gives her some "good" news: the son of the actress set to play her mom has drowned. The role is likely her's. And her glee is sickening...
"We're fire and he's water." This film never misses an opportunity to stretch its metaphors and symbols to the very brink, and so, thusly, we see Agatha visiting Pattinson on the set of the TV show Blue Matrix where his comical makeup ("I think it's a birthmark") mirrors her own scars...
In Hollywood, the production is everything and everything is the production. Agatha then confronts her brother for the first time since she went away (for drugging him and setting the house on fire). It's a fantastic scene with amazing dialogue. So much credit for the success of this film has to go to screenwriter Bruce Wagner. Primarily a novelist (though he got a "story by" credit on A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors! What timing! ), Wagner's work here is as good as it gets. I couldn't decide what to cut out here, so I'll just share the whole interaction...
Stafford confronts his daughter and without a shred of empathy he throws $10,000 at her and commands her to leave town immediately. She does not. She's begun a relationship with Pattinson now whom, seeing her rise in the industry, views her ascension as a potential benefit to his own nonstarter career. She forces him into some role-play of her unwritten script about incest and recites the poem as they begin to hook up. And Pattinson, like a babe in the woods, smiles, not giving a fuck about any of this crazy shit...
Meanwhile, Havana begins to go off the rails in the other direction now, exalted by the news of her new gig. She's manic and throwing a party and gives Agatha a laundry list of orders as she farts on the toilet and gets some gossip about her new bf the limo driver...
Benjie, dealing with the return of his sister, breaks from his sobriety and shoots his friend's dog...
Then Agatha pays her mother a visit, dropping the bombshell that she knows her and father are really brother and sister. Stafford shows up, beats the shit out of her and throws her out...
Benjie, continuing down his own dark path, violently assaults his young co-star who takes the form of the dead girl...
The kid survives but Benjie's career will not.
Havana, ever trying to win the race to be the most vile character in this thing, screws Robert Pattinson. Agatha sees her and their next confrontation doesn't end well...
In a sly nod to Cronenberg's roots perhaps, the statue Mia Wasikowska's uses to bludgeon Julianne Moore to death is a Genie Award, a now defunct honor given out annually by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television to recognize the best of Canadian cinema from 1980–2012. Hmmm. (He never won one.)
Agatha summons her brother to the house and tells him to go get daddy's wedding ring. Back at their parents' glass house, Stafford finds his wife Cristina mysteriously engulfed in flames. He uses a chaise lounge to push her into the pool but it's too late. The CGI is awful, the extreme symbolism is not...
Benjie easily removes the ring from his comatose father's finger and returns to his sister. She takes off her gloves for the first time. They each swallow a bunch of pills (washed down by Cobalt energy drink!) and recite wedding vows and then, once again, the poem. The movie fades to a blue sea of stars and the credits roll...
What I loved about this movie was how it mixed a lot of huge, complicated ideas about family, independence, fame, art, life & death within the framework of an insanely overt, over-the-top Hollywood satire. It was the both the most pleasant surprise in my journey through Cronenberg's filmography and also, simply, one of his very best movies. I can't recommend it enough.
𝚃𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚒𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚎 21st 𝚒𝚗𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚘𝚏 𝙲𝚑𝚛𝚘𝚗𝚎𝚗𝚋𝚞𝚛𝚐 – 𝚖𝚢 𝚌𝚑𝚛𝚘𝚗𝚘𝚕𝚘𝚐𝚒𝚌𝚊𝚕 𝚠𝚊𝚝𝚌𝚑/𝚛𝚎𝚠𝚊𝚝𝚌𝚑 𝚘𝚏 𝙳𝚊𝚟𝚒𝚍 𝙲𝚛𝚘𝚗𝚎𝚗𝚋𝚎𝚛𝚐'𝚜 𝚏𝚒𝚕𝚖𝚘𝚐𝚛𝚊𝚙𝚑𝚢. 𝙲𝚕𝚒𝚌𝚔 𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚎 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚏𝚞𝚕𝚕 𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚔𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚖𝚘𝚛𝚎...
CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 588 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 591 ⫸
⫷ EPISODE 588 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 591 ⫸
Maps to the Stars is a 2014 internationally co-produced satirical drama film directed by David Cronenberg, and starring Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, John Cusack, Robert Pattinson, Olivia Williams, Sarah Gadon, and Evan Bird. The screenplay was written by Bruce Wagner, who had written a novel entitled Dead Stars based on the Maps to the Stars script, after initial plans for making the film with Cronenberg fell through. It was released on May 19, 2014.
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