MAPS TO THE STARS

Cronenberg counts among the sparse filmmakers whose movies I will see no matter the content: a bland history of lichen, a biopic about Anton Khrushchev, a psychological drama about twin gynecologists who work on mutant vaginas, whatever.   Yet even my deference is tempered—in fact, since and including his “breakthrough” Hollywood drama A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE I haven’t blindly endorsed his films.  In particular I hated A MOST DANGEROUS METHOD, a psychoanalytic film I am very much the target customer for, because of its chilly mood and cardboard melodrama.  On the other hand, I loved his last movie, COSMOPOLIS, a densely academic takedown of capitalism, starring of all people (best casting ever) a limo-riding Robert Pattison, which was a movie it seemed no one else liked.  So call me an avid fan, not a rabid one.

Anyway here we are again – back in L.A.—with its hot yellow days and long shadows, its potted palms and sitting rooms, its traffic and noise and curbside limousines.  Certainly Cronenberg’s MULHOLLAND DRIVE, there’s something a bit down the canyon about this: call it RODEO DRIVE if you want.  And though it doesn’t quite indulge in that film’s abstraction, there is a certain Lynchian nightmarishness to what’s going on here. 

And it starts with the cast.  Julianne Moore is heroically ugly, faded in every sense, absolutely egoless as the not-quite-as-pretty, not-nearly-as-young daughter of a dead and very soon to be forgotten actress.  A talented newby plays Benjie, a Justin Bieber cypher, rich-before-his-time, Twitter-polluted and horrible.  John Cusack is his psychologist-cum-masseuse father, whose unspecified and catharsis-forward therapeutic-method is a  jokey critique of the me-too feelgoodiness that engine California Health and Wellness—the sun-soaked sibling of Corporate-America’s Beauty sector.  Pattison is back, as the limo driver this time, yet another actor also-ran with little to eat than what other’s put on his plate.  He drives around Agatha, a mysterious and fire-scarred girl with secret ambitions and histories herself.  It’s a large but strangely (?) incestuous cast, with lots of cross-relationships, scenes-together, converging fates.  

The theme of relevance (specifically Julianne Moore’s perseverance on her own) is entwined with themes of reverence (should we blame or lionize our parents?) and reference (is it MULHOLLAND DRIVE or DAY OF THE LOCUSTS or even outside-LA films like THE SHINING that are being invoked?).  Characters implode in a fairly by-the-numbers, Hollywood-stupid way. As flaccid revelations are made, drugs are taken, ugliness continues to fester, we soon realize that this Map doesn’t lead anywhere terribly new.

Yet there’s a ghost here that continues to call into the night; long after the credits roll, long after you leave the theatre.  The film is so chilly it’s freezer-burnt, impossible to warm to, carefully crafted to be droll and inhuman.  Yet there is that ghost.  That ghost that calls out somewhere in the Hollywood Hills, that reminds you they once were living, that they once were Hollywood.  Though MAPS TO THE STARS is hardly a great film, if there’s anything perversely beautiful here, it’s that familiar desperation to in some way matter. It’s something Hollywood certainly bloats,  but it is—despite our specious Jungian insights—not unique to the “stars” at all.