Maps to the Stars

Overview

Despite its nickname as "the city of angels", Los Angeles is hardly angelic. It's an idea that comes up time and time again throughout movies, television, music and literature — the seedy underbelly of a city that hails itself as the gateway to fame and riches, to dreams come true.

So while David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars isn't the first, and most definitely not the last, to mine this terrain for metaphoric scraps, it is quite surely one of the weakest. And though a film by Canada's master of body horror, one of the tamest.

Agatha Weiss (Mia Wasikowska) arrives in Hollywood and quickly gets into the backseat of a car chauffeured by wannabe screenwriter Jerome (Robert Pattinson). She gets a job as an assistant to a narcissistic, over-the-hill actress named Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore) while tracking down the child star Benjie (Evan Bird) and his father, Stafford (John Cusack). Their inter-connected lives become melodramatic fodder for Cronenberg as he navigates the incestuous nature of the American film industry and peels back the sunny exterior of its destructive nepotism and skewed standards.

Like I said, this is hardly new terrain for any filmmaker, but for Cronenberg it feels like a drastic step backwards, even from the doldrums of Cosmopolis. One of the ugliest films of the year, Maps to the Stars finds no visual storytelling methods at all, which is especially disappointing given the director's trademark audaciously sexualised grotesquery would have been a perfect fit for Bruce Wagner's screenplay. Wasikowska, perfectly fine in the role, is even dolled up to look like Holly Hunter in Cronenberg's Crash, only worsening the comparison between this and his earlier work.

It's up to Moore to save the film, and indeed she does some of the best work of her career as the ridiculously named Havana, who is attempting to star in a remake of her own mother's defining role. She is able to fill the character to the brim with all of the Hollywood insecurities to inevitably come with being an actress of any age, let alone one pushing 50. Her lips perma-glossed, her hair bleached blonde, and constantly shopping just in case she needs to be seen; it's a deliciously hilarious role, and without Moore's keen instincts with the part, the film would be a disaster from start to end.

Maps to the Stars still isn't a good movie, but Moore gives it a life it doesn't deserve.