Maps to the Stars

Synopsis

David Cronenberg’s film about Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) who goes to Hollywood to be employed as a “chore whore” by Havana (Julianne Moore).  Agatha meets her film star 13 year old brother Benjie (Evan Bird).  John Cusack plays a therapist to the stars, he is their father.  Agatha has been scarred by a fire she started.  We see the lives of the pampered Hollywood set and it could all end tragically…

Review

Cronenberg specialized in horror films, the weird graphic depiction of psychological horror becoming real.  He is fascinated by physical perversion and degeneration (The Fly), and this movie presents us with monsters of depravity by pampering.  It’s interesting that though these worthless people think of themselves as decadently freewheeling, they have a very anal attitude to everyday property.  When Agatha soils on an expensive sofa, Havana can only protest like a lower middle class matron shoving the lower orders off her lawn.  Moore does another good actorly turn as a superbitch full of self disgust.  Benjie is the teenage star as malevolent midget (was Macaulay Culkin like this?), he is fuelled with self regard that has him slide down the gilded pole to unlamented destruction.  Cusack is the poisonous purveyor of vacuous psycho babble and new age quackery, the sort of role that shouldn’t go near a rich man’s swimming pool because you know something terrible is going to happen near it or in it.  The swimming pool has been a dystopian fixture in many moral tales, most notably in The Swimmer.  Cusack looks like a warped pervert in clown face white, it’s expected he’ll do something nasty and he does.  In The Brood (1979) Cronenberg invented sexless monsters as the creatures of a tormented woman, and Agatha and Benjie are similarly ripe for destruction.  One thinks of other movies exhibiting the reptilian horror of Hollywood folk: All About Eve, Postcard from the Edge, Mommie Dearest, Sunset Boulevarde.  The trajectory of success through delusion, disillusion, and failure is a shot of poison through the whole film.  Their affluence is a Neronic desolation and they must face moral reckoning.  Robert Pattinson is the chauffeur instead of being the passenger as he was in Cosmopolis.  In Maps he is merely the venal opportunist we expect from a writer who would do anything to get a break in Hollywood.

 

 

A Dangerous Method

Synopsis

Starring Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung, Viggo Mortensen as Freud, and Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein (a Russian patient).  Set in about 1900 in Switzerland and Vienna it concerns Jung’s relationship with Spielrein, it develops into love which must be stopped owing to his bourgeoise responsibilities to his wife and family.  Speilrein becomes a doctor in her own right.  We see the rift between Freud and Jung.

Criticism

Directed by David Cronenberg and written by Christopher Hampton, it’s about what’s supposed to be one of the great partnerships in history.  Mortensen plays Freud as the cautious smooth cultic figure whose authority must not be contested.  According to the film, Freud is a prophet who could tolerate only accomplices or disciples, any rival could become an enemy.  Jung is portrayed as the independent-minded colleague who becomes the great challenger.  Freud is committed to materialism and science, and Jung seems to be going off onto a mystical tangent.  In one scene Jung seems to have precognition about noises on the bookshelf, Freud is the urbane debunker, the imperturbable patriarch.  The film shows a very patriarchal view of well controlled family life.  The challenges to bourgeoise constraints were the constant threat of uninhibited sex, which broke out with sado-masochistic passion between Jung and Spielrein.  The eroticism is exacerbated by the hypocrisy and proprieties among the spotless decor.  The only other concession to sensuality amongst the starchiness of the Calvinist linen is all the smoking going on:  Freud’s cigar, Jung’s meditative pipe, and Vincent Cassel’s roll ups.  Cassel here plays the pantomime pseudo bohemian cad and perfectionist of style.  Dialogue between these guys is the effortless articulacy of the well massaged academic ego.  When Jung talks about mysticism you can see him nettling the self assured Freud whose own claims for the pseudo-scientific psychoanalysis he invented now look very dated.  In the mid 20th century I read books that bowed to Freud’s authority, now he needn’t detain us too much except as a figure of obvious cultural significance.  Jung is the rebellious son who casts off Freud’s biblical authority.  It’s all done with gentlemanly restraint, you can see the effort at self control like a hint of turmoil in a flick of oil in a painting.  These guys hold onto their authority in a Europe about to be steeped in world war, and of course Jung has to have premonitions about this, after all he is the grandfather of twentieth century cults, a shamon in a stiff suit.  Keira Knightley as Spielrein is all actorish gurning as she is driven into the sanatorium and she jumps through the hoops of an actor pretending to be mad but actually just being unconvincingly histrionic.  Later in the film she becomes a more sympathetic character.  The film is quite absorbing.