Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg, 2014)

 

David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars ranks in the lower half of his work, Hollywood’s empty materialism and drained humanity seeming basically like too narrow and obvious a topic to fully engage him. Julianne Moore plays Havana Segrand, a career-challenged actress who engages a new arrival in town, Agatha Weiss, as a personal assistant; Agatha’s teenage brother is the (wantonly unpleasant) star of a “Bad Babysitter” comedy franchise, their father a lifestyle guru who counsels Havana. The film has a broad vein of vicious satire, exemplified by how Havana giddily celebrates the death of another actress’s little boy (an event causing the actress to withdraw from a role that Havana covets), but that’s familiar territory, albeit more sharply executed than average. Of greater interest are its multiple instances of doubling: two (at least) quasi-incestuous relationships between siblings, two characters visited by visions of dead people, two name actors beset by career anxiety, two case histories involving fires, two instances of drowning, all of which contributes to a sense of proliferating stasis, a perception that Hollywood stories are essentially just all the same (of the two movies foregrounded in the narrative, one is a franchise sequel and the other a remake). At the same time, the gradual revelation of so many interconnections between characters creates an ultimately savagely implosive quality: Cronenberg goes relatively light here on the “body horror” (mostly displaced into conventional concerns about appearance, and to skin permanently marked by earlier calamities), but the film ultimately feels no less invasive and destabilizing (conspicuous by its absence of course is anything close to lush cinematic pleasure). Still, Hollywood mythmaking isn’t entirely absent: an early scene has Agatha bragging in seemingly transparently bogus manner to a driver she’s just met about her connections with Carrie Fisher, all of it turning out in short order to be true!