Julianne Moore ready for her close-up, but Cronenberg’s Hollywood evisceration doesn’t measure up

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This article was published 31/10/2014 (4351 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For my money, the best shot of all movies set in Los Angeles is Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. The 1973 film captured the sand-scrubbed gleam of the gated communities, the shadowless glare of the all-night supermarkets and the grunge of the Hollywood holding cell, all seen by Vilmos Zsigmond’s restless, floating camera as it moved in and out of points of visual interest like a stoned ghost.

It’s so L.A.

Ghosts float through David Cronenberg’s new film Maps to the Stars, but the camera doesn’t follow their lead.

Cronenberg and screenwriter Bruce Wagner present a galaxy of Hollywood types, including a neurotic fading star, an arrogant-beyond-his-years child star, a sleazy psychologist and all their miscellaneous enablers. But Cronenberg and cinematographer Peter Suschitzky’s cameras do not float. Befitting the Canadian director’s status as a Hollywood outsider, the camera doesn’t seem to move much at all, as if these characters were the subject of a scientific study of exotic, deadly life forms.

The approach casts a chill over the weird proceedings, which centre on a mysterious young woman named Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), who arrives in L.A. from Jupiter (the town in Florida, not the planet). Sporting visible burn marks on her hands and neck, Agatha lands the job of personal assistant (a.k.a. “chore whore”) to Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), a successful actress who is growing increasingly panicked by the fading interest of producers and public.

To stay visible, Havana has gone public with a cringingly self-serving story about how she was sexually molested by her own mother (Sarah Gadon), a long-dead superstar whose signature role Havana seeks to play in a remake.

That plan raises all kinds of psychic turbulence, manifest when the ghost of Havana’s mother shows up during a tawdry threesome. Answering Havana’s call is Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), a quack psychologist whose treatment of Havana looks to be a combination of straight psychotherapy and a rough Rolf-style massage, as if he is physically wringing epiphany from her body.

The doc’s seemingly happy home front is more compromised than Havana’s career. His son Benjie (Evan Bird), a beloved child star (his would-be film franchise is called Bad Babysitter) is only 13 and already at risk from drug abuse and obnoxious behaviour. It’s the job of his icy mom (Olivia Williams) to continue to negotiate top dollar for her errant offspring. Family members are also coping with their own past trauma involving a house fire set by Benjie’s now-absent sister.

Meanwhile, things appear to be going Havana’s way when her competitor for the role suffers a horrible loss, a development that pushes Havana into dangerous levels of arrogance pertaining to Agatha and the slightly dim limo driver (Robert Pattinson), with whom she has bonded.

It must be said Moore’s work here is extraordinary. With no visible signs of either fear or restraint, she has created the most indelibly monstrous Hollywood grande dame seen since Gloria Swanson descended the stairs in Sunset Boulevard.

Cronenberg gets a great performance out of her, but he doesn’t really put her in a movie worthy of that performance. Cronenberg’s visual style is scaled-back and minimalist when the material absolutely demands something as visually exotic as the content. When a shocking relationship is revealed near the movie’s end, we might have been acclimated to it by a stylist given to an appropriate level of visual flourish. But Cronenberg applies a spartan style to a baroque premise, and the plot twist just sits there, unbelievable and gratuitous.

Maps to the Stars is entertaining anyway, worth seeing for Moore’s star turn and its sterile but merciless dissection of the movie business.

One dreams what Altman would have done with it.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca