Seberg ** (2019, Kristen Stewart, Jack O’Connell, Anthony Mackie, Colm Meaney, Yvan Attal, Margaret Qualley, Gabriel Sky) – Movie Review

Director Benedict Andrews’s biopic Seberg (2019) is in the quite interesting category, supported with a good performance by Kristen Stewart as Sixties American star Jean Seberg, who leaves her home, husband and child (Gabriel Sky) in Paris to work in Los Angeles, where she becomes romantically involved with married civil rights activist Hakim Jamal (Anthony Mackie) in the late 1960s, supporting bis cause financially and in the media. Understandably, his does not impress the FBI, Seberg’s husband or Jamal’s wife.

There are perhaps two main downsides to the movie. The film has a cramped TV movie feel and is often quite chilly instead of passionate and raging with the required indignation against injustice, while Seberg comes across rather tiresomely and unsympathetically as a well meaning, naive simpleton, who gets herself stupidly and willfully into a whole world of serious trouble as an FBI target, in an almost self-destructive kind of way. Why didn’t she listen to the wise counsel of her agent or her husband? On the other hand, Stewart goes full out to make the actress and her actions and beliefs as sympathetic as possible.

The rest of the acting is only moderate. Jack O’Connell wanders through the film rather wanly as the film’s hero, obsessed young FBI agent Jack Solomon, and Yvan Attal makes little impression as Seberg’s Russian-born, Paris-based husband Romain Gary (in an admittedly weakly written role). Unusually, Anthony Mackie, Colm Meaney (as FBI boss Frank Ellroy) and Vince Vaughn (as FBI bug expert Carl Kowalski) are not particularly good, leaving holes in the film. Margaret Qualley and Zazie Beetz don’t have a good time as the wives, Linette Solomon and Dorothy Jamal.

Then again, it is a depressing story, leaving little after-taste, except a bitter feeling of tragic waste. Both Seberg and Gary committed suicide. Seberg committed suicide in the back seat of a car in Paris on 30 August 1979, aged 40 . Her body wasn’t found until 11 days later. Gary shot himself in Paris on 2 December 1980.

The core problems are all in the screenplay by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, inspired by real events in Seberg’s life. Presumably, the FBI character is fictional, hence some of its credibility issues. But Shrapnel and Waterhouse are having trouble explaining themselves and telling their story. They assume too much knowledge of their viewers. Seberg who? Who is Preminger? What is the musical Western? Can we trust the screenplay for information? Did Seberg get badly burned making her first film Saint Joan (1957)? And if Preminger was such a monster, why did she film Bonjour Tristesse with him immediately after?

Benedict Andrews directed Jack O’Connell and Colm Meaney on stage at the British National Theatre in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

 © Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

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