NYFF: Maps to the Stars, Or: Julianne Moore is God, Again
Friday, September 26, 2014 at 2:41PM The New York Film Festival has begun. Here's Nathaniel on the latest from David Cronenberg which won Julianne Moore the Best Actress prize at Cannes earlier this year.
Let's not bury the lede. At a key moment in Maps to the Stars when the actress Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore) gets some bad news that she's more or less been expecting/dreading, she is in a Buddha pose in yoga pants. Her eyes struggle to hold back tears and her body struggles to pretend it's relaxing when she lets out a sudden wail. You think the wail will descend into Julianne Moore's familiar crying jag (You know how she loves to do). Instead the wail abruptly stops. Fans of Julianne Moore won't be able to silence their own screaming so quickly. I, for one, felt euphoric watching her. For those of us whom we have famously dubbed "actressexuals" - the word originated at this blog though it's now escaped our small pfeiff fiefdom and entered the greater internet -- major achievements from our favorite stars can feel, however absurdly, like personal triumphs. Or at least like just rewards for enduring loyalty. Especially if you've worried that the magic has dissipated with familiarity, poor career decisions, lesser roles and/or medicore films.
This year, with Maps to the Stars and Still Alice (previously reviewed), the Julianne Moore I first fell for, the actress who inspired my whole career path (newbies might not know that this site emerged from a zine I started in the 1990s with issue #1 dubbed "Julianne Moore is God," pictured left) came roaring back into full power.
Pity, then, that the movie can't quite keep up with her or harness her brilliant satirical embodiment of all that is self-absorbed, self-loathing, self-medicated, and self-serving in modern Hollywood celebrity. [More...]
It's not, I must quickly add, that the film is terrible. It's just that it's disjointed, uneven and unfocused, and weirdly bereft of the kind of offkilter disturbances it needs to work. Two ghosts figure into the narrative, for example, but their scenes never have the full rattling drama or maybe psychological horror or maybe deadpan comedy that they need. All three of those things are things Cronenberg could once capture with ease. Maps to the Stars, is written by Hollywood satirist Bruce Wagner (He wrote a similar book called Dead Stars but he says he based it on this unproduced at the time screenplay, so this is an Original Screenplay for what it's worth). And the disjointed feeling may well be unavoidable. It follows the fates of five main characters on mutually assured paths of self-destruction: Havana Segrand is a famous actress whose career is on the skids; Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) is her burn victim personal assistant or as Havana likes to call her "my chore whore"; and the three other key players are a showbiz power family led by a self-help guru Dr Stafford Weiss (John Cusack) his wife Christina (Olivia Williams) who manages their cash cow son Benjie (Evan Bird), a spoiled and hateful teenage movie star who commands $8 million a picture. On the periphery of the action are the aforementioned ghosts, a chauffeur/actor/writer (Robert Pattinson), several showbiz acquaintances of Havana's and Carrie Fisher (Carrie Fisher), brilliantly cast and perfectly parcelled out as Connective Tissue within Hollywood's vast incestuous family of neurotics.
But for all of the screenplay's verve, it may be repetitive and easy but it's not dull, visually not much appears to be happening at least on a first screening. The auteur's gift for judging how sound can rattle a scene's surface mood comes through, though. Cronenberg's best films rely heavily on his inimitable directorial voice paired with brave actors totally going for it. But, sadly, Moore is the only one who seems to have fully showed up to work. (Points to Mia Wasikowska, a little lost at times but at least in the same zip code as Moore)
Moore manages a highwire juggling act of easy-target satire, traumatized neurotic truth, and complete insanity that is, I'd argue, the only trifurcated tone by which this absurd story and ballsy if simplistic satire could be its best self. The other actors only manage those registers briefly and never all three and certainly not all at the same time like our ginger goddess (who is gone to blonde seed here, like an adult Lindsay Lohan had she managed to keep it together until her late 40s). Everything about her star turn works, from her faux sincerity, to her babbling dimwittedness, the subtle but constant shade thrown at other actresses (she's a Hathahater!) to her career insecurity, to the hilarious physical business (one moment with a Genie statue -- a Genie statue !!! - just slays), and the way she holds her overly glossed lips in perpetual pout like she's definitely had whatever procedures Catherine O'Hara had at the tail end of For Your Consideration. True to glorious (return to) form, when it comes to actresses playing actresses (see also: Boogie Nights and Vanya on 42nd Street), Julianne Moore is a supreme being.
Julianne: Easy A; The Movie: C+
Reader Comments (25)
Julianne at her best AND Carrie Fisher as Carrie Fisher (author of one of the great Hollywood inside novels/screenplays)! I am giddy with excitement to see this. (Is Carrie in a lot of it and is she...well?)
Julianne at her best AND Carrie Fisher as Carrie Fisher (author of one of the great Hollywood inside novels/screenplays)! I am giddy with excitement to see this. (Is Carrie in a lot of it and is she...well?)
"Let's not bury the lede."
THANK YOU and also I am salivating for this movie I need to watch it so bad.
Awesome!
Time to posterize God's career, maybe?
Ric -- oh god (literally) but she's made so many movies! It would be a post as long as 10 days of postings
Moore is glorious in this movie and it just makes me so happy that she's been having a great year (which may very well get even better).
Just curious, would you categorize her here as lead or supporting?
JULIANNE MOORE! But I'm worried this won't get normal distribution, they're already so cheap about an Oscar campaign.
I totally felt the same way abou Julianne Moore and her performance in Maps to the Star.
Her performance is in the same wave lenght as her Amber Waves.
All I have for her Havana Segrande is LOVE.
A real return to form,Nat do you think she is a lead or supporting,i felt like all her characters from the 90's seeped into Segrand.
I LOVED Julianne's performance, the movie...not so much. It felt so dumb and obvious to me.
She's amazing. Simply amazing. I know one shouldn't blurb whore but A TOUR DE FORCE PERFORMANCE. TWICE THIS YEAR.
I love her.
I think the C+ grade is being kind. This film is the worst that I've seen in Cronenberg's filmography (I do have a few blind spots-Naked Lunch, M Butterfly, Rabid, Shivers). I didn't even find the film entertaining because the surface satire is so F-grade that everything seems stupid/dull. I will grant that the family psychodrama/ghost story elements had potential, but they're not fleshed out enough in the screenplay and the directorial presentation is completely indifferent and unconvincing. D+ or C-
Nate: is Moore's work in Maps up there with her work in Safe and Far from Heaven? I just don't want to hope too much that an actress in her fifties is allowed to go back to the masterful levels under which she was operating in her thirties. But your review gave me hope.
"oh god (literally) but she's made so many movies! It would be a post as long as 10 days of postings"
Yes, Nathaniel. And I'm sure everyone on this blog would just *hate* 10 days of Julianne Moore postings... ;)
"How is that gonna work?", says Savana when she hears Anne Hathaway would play her mother's role when young. She says it in a Julia Louis-Dreyfuss kind of way and she is so amazingly convincing at being fake and lying about how she really feels that she lost the role that we can see the talent there too. Savana is Valerie Cherish on acid (and vicodin, xanax, zoloft)! There is a great movie in Maps of the Stars and that is the one Moore stars in, not the one the screenplay insists in bringing to the front. The whole premise is a disaster in the other half of the movie: I could never in a million years buy that that kid was the star he was supposed to be (a lot to do with the flat acting from Evan Bird), neither that that specify movie he did was that successful (700 mil worldwide) and the ghosts' interventions feel extremely uneventful and unscary (even though is provides for some amazing reactions from Moore, particularly the first apparition).It's a bad script overall, but Moore transcends it in the same way other actors in bad movies have (Depp in Pirates…, Roth and Bonham Carter in Planet of the Apes, Cotillard in La Vie..etc). I wish the movie was fully focused on her. I wish I had seen her audition. I wish I had seen more of her interview on TV. I wanted more. Her physicality in her last moments is mind-blowing.
Kate: I've seen Naked Lunch at least, and it's at least as good an adaptation of that book as you could get without being almost entirely divorced from structure.
alex - i haven't decided lead / support. in some ways it's her movie but in other ways it's totally the story of Mia and the teen star. It's either an ensemble all supporting or there are like 4 leads.
That means she can be double nominated! At least in Film Bitch Awards.
Someone need to do a GIF of Havana's hilarious split-second eye-roll/pout when she's asked "Do you know Anne Hathaway? She's amazing."
I thought it was a Woody Allen by way of David Lynch and Moore was doing all the heavy lifting,I thought everyone else was awfulinc Mia,olivia,john and THAT KID.
BVR,
She's amazing. Right up there with Boogie Nights for me. I hear Still Alice is closer to [safe] and Far From Heaven levels of brilliance.
Nathaniel - you aren't the only one who's enthusiastic about Julianne Moore's performance in "Map of the Stars". Try listening to Mark Kermode's podcast on the BBC for a rave review that will warm your heart. Kermode isn't someone who overpraises actors, so it was exceptional that he came right out and said she should win the Oscar - but probably won't.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/kermode
Keeping in mind that Julianne Moore won the prize at Cannes for best actress I think she should have some kind of Oscar campaign for this year.
I doubt she would have gotten an oscar nod if this came out this year. The film is too bizarre. Loved her in it. Saw her as lead. Didn't like the family story at all which is the bigger story of the film.
I quite like it, mostly because of Julianne and Mia. Yes, the movie is strange and at times feels disjointed, but I enjoyed it. I can do without Evan Bird's flat acting, though.
Late to the party but this out-and-out rave for God has me salivating now. Ugh. Can I just watch all of her scenes with all the failed story bits edited out? I have no desire to spend time watching limp actors doing their best with very tricky material in a Cronenberg movie. I want someone who showed up to WORK.