Maps to the Stars

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those timid spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.” – T.R. Roosevelt

David Cronenberg is a great director.  From essential experiments like  Videodrome and Naked Lunch to mature and gripping crowd pleasers like The Fly, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, the man has created a filmography that constitutes a must-see list for those who engage with film as an art form as serious as it is entertaining.  In short, David Cronenberg isn’t just cranking ‘em out and cashing checks.

So Maps to the Stars doesn’t quite work.  So it’s a bit too elliptical at some points, too on-the-nose at others.  So it’s 111 minutes spent with terrible people doing mean things to one another, with no audience-identification characters and no hint of levity to season the mix.  So it’s a miserable way to spend a couple of hours.

I’d still rather watch it than Ted 2.  Cronenberg’s daring a mighty thing with Maps to the Stars, tackling a tough story peopled with difficult characters and trying to make something of it.  Even if he doesn’t quite pull it off, I’d rather watch one of Cronenberg’s misses than many other filmmakers’ hits. 

Crash

I wanted to like David Cronenberg’s CRASH. I really did. But it didn’t give me anything to hold on to.

The film is ostensibly about a sexually adventurous couple who enter the world of automobile crash fetishisation (Note: As far as I’m aware, so such world actually exists. But the internet is a big place. It could be out there somewhere.). It’s really about compulsion and the proper location of boundaries on sexual experience. That makes it interesting, but it fails to be engaging because its characters are too remote, its music is too remote, and even its photography is too remote.

All that remoteness makes CRASH a cold, dull experience. It’s like reading an encyclopedia article on sexuality. All the words are there, but it fails to capture the essence of the subject. At no time in the course of the film did I feel like I was watching real people have real experiences or speaking in real ways. At no time did my pulse quicken or eyes dilate. CRASH is an exercise in observation, and observe it does, but it’s more science than art. Had the film given me even one character to whom I could relate, one situation that I could even tenuously connect to my life, it might have engaged me more thoroughly.

As it was, I had to will myself to power through to the end. What a disappointment.

Eastern Promises

What a pleasure to watch a great artist at the top of his game.

David Cronenberg is one of the filmmakers who showed me that the medium could be used for more than assembly-line product. From VIDEODROME to THE FLY to DEAD RINGERS to NAKED LUNCH, here was a guy who was willing to tackle uncomfortable and difficult subjects through characters who felt like real people. Cronenberg made honest, artful but not artsy, films of which anyone could be proud.

He didn’t always connect with popular audiences, however, and it seems that he tried to appeal to mainstream adults with his last two films, the brilliant A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE and his most recent, EASTERN PROMISES. Thing is, for a guy as skilled as Cronenberg, appealing to a mainstream adult audience and selling out are not the same thing. Rather, he has figured out how to make challenging, adult fare with broad appeal. These last two movies are as serious, as legitimate, as anything he’s done. They also pop, keeping the viewer engaged and enrapt from beginning to end.

With EASTERN PROMISES, he kept this viewer engaged and enrapt even after the end. Though this film tells a complete story, that story is one of a chapter in the lives of its characters. But these characters, played by a stellar cast including Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, and Vincent Cassel, are so compelling that I’ve been spending much of the last 18 hours thinking about how they came to the beginning of the film, and where they went after the ending.

Here’s the hook: Watts is a midwife in a London hospital. When a young Russian prostitute dies on the birthing table, Watts finds the diary in the prostitute’s handbag. Hoping to find the girl’s relatives and place the newborn infant, she has the diary translated. But young Russian prostitutes are not independent, and soon Watts has the attention of the Russian mob. Enter Mortensen, a low-level driver in the organization, and we’re off.

Watts gave a masterful performance. I completely bought her as a lower-middle class Londoner, just as I completely bought Mortensen (also brilliant in HISTORY) as the Russian driver. Speaking of performances, both Armin Mueller-Stahl and Vincent Cassel, both cast against type, absolutely shine in this film. If you’re going to perform on this stage, you’d better bring your A game. They do, and the doubt and unpredictability created by going against the viewer’s expectations of these actors pays off wonderfully well.

I started these comments with my closer, so I can only reiterate it. I would, however, like to add a small explanation of my choice of words. Mr. Cronenberg has worked with the same people for years. The same crew, the same costume designer, the same composer. As far as I’m concerned, they’re all great. There are so many talented people involved in creating a film, however, that it’s easier to anthropomorphize the entire process in the form of one individual, the director, than to detail the individual contributions of all those involved.

Perhaps I should have written that it’s a pleasure to watch great artists at the top of their game. It’s just as true. EASTERN PROMISES is well worth seeing.