Guillermo del Toro’s love letter to both V.C. Andrews and Edgar Allen Poe is a beautifully crafted gothic horror that will make you squirm in your seat as your eyeballs dance around the wonderfully appointed screen.
It takes the elements of gothic literature—love transcending death, seductive strangers—and the weirdness we expect from del Toro—haunted houses, ghosts, vats of blood and even incest—to create a whole that is one of the most singular films of the year.
Period-piece It Girl Mia Wasikowska is Edith Cushing, daughter of a Buffalo, New York construction magnate. She’s a writer, penning a story of ghosts and love, when she is swept away by a mysterious stranger. Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and his sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain) are British gentry in America to raise money to perfect and build a machine to mine the rich, crimson red clay that lies under their family estate. Edith is immediately taken with Mr. British Tall Dark and Handsome, leaving her previous suitor Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam) behind.
Soon they are married and off to Sharpe’s family estate, nicknamed Crimson Peak because in the winter the red clay it sits on turns the snow a lurid shade of cerise. The crumbling building holds many secrets in its rotting walls, secrets Edith must unravel if she is to survive.
Bloody and by times bloody terrifying, every frame of “Crimson Peak” drips with del Toro’s Grand-Guignol sensibility. Madness and murder are front and center, coupled with arch performances—Chastain in particular embodies the Hammer Horror style of wild-eye-acting—and the director’s flawless instinct for creating unease in the audience. It’s a transport to another world, a place where the ground seeps red and old houses moan in the wind. With atmosphere to burn it’s an operatic companion piece to “The Devil’s Backbone” and “Pan’s Labyrinth” that plays like a fever dream.
Anyone unfamiliar with the novel or countless retellings of Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” could be forgiven in thinking Sophie’s Barthes’s version is some sort of period film noir. Like the classic noirs it begins at the end with the tragic fate of its protagonist and then ricochets backwards to the start to show how the main character met their fate.
If the film was set in the 1940s instead of the 1870s Emma Bovary (Mia Wasikowska) could have made a convincing femme fatale. Like the best noir characters she is ambitious, philandering and has a taste for the finer things in life.
Married to humble country doctor Charles Bovary (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) she longs for the bright lights of Paris. To elevate her status she engages in a series of illicit affairs with wealthy men—Leon Dupuis (Ezra Miller) and The Marquis (Logan Marshall-Green)—but is ultimately done in by her short-sightedness, spendthrift ways and social climbing. Drowning in debt, she is “standing under an apple tree longing for the scent of orange blossom.”
The problem with this “Madame Bovary” adaptation lies with the main character. She is the architect of her own doom and to my eye a thoroughly unlikeable character. As her life crumbled part of me wanted to scream at the screen, “What did you expect?” She is blinded to the consequences of her actions until it’s too late and then blames everyone around her. “You are all evil, all men,” she rants without taking any personal responsibility for the mess she has made. Wasikowska does a good job of bringing intelligence to Emma, but she never plays her like a grown-up. She’s more a petulant child and not a very interesting one at that.
That Wasikowska is trapped within a naturalistic but stodgy film that doesn’t allow her more than just a cursory take on the character. The tragedy is ladled on thick but the passions that fuelled her aristocratic aspirations are absent, leaving us with a handsomely presented but ultimately empty experience. A bit more noir and a bit less “Masterpiece Theatre” would have served this adaptation well.
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.
“The Double” plays like a movie made by the love child of David Lynch and Terry Gilliam. Based on Fyodor Dostoevsky novella about a man who finds his life being usurped by his doppelgänger, it is a quietly surreal story about the existential misfortune of a man (Jesse Eisenberg) with no sense of himself.
Eisenberg is Simon, an insecure twenty-something trying to make a name for himself, personally and professionally, to no avail. His boss (Wallace Shawn) ignores his ideas and even his mother isn’t a fan. He’s in love with co-worker Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), who lives in an apartment across the street from him, but like everyone else Hannah looks right through Simon.
“I have all these things that I want to say to her,” he says, “like how I can tell she’s a lonely person, even if other people can’t. Cause I know what it feels like to be lost and lonely and invisible.”
Everything changes when James (Eisenberg again) is hired at work. Physically he’s Simon’s doppelgänger, an exact match, but personality-wise he a polar opposite. Confident and charismatic, he excels at work and worst of all, Hannah wants to date him.
In front of the camera “The Double” writer-director Richard Ayoade is best known for playing computer nerd Maurice Moss on the much-loved British sitcom “The IT Crowd.” Behind the camera his work takes a much more darkly comedic approach. His first film, “Submarine,” was an edgy coming-of-age story that earned him a BAFTA nomination for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer.
“The Double” strays into even stranger territory. Imagine “The Nutty Professor’s” Professor Julius Kelp / Buddy Love filtered through Dostoevsky’s “mystery of spiritual existence.” Ayoade creates a personal dystopia, inhabited by Simon, Hannah and James; a stylized study of paranoia with a few laughs thrown in. It’s an unabashedly weird movie that lets its freak flag fly.
This is Eisenberg’s film. He and Michael Cera (who tread on similar dual character territory in 2009’s “Youth in Revolt”) have made careers playing up the socially awkward nature of their characters, so half of “The Social Network” actor’s performance is no surprise. His work as Simon is something we’ve seen before from him, but his take on James is fresh, accomplished with shifts in body language. He effectively plays two characters in one movie.
In the end “The Double” stands as a unique movie, rich in Orwellian details and with good performances, but marred by a difficult, confusing story that may alienate less adventurous viewers.
The Spider-Man movies don’t skimp on the stuff that puts the “super” into superhero movies. There’s web-slinging shenanigans and wild bad guys galore, but The Amazing Spider-Man 2 director Marc Webb calls the relationship between Spidey and girlfriend Gwen Stacy, “the engine of the movie.”
The chemistry the real-life couple brings to the screen is undeniable, but it almost didn’t get a chance to blossom. Before Emma Stone landed the role of the brainiac love interest, Mia Wasikowska, Imogen Poots, Emma Roberts and even Lindsay Lohan were considered.
Stone won some of the best reviews of her career playing Gwen in The Amazing Spider-Man — Peter Travers said she, “just jumps to life on screen” — in a role that gave her the biggest hit of her career to date.
Smaller roles in Superbad and Zombieland hinted at her ability to be funny and hold the screen, but in 2010’s Easy A she turned a corner into full-on Lucille Ball mode, mixing pratfalls with wit while pulling faces and cracking jokes. Smart and funny, she’s the film’s centrepiece.
The movie begins with the voice over, “The rumours of my promiscuity have been greatly exaggerated.” It’s the voice of Olive (Stone), a clean-cut high school senior who tells a little white lie about losing her virginity. As soon as the gossip mill gets a hold of the info, however, her life takes a parallel course to the heroine of the book she is studying in English class — The Scarlet Letter.
Stone is laugh-out-loud funny in Easy A, but her breakout film was a serious drama.
In The Help, she plays Jackson, Miss. native “Skeeter” Phelan who comes home from four years at school to discover the woman who raised her, a maid named Constantine (Cicely Tyson), is no longer employed by her family. Her mother says she quit, but Skeeter has doubts. With the help of a courageous group of housekeepers she tells the real story of the life of the maids, writing a book called The Help.
The Flick Filosopher called her performance, “on fire with indignation and rage,” and she moved from The Help to a variety of roles, including playing a femme fatale in Gangster Squad opposite Ryan Gosling and Josh Brolin, and lending her trademark raspy voice to cave girl Eep in the animated hit The Croods.
The 25-year-old actress is living her childhood dream of being an actress but says if performing hadn’t worked out, she would have been a journalist, “because (investigating people’s lives is) pretty much what an actor does.
“And imagine getting to interview people like me,” she laughs. ‘’It can’t get much better than that.”
You could be forgiven if you have a feeling of déjà vu at the movies this weekend. According to IMDB there are at least 22 versions of the Charlotte Brontë novel “Jane Eyre,” the first dating back to 1910, the most recent opening this today.
“Alice in Wonderland’s” Mia Wasikowska makes the title role her own in director Cary Fukunaga’s elegant retelling of Jane Eyre’s search for happiness and love. After a bleak, loveless childhood Eyre finds employment as a governess at Thornfield Hall, working for the brooding Mr. Rochester (Michael Fassbender). The pair forms a romantic bond but this is a gothic story, so of course Jane’s happiness is waylaid by her fiancée’s terrible secret.
Fukunaga, whose last film was the violent Spanish language “Sin Nombre,” has created the most gothic version of “Jane Eyre” to date. Things go bump in the night, mysterious shadows lurk in flickering candle light and mortal danger seems constantly close at hand. It’s a gorgeous vision, ripe with the repression and melancholy so crucial to the story. It is spare in a way that Victorian period pieces rarely are, yet sumptuous with atmosphere to burn.
The movie looks fantastic but that wouldn’t mean much if the characters weren’t as well defined as they are in the hands of Wasikowska and Fassbender. As plain Jane Wasikowska brings a quiet intensity and resolve to the role while Fassbender gives Rochester a brooding bravado which belies his troubled mind. Together, sparks fly and the passion of the story bubbles to the surface despite the reserved nature of the storytelling.
Add to that terrific supporting work from Judi Dench as the devoted housekeeper Mrs. Fairfax and a nice turn by Amelia Clarkson as young Jane and you have a worthy addition to the “Jane Eyre” canon.
The people at the center of “The Kids Are All Right” are Nic (Annette Benning) and Jules (Julianne Moore), a long time lesbian couple raising their two kids, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson) in the suburbs of LA. The Moms are opposites—Nic is a perfectionist doctor, Jules a free spirit still searching for her way—but the family is happy. Happy, that is until Joni contacts her biological father via the sperm bank. Turns out donor dad is Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a SoCal restaurateur who had no idea his sperm bank contributions resulted in one child, let alone her brother Laser as well. Despite Jules and Nic’s trepidation the kids form a relationship with Paul, but his presence brings with it some unwanted consequences.
There is a scene near the end of “The Kids Are All Right” that sums up the feel of the whole film. At a dinner party Nic and Paul sing a Joni Mitchell song. The “performance” is joyful, ridiculous and poignant simultaneously and is a perfect microcosm of the script. Like real life, the ups and downs of this particular group of folks are unpredictable, sometimes funny, sometimes not. This well drawn cast of characters keeps the basic story afloat, adding richness and color to a story that could have been an average romantic comedy.
Bening and Moore are warm but complicated presences. The audience never doubts for a second that they’ve been a couple for twenty years, and their intimate moments, their testy moments, their funny moments and their heartbreaking moments are believable and dynamic because of the skill of these two actors.
As Joni Mia Wasikowska, such a flatline as Alice in “Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland,” shines here as the brainiac who is just coming into her own.
Also impressive is Mark Ruffalo as Paul, the interloping sperm donor. He’s a lonely guy in search of a family, and despite the trouble he causes—both wittingly and unwittingly—Ruffalo makes him charming and believable.
There’s that word again. Believable. Believability is the main strength of this film. The characters have a lived-in, realistic feel so even when the story falters the people in it don’t.
It’s a story that is both very specific and rather universal, all at the same time. Nic and Jules may have an nontraditional marriage but their story of parenting issues, mid-life crisis and long term commitment is as traditional—and crowd pleasing—as we’ve seen in a movie this year.
The new thriller “Stoker” has nothing to do with Bram Stoker or his most famous creation, Dracula, but something tells me Stoker himself might have enjoyed the strange sense of dread incubating deep within the story.
The first English language film from Korean master Chan-Wook Park, “Stoker” revolves around the Stoker family, or, more correctly, the remaining members of the clan. Father Richard (Dermot Mulroney) was tragically killed in a car accident on his daughter India’s (Mia Wasikowska) eighteenth birthday. Mom Evie (Nicole Kidman) is upset, but eager to move on once handsome Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) shows up after a long absence.
In fact, creepy Charlie is just a little too mysterious—he’s been away for too long—to be a benign figure in India or Evie’s life.
“Stoker” is a sexual-psychological drama with overtones of incest, mental illness and infidelity. In other words it’s the kind of film that could keep psychoanalysts busy for years. Question is, will it keep audiences entertained for two hours?
It’ll be up to each and every viewer to decide whether the film’s unusual feel will be for them. Here’s what you need to know: India is an artistic girl who passes the time reading science books and staring off into space. She doesn’t like to be touched and, since the death of her father, seems to have disconnected from everyone around her. She’s so sullen she makes Bella Swan seem lighthearted by comparison.
The movie strives to emulate India’s sense of withdrawal by creating a sense of disquiet in the viewer, akin to India’s unease. Long silences punctuate sentences, as the ethereally pale protagonist slowly seems to be losing her mind. Or is she? The line between reality and fantasy is deliberately blurred as India is forced to grow up rather quickly.
The stuff of mystery is very much in evidence. Charlie’s past is shrouded in secret, there’s odd letters found in an old desk, skeletons in the cupboard and mysterious glances galore, but this isn’t Agatha Christie. It’s a slow burn leading up to an unconventional climax.
It’s beautiful to look at—one transition from scene to scene sees Kidman’s flame hair turn into swamp reeds—but the deliberate aloofness of the characters and the story may be off putting for many.
The classic “Jack and the Beanstock” is given an epic twist by director Bryan “X-Men” Singer. Synopsis: The action in this epic retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk begins when the king’s advisor Roderick (Stanley Tucci) hatches a plot to steal an enchanted crown and the six magic beans that hold to key to opening a gateway between earth and Gantua, the land of the giants. Enter poor farmer Jack (Nicholas Hoult) who becomes involved when he unwittingly sows a seed that sprouts a giant beanstalk, literally shooting the princess Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson) skyward into the humungous hands of the giants. Determined to rescue her Jack battles the goliaths, wins the respect of the king and the love of a princess.
