Review: "Maps to the Stars"

Director: David Cronenberg

Runtime: 111 minutes

There's quite a bit of talk about fires and burns in Maps to the Stars, yet precious little actual heat. The latest from David Cronenberg sees him taking a knife to the squishy, slimy underbelly of Hollywood, with results that are more likely to induce shrugs than gasps of horror or outrage. Maps is something of a companion piece to Cronenberg's last film, 2012's Cosmopolis, tackling a different sort of elitist American culture, albeit with drastically different tones. The iciness of Cronenberg's approach in Cosmopolis was off-putting at first, yet gradually became an effective choice before making a gripping hard left turn into fire and brimstone condemnation. Unfortunately, the director isn't able to bring even a small fraction of Cosmopolis' concluding fire to Maps. Despite scenes that are, on paper, stomach-churning, Cronenberg's latest is ultimately a lukewarm stab at cutting satire.

Hollywood has always provided multiple angles for satirization, and Cronenberg and writer Bruce Wagner have at least assembled a good host of targets. There's fading star Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), trying to revitalize her career in the shadow of her dead mother (Sarah Gadon), and her new assistant Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), who happens to be a burn victim. Then there's Agatha's possible boyfriend Jerome (Robert Pattinson, now at the front of the limo), a limo driver who really wants to be a writer and actor. And then, of course, there's the screwed up child star Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird) and his vaguely creepy parents (John Cusack and Olivia Williams). All good ingredients to have for an expansive satire of the entertainment industry's vanity, misplaced priorities, and closets stuffed full of skeletons.

Where Maps to the Stars veers of course starts with Wagner's screenplay, which spreads the screen time around so much that all the plot lines feel half baked. The most compelling part of Maps is Havana's story - in no small part thanks to Moore's Cannes-winning performance - yet Wagner spends so much time with the rest of his Hollyweridos that her story comes off as pointless by the time the credits roll. In Havana, Wagner is able to tackle issues such as celebrity status, aging, Hollywood's standards for women, and the trauma of childhood abuse, yet he refuses to fully engage with Havana's mindset. During the first hour or so of the film, Gadon pops up as the ghost of Havana's mother (a famous actress who died young in a fire), presumably to torment her struggling daughter. 

Yet as Wasikowska's own story starts to move independently, Havana's hallucinations cease and her mental strain is washed completely away. Gadon and Moore play off of each other well, and their casting taps into some interesting notions about age and talent, but every scene they have together is exactly the same. Havana asks what Gadon's Clarice wants, and by the end of Maps to the Stars, you'll neither know nor care (Havana seems to forget about her as well).

This is made even more frustrating because of how much fun Moore is having sinking her teeth into a role like this. She alone seems to understand what Cronenberg and Wagner are trying (and failing) to accomplish. She is constantly on edge, even when trying to meditate her way through receiving bad news, which enlivens Cronenberg's otherwise staid atmosphere. The biggest crime of the film is that Moore is a member of an ensemble cast, and not a definitive lead. With her at the center, Maps would have had a infinitely stronger foundation. 

Only Wasikowska comes close to Moore's understanding of the film's aims, even as she's saddled with an underwritten character. Though Moore dominates the scenes with Havana and Agatha, Wasikowska is able to effectively hold her own as a sounding board for Havana's histrionics. And when facing off against other cast members, Wasikowska is really able to shine, giving careful hints about Agatha's damaged psyche and doing her best to fill in the gaps of Wagner's writing. 

The rest of the main cast, however, look as though they've been directed into comatose submission. Bird has the looks to play a royally messed up Bieber-esque child star, but he's never given the room to truly dig into the character's excessive lifestyle and increasingly erratic mindset. Cusack, meanwhile, is unable to lend a spark to what should be a juicy role: a classic puffed-up Hollywood life coach/guru. Yet rather than inflate himself to fit the role, the actor shrinks and goes through the motions. As for Pattinson, he's only got a handful of scenes, and they're all of the sort that really don't require a name actor at all. The exception, and not in a good way, is Olivia Williams, who - perhaps because of the editing - appears to be giving two performances at once. One minute she's a domineering stage mother, and the next she's falling apart and weeping over a past trauma. There's no in between, and the shifts feel completely forced. 

Though Cronenberg knows how to direct freakish madness on screen (Videodrome, Naked Lunch, The Fly, etc etc etc), his forays into psychological dramas over the past decade have largely proven to be stillborn. Cosmopolis and Spider had some effective moments and ideas, yet films like A Dangerous Method were often just sluggish and hollow. Maps to the Stars presents the best opportunity for Cronenberg to use his gifts as a director of nightmares, yet those nightmares never come. Even with the ghosts, different forms of incest, burning bodies, and three dead children, nothing about Maps to the Stars resonates. The visuals are flat, the production design passable, and the music barely notable. The content on page is so scattered that it can't really work without a strong atmosphere to heighten to horror of what it depicts, and Cronenberg and his collaborators never supply it.

One can't blame the director for trying to branch outside of his body horror roots, but you'd think by now he'd have seen that films like Maps to the Stars really don't fit his skill set at all. I have no doubt that he has some genuine contempt for the seedier aspects of Hollywood, but Maps to the Stars ultimately gives the impression that he's just indifferent towards it. Were this his first foray into this sort of satire, it would be easy enough to lay most of the blame at Wagner's feet. Yet even though Wagner's script is heavily flawed, Cronenberg's directorial choices (or lack thereof) are equally lackluster. There is so much bark in what Maps to the Stars wants to say, but when it comes to bite, the film has forgotten to put its dentures in. 

Grade: C

Review: "Anna Karenina"

Director: Joe Wright
Runtime: 130 minutes

Shakespeare's immortal line "All the world's a stage..." has never applied to a film so literally as it does to Joe Wright's Anna Karenina, the latest adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's classic novel. Filmed almost entirely inside of a dilapidated theater, the film's characters walk across stages, climb through rafters, and move seamlessly from place to place as sets transform around them in real-time. It is, as the marketing has billed it, a bold new vision of Tolstoy's work. Yet is there a price to pay for such heavy artifice? The film runs a little over 2 hours, and Wright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard have obviously omitted or streamlined parts of the 1000 page novel. Yet do these changes, combined with the stylistic conceit, detract from the overall quality and impact? It's hard to say, as Wright's film is the rare sort of classic literary adaptation that is likely to inspire extreme division, between those swept up by the execution, and those turned off by what could be seen as a nuance-free adaptation.

For those not terribly familiar with the story, Anna is set in Imperial Russia in the 1870s, and charts the fall of the distinguished titular character (played by Keira Knightley) in high society after a passionate affair. Yet Anna's infidelity towards her husband (Jude Law) is not the story's first bit of romantic betrayal. We're first introduced to Anna's brother Oblonsky (Matthew MacFadyen), a husband and father who engages in a brief affair of his own. It is in Anna's journey to smooth over the relationship between Oblonsky and his wife Dolly (Kelly MacDonald) that she first meets the dashing Count Vronsky (Aaron Johnson), who inspires actual feelings of attraction in Anna, as opposed to her respectful but love-less marriage to Karenin. 

And now is as good a time as ever to admit that, outside of a few chapters, I have not read Tolstoy's novel. As such, I can't tell you how Anna Karenina "should" be played on screen, and if the character offers room for different interpretations. What I can say is that Ms. Knightley, in her third collaboration with Wright, presents her as a woman forced too early into maturity. Anna can be coy, flirty, or petulant at a moment's notice. As best as she tries to maintain the steely composure of a dignified member of the upper class, the facade cracks often as she struggles to reconcile her choices with the effects they have on her social life. She is, whether by choice or not, beyond being a girl, yet still not quite comfortable as a woman (I promise that this isn't a reference to that Britney Spears song). Where she stacks up against other big screen incarnations of the character, I can't say. However, despite the odd bump or two, Knightley and Wright's interpretation of the character is a success on its own terms, even if she is rendered less complex that she likely was on page. 

Yet even though Anna's troubled romance with Vronsky is the story's focus, it is the supporting cast who dominate the film. That is, when they're given enough to do, and have scenes that allow them to breathe. MacFadyen is particularly lively, with his portly joviality and walrus mustache accompanying his grandiose swaggering. It is thanks to MacFadyen (and Stoppard's script), that the film generates a surprising amount of laughs. Even though these lighter moments are mostly confined to the film's opening (which has fun sending up the performative nature of upper class rules and rituals), they lend Wright's film a liveliness and an energy that is then carefully slowed down as emotions deepen.

If MacFadyen is the comedic king of the supporting cast, it's Law who reigns on the dramatic end of the spectrum. Kept out of sight early on, the actor - severely de-glammed with a horrible hairdo - brings a sophisticated toughness to Karenin that refrains from making him a simple antagonist. Karenin is stern and abides by his moral code, yet he remains understandable, even though his attitude towards Anna can easily be seen as cruel.

But then there are those who move outside of the grand artifice of the theater. Levin (Domnhall Gleeson), a young man seeking Oblonsky's romantic assistance, rejects high society, and takes the story to a series of naturalistic settings. While the others fret about morals and manners, Levin makes his living out in the wheat fields, free from gossip and constricting social identities. As a result, Levin's relationship with young socialite Kitty (Alicia Vikander) feels, appropriately, more honest and heartfelt, whereas other relationships veer toward heightened melodrama. 

This marks, perhaps, the one key drawback to the film's structure and Mr. Stoppard's screenplay. Wright's Anna Karenina has energy, but it can also feel truncated. As well as much of the film flows along, it occasionally lurches forward with emotional developments, particularly when it comes to Anna and Vronsky's affair. And even though Knightley generally holds up her end of the relationship nicely, Johnson's Vronsky comes with a surprisingly lack of allure. The strange blonde dye job is forgivable. The fact that Johnson and Knightley sometimes seem to pretend that they're interacting with someone other than their scene partner? Less so. As such, neither Anna's fall from grace, nor her ultimate fate register as strongly as they could. Though the film descends from its outrageous stylization as it progresses, it can't quite hop off of the pedestal to become fully human. Wright strives for an epic romantic tragedy, yet he doesn't make it all the way there. Consider it a case of landing among the stars after shooting for the moon.

Where the film does fully succeed, to little surprise, is in its visual and sonic departments. The sets, whether realistic or purposefully stagy, are intricate and often create the effect of looking at a series of beautiful moving tableaus. Jacqueline Durran's costumes, with a wide array of colors, head ornaments, veils, and fur-lined garments, constantly top themselves the further the film goes on. Throw in cinematographer Seamus McGarvey to capture it all, and you have a truly sumptuous experience that sweeps your senses off of their feet, even as it sometimes leaves the heart behind. Usual Wright composer Dario Marianelli is also back after skipping out on Hanna, and provides suitably seductive, lush musical accompaniments that transform the story from classic romantic literature to full blown opera. Whatever your thoughts on Wright as a director, there's no doubt the man knows how to create beautiful (and often compelling) images even as he flirts with indulgence. From an aesthetic standpoint, consider Anna Karenina a two hour ride in a Rolls Royce outfitted by Chanel and Swarovski.

How fans of the book will react to this adaptation is, as previously stated, difficult to say. Some may find Wright's streamlined take enthralling. Others may find it to be a garish watering down of one of Russian literatures greatest works. Yet wherever you stand on the film (even if you haven't read the book), it's hard to not be impressed by the daring approach. Many adaptations are sunk by a slavish faithfulness to the source material. At the very least, Wright and his cohorts deserve a degree of admiration for creating such a wholly cinematic vision of a novel that, in its entire complexity, was probably never truly meant for the big screen.

Grade: B/B+