“Please. No film noir questions.” Maps To The Stars (2014) fits into the sub-genre of Hollywood noir or neo-noir rather, a descendant of Sunset Boulevard’s scathing look at the film industry, wrapped up in murder, gothic imagery, grotesqueries, and sardonic comedy. David Cronenberg’s film, the first he shot in Los Angeles, and working with a script by Bruce Wagner, has been compared as well to Mulholland Drive; there’s definitely the black leather vibes of Lynch’s Lost Highway and it feels like an adaptation of a Brett Easton Ellis book that was never written. It stings with predominately unlikeable characters who are completely toxic, and the movie’s happy to rub your nose in the abuse, degradation and vanity. I was into the movie with Julianne Moore’s second scene where she talks with her agent; it’s the breathless anxiety of Moore’s pharmacy store scene from Magnolia mutated with an impression of Lindsay Lohan or something. Moore’s character, Havana Segrand, is an an actor who presents themselves as chilled out and likeable, but is vibrating with intense desperation over where she is in her career, already feeling over-the-hill at forty thanks to the industry’s sexism; she is also desperate to star in a remake of a classic film that her own actress mother (Sarah Gadon) starred in, to play the same role, even as she is haunted by the ghost of her mother who died young in a fire. Mia Wasikowska is Agatha, a burn victim returning to LA who seems innocent and friendly, her long black gloves recalling Audition. Robert Pattinson is Jerome the limo driver who is also a wannabe actor-writer. John Cusack is a motivational speaker and guru named Stafford Weiss, married to Cristina (Olivia Williams), the manager to their son, a child actor named Benjie Wiess (played by Evan Bird) who is an unrelentingly acidic nightmare of a person. The cast is great, particularly Moore and Wasikowska; though I would have loved to see Robert Downey Jnr in the Cusack role. Ghostly visitors, glass houses, swimming pools, dated CGI fire and the Hollywood sign visible from an empty lot. Even Carrie Fisher playing herself. While Mulholland Drive might have more style and sensuality to its eventual apocalypse, Maps To The Stars is blunt, nasty and unpleasant, yet still satisfying and entertaining as an evisceration of Hollywood desperation and power. Great ambient score by Cronenberg’s collaborator Howard Shore. Available to stream on SBS On Demand. Recommended, if you like toxic sludge.
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