Maps to the Stars **** (2014, Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, Robert Pattinson) – Movie Review

The 71-year-old director David Cronenberg’s run of success continues with this typically dark and twisted satire and thriller, lifting off the lid of Hollywood. One of its stars, John Cusack, says that Hollywood is a whorehouse and people go mad. This movie shows exactly why. It a memorable movie. 

It centres on the Weiss family with father Stafford (John Cusack) an analyst and coach who has made a fortune with his self-help manuals and mother Cristina (Olivia Williams) who looks after the career of their toxic 13-year-old child star son Benjie (Evan Bird). Benjie has a hit TV show but has just come off the rehab programme he joined at the age of nine. He likes abusing people, drugs swearing and guns.

But the film’s main star is Julianne Moore, who plays Havana, one of Stafford’s clients who is an ageing actress obsessed with shooting a remake of the movie that turned her late mother, Clarice, into a star in the 60s. Visions of her mom still haunt Havana, who is desperate for that film role, a desperation that is going to make being passed over difficult to bear, just as difficult as her fading looks and fading stardom.

The other main star is Mia Wasikowska, who plays Benjie ‘s sister Agatha. She has recently been released from a sanatorium where she was treated for criminal pyromania and starts a job as gofer for Havana, meanwhile befriending  limo driver and aspiring actor Jerome (Robert Pattinson). An almost unrecognisable Carrie Fisher plays Carrie Fisher, supposedly a friend of Havana’s, who recommends Agatha to her as her little helper.

This neat plot of interlocking characters is well thought out and satisfying, and provides the springboard for Cronenberg’s searing critique of Hollywood, in his first American movie. It’s a very weird and unpleasant film, as you’d expect from this film-maker, and, though it doesn’t have anything new to say about Tinsletown, it manages to say it in a fresh and original, and searing way. Bruce Wagner writes the commendable screenplay – his previous credits as writer are way back with A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors in 1987 and Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills in 1989.

The characters are all in crazy, delusional meltdown. They’d all fit in nicely in Sunset Boulevard, as pals of Gloria Swanson. The film’s entertaining and gripping, in its dark and offbeat way, and though far from likeable, is involving and of excellent quality, with strong dialogue and provocative ideas oozing out of every pore. Moore is very, very good indeed, in a brave, fearless performance. Wasikowska is quietly chilling, Pattinson is low-key effective, with another good American accent and Bird is an eye-opener as an appalling little monster.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

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