Hollywood contains enough fodder for ridicule to fill up an entire encyclopedia, yet movies poking fun at the industry's dog-eat-dog ways, at least those that stand the test of time (i.e. Sunset Boulevard, The Player, are few and far between. The streets of L.A. overflow with the debris of broken dreams and once-promising careers in tailspin, but who's willing to take the hit for laying bare the ruthlessness with which this insatiable profession chews people up and spits them out? There are many axes to grind out there, but few are willing to burn those bridges that could potentially open doors and yield that long-sought-after break.
Julianne Moore.
Which is why handing over directing duties to David Cronenberg on Maps to the Stars, a ferocious showbiz satire with a potent dash of outlandish surrealism, was such a no-brainer. Granted, the Canadian auteur, who had his own brush with the studio system back in the '80s when he helmed a a screen adaptation of Stephen King's The Dead Zone (1983) and a remake of The Fly (1986), seems at first glance ill-suited to handle screenwriter Bruce Wagner's take-no-prisoners zingers. Heads only explode metaphorically in the strangely disorienting landscape that comes out of this collaboration, but the dark humor that pervades this tale of movers, shakers and wannabes fires up the Scanners director's creative juices, yielding some of his best work since his brooding A History of Violence.
The film, which premiered nearly a year ago in Cannes and finally opens in the U.S. this month, kicks off with the arrival of starstruck go-getter Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) in Los Angeles. She befriends, then begins dating her limo driver Jerome (Robert Pattinson, reteaming with Cronenberg after headlining the polarizing Cosmopolis). She confides to him that she's come all the way from Florida and that she knows she has a shot at landing a decent gig because she befriended Carrie Fisher on Twitter.
Fisher, who appears briefly, suggests to her friend Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), an aging film actress struggling to remain relevant as she vies for the lead in a remake of the movie that made her deceased mother a star, that she hire Agatha as her personal assistant.
The high-maintenance thespian is fascinated by the younger woman's burn scars – not to mention the seemingly gullible naïf's initiative – and opts to take her on, a decision that will have unforeseen consequences, not just for Havana, but for her therapist/masseur, Dr. Stafford Weiss (a return to form for John Cusack), and his family, which includes his son Benjie (Evan Bird), a teen idol eager for another hit following a stint in rehab.
Photographer: Caitlin Cronenberg
Mia Wasikowska, Julianne Moore.
Wagner, who wrote the novel Dead Stars based on this material after initial attempts to make a movie out of his Maps script fell through, skillfully juggles the multiple plot strands, and he scores big laughs whenever he depicts Bernie's disastrous shoot of a new studio comedy that's put in jeopardy when he starts feeling threatened by his (much younger) co-star, an adorable ginger with scene-stealing tendencies. Less successful is Benjie's interaction with his hedonistic industry peers, which comes across as warmed-over Bret Easton Ellis but still manages to elicit some mean-spirited yuks.
Moore's inspired over-the-top theatrics, however, more than compensate for the film's less inspired moments. Adopting a cartoonishly nasal voice voice for the role, she's a hoot and a half, never less so than in an outrageous scene that shows her talking to Agatha while she's in the toilet. (Julianne farts!)
She nabbed Best Actress honors at Cannes and, for my money, is far better here than she was as a linguistics professor diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's in the earnest Still Alice, the performance that finally won her an Oscar Sunday night. Kudos to Pattinson as well for providing a sober contrast to Agatha's delusions of stardom even as his character pursues his own goals in front of the cameras.
Evan Bird.
Shooting in the U.S. for the first time seems to have brought out the best in Cronenberg, and his outsider's eye makes the material feel fresh and unpredictable despite the familiar trappings. Take, for instance, a conference room scene in which Benjie has to convince studio execs he'll remain clean and sober on the set. Aided by ace cinematographer Peter Suschitzky's boxy compositions, Cronenberg frames the industry leeches as stand-alone vultures voicing their concerns with deadpan sternness.
It's a business meeting conducted with the utmost seriousness, the better to convey the gulf between these humorless suits and the dreck they greenlight and protect as if it were a government secret.
It also helps that Cronenberg and Wagner introduce a supernatural element in the form of ghosts who appear to the characters throughout the film. The unsettling apparitions could have derailed a more conventional movie, but they actually keep Maps to the Stars intriguingly off-kilter while avoiding the trap of so many dark comedies that wear out their charm when things take a nihilistic turn. What keeps the film buoyant is Cronenberg's command of tone, an ideal complement to Wagner's pitch-black barbs. You can almost hear this wicked duo giggling behind the camera.
Julianne Moore.
And yet, beneath the bawdy laughs, the filmmakers serve up a profound meditation on the dream factory that posits these neurotic, astonishingly unfortunate characters as the real ghosts in this L.A. story. It's a pretty tall order to pull off this mixture of lowbrow hijinks and astute ribbing, but Cronenberg and his game cast do so with tongue placed firmly in cheek and without diluting their stinging Tinseltown deconstruction one iota. They turn this scathing mad science experiment into the first must-see movie of 2015.
Maps to the Stars opens Feb. 27 at O Cinema Wynwood and Cinema Paradiso Fort Lauderdale. Don't miss it.
