Hollywood loves pointing the camera on itself but not since The Player has the selfie provided such a wonderfully sadistic portrait of Tinsel Town. At the centre of David Cronenberg’s film is a Hollywood family — played by John Cusack, Olivia Williams and Evan Bird. Orbiting them are a former big name actress (Julianne Moore) and a burn victim (Mia Wasikowska), whose presence threatens to expose closely guarded secrets. The terrific performances and decidedly un-Hollywood feel of this, the most Hollywood of Cronenberg’s films, make Maps a compelling psychological thriller.
Hollywood — self-obsessed child that it is — enjoys turning the camera on itself, but with Maps to the Stars, director David Cronenberg uses the city as a palette to paint a picture of the stupid, venal and stratospherically self-involved behaviour that goes on behind the scenes in Beverly Hills’s gated communities and back lots.
At the centre of the film are the Weisses, a Hollywood family (John Cusack, Olivia Williams and Evan Bird) with more secrets than TMZ’s too-hot-to-handle file, Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), a former big name actress who is now as messed up as she is washed up and Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), a burn victim with schizophrenia whose presence threatens to expose closely guarded secrets.
This may be the most sun-dappled film Cronenberg has ever made, but don’t let the light fool you; it’s also one of his darkest. I say one of his darkest because the 71-year-old director has frequently visited what Victor Hugo called “night within us,” provoking Village Voice to call him, “the most audacious and challenging narrative director in the English-speaking world.”
Spider, a trip into the mind of a severely mentally disturbed man starring Ralph Fiennes, is a case in point. Called “Cronenberg’s most depressingly bleak film,” by critic Ken Hanke, the 2002 film sees Fiennes deliver a virtually dialogue-free performance as the title character. But it is Miranda Richardson as several characters — all the women in Spider’s life — who really steals the show. It’s a spooky, cerebral thriller.
The Brood is probably Cronenberg’s most traditional horror film. Featuring murderous psychoplasmic kids, experimental psychotherapist Oliver Reed and Samantha Eggar as a fetus-licking mother, it is the very stuff that nightmares are made of. It’s lesser seen than The Fly or Dead Zone and way more down-and-dirty, but for sheer scares it’s hard to beat.
A Dangerous Mind, the tautly told story of two psychoanalysts you’ve heard of, Dr. Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), plus one you’ve probably never heard of, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), sees Cronenberg combine a love story and birth of modern analysis.
The almost total lack of physical action means the focus is on the words. Some will see a film rich with dialogue, others will see it as verbose. But that’s the kind of duality the movie explores.
Finally, in Cosmopolis, Cronenberg takes us along for an existential road trip through the breakdown of modern society. Based on a novel by Don DeLillo and starring Robert Pattinson as a controlling and self-destructive billionaire money manager, the movie covers the gamut of human experience, from haircuts, money and infidelity to asymmetrical prostates and mortality.
David Cronenberg has spent his entire career working on the fringes of Hollywood. An auteur with a singular vision, his big hits and art house flicks all live outside the The Entertainment Capital of the World. With the release of “Maps to the Stars,” the first film he ever shot in Los Angeles, he almost ensures he’ll never do business in that town again.
Hollywood enjoys turning the camera on itself, but not since Robert Altman’s “The Player” has the selfie provided such a wonderfully sadistic portrait of Tinsel Town and its citizens. Cronenberg takes a bite out of Hollywood and finds a cookie full of arsenic.
At the center of Bruce Wagner’s script are the Weiss’s, a Hollywood family with more secrets than TMZ’s too-hot-to-handle file. Father Stafford (John Cusack) is a self-help guru who uses new age jargon— “If we name it, we can tame it.”— and massage to heal his wealthy clients. One of his regulars is Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), a former big name actress who is now as messed up as she is washed up. Stafford’s wife Cristina (Olivia Williams) is the momager of Benjie (Evan Bird) a teen superstar fresh out of rehab. Into this toxic mix comes Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), a burn victim with schizophrenia whose presence threatens to expose closely guarded secrets.
This may be the most sun-dappled film Cronenberg has ever made, but don’t let the light fool you, it’s also one of his darkest. The glee Havana feels when she wins a coveted role in a movie because the original actress’s son has died is a nastier indictment of Hollywood than anything in “Sunset Boulevard.” Ditto Benjie’s disappointment when he learns that the young girl he visits in the hospital has non-Hodgkin lymphoma. “I mean non-Hodgkin’s, what’s that?” he says. “Either you are or you aren’t.”
Cronenberg uses the notion of Hollywood mythology as a palette to paint a picture of the stupid, venal and stratospherically self-involved behavior that goes on behind the scenes in Beverly Hills’s gated communities.
Moore presents Havana as a bundle of exposed ego and neurosis. Cusack is a career-minded Zen master, a cruel man whose world is starting to unwind while his son Benjie is a foul-mouthed child with a squeaky clean image. Rona Barrett would have had a heyday with this bunch.
Wasikowska is the outsider, the fly in the ointment that connects and tears apart each of the characters. She’s a strange, ghostly character, almost as ghostly as the poltergeists that haunt Benjie and Havana. In a world where flickering images are often more potent than the people who make them, the appearance of specters isn’t otherworldly, it’s an expected offshoot for a world that believes in the make-believe.
“Maps to the Stars” will divide people. Some will find its sadomasochistic glee in the travails of its characters unsettling; others will revel in the terrific performances and the decidedly un-Hollywood feel of this, the most Hollywood of Cronenberg’s films.
Exclusive Q&A with David Cronenberg following opening night
Halloween screening of MAPS TO THE STARS
Q&A to follow 7:10 p.m. screening at Varsity Cinemas, to be moderated by Richard Crouse
Opening Night Screening
Friday, October 31
7:10 p.m.
Varsity Cinemas (55 Bloor St. W.)
This is a public event. Tickets available via Cineplex.com.
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Maps to the Stars
Directed by David Cronenberg
Starring Julianne Moore, John Cusack, Mia Wasikowska, Robert Pattinson, Olivia Williams
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With this tale of a secret-filled Hollywood family on the verge of implosion, award-winning director David Cronenberg forges both a wicked social satire and a very human ghost story from our celebrity-obsessed culture. From a screenplay by acclaimed author, screenwriter and West Coast chronicler Bruce Wagner, and featuring an ensemble cast that includes Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, John Cusack, Robert Pattinson, Olivia Williams and Sarah Gadon, MAPS TO THE STARS tours the seductive allure and the tender, darkly comic underbelly of contemporary success.
In the new David Cronenberg film Maps to the Stars, Julianne Moore plays actress Havana Segrand.
A child of Hollywood, she’s the daughter of a movie star who became a star herself but is now, as Moore says, “monstrous and childlike.”
Havana is a bundle of exposed ego and neurosis, a Hollywood stereotype, but Moore promises she’s not based on anyone in particular.
“I swear to you she sprung to life from the page,” she says.
“That was what was great about it. (Screenwriter) Bruce Wagner’s language is so precise, so spectacular, so emotional; it was almost like poetry.
“There was a rhythm to it. I could hear her voice in the rhythm of the speech and how things were supposed to be delivered.
“The key to Havana for me was her arrested development. She’s stuck at the age her mother died. She’s so childlike.
“Everything is all about her mother and not being parented. All this childish, even sexpot behaviour — the ‘Look at me!’ — is all about not being parented. That’s all she wants.”
The film is a wonderfully sadistic portrait of Tinsel Town and its citizens, portraying the wild side of Los Angeles where venal and stratospherically self-involved behaviour plays itself out on the public stage. It’s a dark picture of life in Hollywood, but longtime New York City resident Moore says the conduct isn’t exclusive to the movie biz.
“I‘m sure there can be a certain kind of permissiveness in any business,” she says, “on Wall Street and Silicon Valley and in certain socialite circles.
“People try and pin it on Hollywood as the only place it happens, and of course, it’s not.
“I only lived in L.A. for a while in the ’90s. There was a different quality to socializing than I had ever seen before. I’m pretty bourgeois. I’m not a partier. I don’t really go out, but when I moved to L.A. there was a degree of socialization. I was like, ‘Whoa, there’s a lot of parties out here.’
“I was also single and out in a way I hadn’t been before. Very soon after that I met my husband, we had children and I went right back into my hole.”
She does, however, go out from time to time.
“I have a school event later tonight,” she laughs as we end the interview.
“This is the weirdest hotel ever,” says Robert Pattinson. He’s at TIFF to promote his latest collaboration with David Cronenberg, the Hollywood satire Maps to the Stars, and he doesn’t much like the suite we’ve been given to do the interview. “I just keep picturing if I was actually staying in a room here… there’s such bad terrible vibes in every room.”
A self-described spiritual person, the former Twilight heartthrob picks up on vibes in hotel rooms and in film scripts.
“There is something so jarring and weird about it. I can’t really tell what it is.”
He’s not talking about the room anymore, he’s on to Maps to the Stars. It’s a Hollywood satire, a jaundiced look at child stardom, the thirst for fame and hard-to-keep secrets, but Pattinson says it was something else that grabbed his attention.
“I don’t think I really thought of the Hollywood aspect of it,” he says. “I liked the mystic aspects of it. David is always talking about being this militant atheist but every single movie he does is so spiritual. He says, ‘It’s not that at all,’ but yes it is!’
“Maybe I’m just reading into it because I’m a very spiritual person but the last scene is this weirdly transcendent thing. There’s an altar and a burnt house. It’s like family as religion. And also the way the family reacts to one another, there are these weird blood honor oaths, like all the priests hiding stuff in the Catholic Church. Hiding these disgusting secrets they think are going to destroy them.”
The movie uses the notion of Hollywood mythology as a palette to paint a picture of the stupid, venal and stratospherically self-involved behavior that goes on behind the scenes in Beverly Hills’ gated communities and nightclubs.
The movie, says Pattinson, reflects “what it used to be. It’s changed quite a lot in LA. When I first started going to LA everyone was underage and if you were a famous actor the rules did not apply. You could be a sixteen-year-old and go into a club but now that there are camera phones everywhere that doesn’t exist anymore. That period was so weird. You’d see a fourteen-year-old actor wasted, doing lines of blow on the table. It was crazy. Now they just do it at their parent’s house.”
This is the second film Pattison has made with Cronenberg. The young actor says the seventy-one-year-old director is “fun to be around,” and also shares a love of pushing the envelope.
“I like to do things that feel a little bit dangerous and there’s not many people who do that. I don’t really relate to that many normal things. I like things that are sort of surreal. I find them easier to play. I don’t gravitate toward kitchen sink dramas. I don’t feel like that. I like things that are slightly off the wall.”
Metro’s Reel Guys columnists Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin take a look at this year’s crop of potential crowd pleasers at the festival.
Richard: Mark, every year I look forward to covering the festival with a mix of dread and anticipation. The dread part comes from knowing how I’m going to feel once the 10 days of 18-hour shifts is finally over. The drooling anticipation part comes along with the slate of films TIFF offers up. This year the new David Cronenberg film is top of my list. In Maps to the Stars, he showcases the stupid, venal and stratospherically self-involved behaviour that goes on behind the scenes in Beverly Hills’ gated communities. The idea of debuting a jaundiced look at Hollywood at the biggest film festival in North America appeals to my rebellious side.
Mark: Can’t wait, Richard, for this or any other Cronenberg! I’m also a big fan of Jason Reitman, who consistently delivers movies that plumb the abyss of the zeitgeist. His latest, Men, Women, and Children, should be no exception. Based on one of my favourite novels by Chad Kultgen, it’s a look at how the Internet is warping families, twisting our sexuality and mediating our desires. Oh, and it’s a comedy.
RC: Mark, the sci-fi musical genre has been sadly overlooked at TIFF in past years. That changes with Bang Bang Baby, starring Jane Levy as a 1960s teenager whose dreams of rock ’n’ roll stardom are dashed when a chemical leak in her town causes mass mutations and “threatens to turn her dream into a nightmare.” Then there’s The Editor, a giallo-comedy tribute to the films of Mario Bava and Dario Argento about a one-handed film editor who becomes the prime suspect in a brutal series of murders.
MB: Sounds great, Richard! I’ll stand in line to see the new Denys Arcand film, An Eye For Beauty. Here’s a director not afraid to take a satirical look at our modern mores, but he’s never tackled a love story before. Some of it takes place in Toronto, so I’m expecting a sly gimlet-eyed view from this great Québécois director.
RC: Speaking of great Québécois directors, Jean-Marc Vallée, the Canadian Oscar nominee for Dallas Buyers Club, returns to TIFF with Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon in the story of a woman who finds an escape from her self-destructive ways on a 1,100-mile solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail. I’m also psyched about Haemoo. With a script by Snowpiercer penner Bong Joon-ho, this movie about a fishing crew smuggling illegal immigrants from China to Korea promises wild action and unexpected thrills.
MB: Richard, do you realize all our picks inadvertently turned out to be Canadian directors? I’m looking forward to Black and White by Mike Binder. It promises to be a heartfelt drama about an interracial family with issues. Binder is from Detroit but went to summer camp in Muskoka, so he qualifies as an honorary Canuck.
Susan Smythe-Bishop is not only one of the country’s most talented film publicists, but she is also a mean cake designer and baker and a gifted artist. On her website www.theaccidentalvicepresident.com she showcases her story and her art. Most recently she kindly included Richard on her Wall of Fame, a collection of drawings of “the kind and hard working artists” she has worked with over the years. Other entries include Michael Caine, Bryan Cranston, Jackie Chan, David Cronenberg and Sir Anthony Hopkins. Have a look now before she changes her mind and replaces Richard with David Hasselhoff!
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
