ARTS & CULTURE
of their pasts, Maps to the Stars follows the Weiss’s.
Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) is a shady schizophrenic
who arrives from Florida and lands a job as the personal assistant of Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore),
an aging diva with bubblehead mannerisms and a
penchant for impromptu threesomes. Stafford (John
Cusack) is a self-promoting self-help guru whose
“Hour of Personal Power” has brought him A-list
clientele. Christina (Olivia Williams) manages the
career of their disaffected child-star son, Benjie, a
fresh graduate of rehab at age 13.
Cusack exudes telegenic charm when hocking
his bestselling guide to holistic healing and dials
up the ferocity when dealing with the unwanted
Agatha, and Williams (Anna Karenina) matches
Cusack ounce for ominous ounce. Cannes Best
Actress winner Moore (Don Jon) gets the tricky tone
uniquely right, effervescing and spooling disgust,
playing Havana like a person walking a tightrope
over a yawning pit of psychosis; her rabid emotions
threatening her to knock her off and send her plummeting into the abyss. Since The Kids Are All Right,
Wasikowska has completed a string of roles doused
in intense existential angst (Jane Eyre, Stoker, Only
Lovers Left Alive, The Double).
C a n ad i a n d i re c tor D av id C ronenb erg
(Videodrome, A History of Violence, Eastern
Promises) has nothing left to prove. Working an
even deeper haunted groove than David Lynch did
in Mulholland Dr., Maps to the Stars is an etchedin-acid comedy that attempts to dig deeper into the
perversions and pathologies undergirding the Dream
Factory than anything since. While far from his canniest piece of filmmaking, it’s definitely his angriest:
Cronenberg constructs his crystal kingdom, then
launches his stones with mischievous joy, panning
satiric gold from the muck of celebrity ills, in a place
where reality depends on your dosage.
Graphic, dark, and horrifying, Cronenberg’s
vision is as bright as a sunlamp, as still as a morgue,
and as sterile as an operating table, offering no moral
stance, full of that dreamy fixation with aberration and perversity. It doesn’t touch Sunset Blvd. or
All About Eve, but Cronenberg is on bullish form;
the script is dipped in venom – black-hearted to the
point of being mean-spirited (there are jokes about
being “menopausal” and Mother Teresa being “f***ed
up,” and metaphoric singing/dancing on the grave of
a young boy) – and the cast is on full power.
Drenched in unhappiness that oozes out of the
screen, Maps to the Stars dabbles in every repugnant taboo under the sun – child abandonment,
sexual abuse, drug addiction, pyromania, facial disfigurement, hallucinations, animal cruelty, retaliatory menstruation, graveyard wedding ceremonies,
incest, murder by strangulation and blunt force
trauma, and mass suicide. It’s one of the least sympathetic Hollywood take-downs ever mounted.
Cronenberg always does justice to his characters; he
just leaves them without hope.
Maps to the Stars is a tale of terminal wastrels
with the twisted structure of a Greek tragedy and
the rictus grin of a rancorous sitcom. A plaintive
chord of melancholy rings throughout, evident in the
repeated invocations of Paul Éluard’s poem “Liberty,”
a paean to freedom clandestinely published at the
height of the Nazi occupation of France. The statusanxiety, fame-vertigo, sexual satiety, and all-encompassing fear of failure which poisons every triumph
Monday, December 1, 2014 23
ê Julianne Moore in Maps to the Stars.
t humbs UP
Taylor Swift’s 1989. #noshame #sorrynotsorry
#hatersgonnahatehatehatehatehatehate
are displayed with an icy new connoisseurship.
Narratively unwieldy and tonally jumbled, the
plot is predictable, melodramatic, and nonsensical, and often comes across as jaded mumbo-jumbo.
Yet for a film that has so many problems, it is one of
the more watchable ones. It has a venomous bite that
makes you think and shudder with outrage. With so
many industry neuroses exposed and horrors nested
within horrors, one viewing is too much, and not
enough.
Scraping away the shiny surface of Hollywood to
discover a Cronenbergian outbreak of tortured families, reprehensible behaviour, and extreme violence,
Maps to the Stars is an elaborate circus of errors
that’s close to the fake smiles and boardroom handshakes of the real thing. It’s a remorseless assault on
a Tinseltown stoned on the self-delusion that it’s a
hard-working utopia, an altruistic fountain gushing the milk of human kindness, when it’s actually a world comprised of destructive impulses, and
designed to breed more of them. u