The tinsel that surrounds Hollywood is common, something that is known by all.
However, the mecca of cinema never ceases to amaze with everything that happens in its streets, every detail in a movie studio, and every secret that lives inside the houses of the stars. This and many more gory details are what inhabit the latest from director David Cronenberg, "Maps To The Stars."
In this film, we find Agatha, who recently arrived in Hollywood from Florida, with marks from an accident on her body, a desire to work, and a somewhat twisted secret. Here she makes first contact with Jerome, an aspiring actor, and writer down as a limo driver who, on a trip just below the Hollywood sign, takes a liking to her, who will eventually be the assistant to Havana Segrand, a famous but subdued who vehemently desires a role that in the past was played by her already dead mother, with whom she has unresolved issues and traumas.
To try to channel them, he seeks support from Dr. Stafford Weiss, one of the many successful gurus of a new age and alternative therapies who also appears in infomercials as he sells bandages for the soul halfway between therapy and quackery, who has a somewhat stormy from which they have a son who is one of many young teenage stars who make millions with just one movie and an ego that makes him unbearable and psychopathic. All of them meet and intertwine. Decadence hanging like a fetid vapor over the city.
For many of us when thinking about freak-style cinema it is to keep in mind David Cronenberg, from his insane classics from the 80s such as "Scanners", "Videodrome", his works of that time for major studios such as "The Dead Zone ” or the remake of “The Fly”, in adaptations of cursed works such as the novel by William S. Burroughs “N- Lunch”, poetic and transgressive films such as “M. Butterfly”, body horrors such as “eXistenZ” or “Spider” or in more “relaxed” works in terms of extreme situations such as “Eastern Promises” or “A History Of Violence”, Cronenberg is audacious with the camera and with the subjects to treat. All this film baggage is appreciable in "Maps To The Stars" where he openly brings out a Hollywood of appearances and sins in equal parts.
Laughter and vices, tears and blood, curses, and redemptions, not as the basis for a film within a film, but as the framework that inhabits the streets, night spots, movie studios, homes, and the souls of those who inhabit this ecosystem. Guinea pigs behind the director's camera.
All this compendium of situations and characters is created from a script written by Bruce Wagner that invites us to feel amazement at how damaged the protagonists are, but at the same time compassion for what they have come to experience, regardless of whether they are good or bad.
The editing work is linear, more naturalistic than gimmicky, but it complies with reflecting the rhythm of life of the actors and their motivations. Musically, Howard Shore –a long-time collaborator of Cronenberg's films– creates ethereal and dark atmospheres.
Julianne Moore creates a Havana Segrand that is partly defenseless and partly pathetic, as we assume any drab Hollywood star should behave. Mia Wasikowska makes Agatha fragile in appearance, but sinister in the background with a multitude of secrets, the same ones that John Cusack and Olivia Williams have in their characters as Stafford and Cristina Weiss respectively, happy on the outside and tragic on the inside, just like Benjie, the son portrayed on screen by Evan Bird with a resemblance to any singer or actor we know more from headlines in tabloids and gossip websites than from his work.
In theory, the one who is saved from this chaos is Jerome, the character played by Robert Pattinson, serving more as a guide than as a protagonist, although he remains involved in the morass that accompanies the characters.
“Maps To The Stars” ends up being a kind of moral lesson without sounding pedagogical, but as a sample of how low certain people can go. Where the reprehensible is approved, where the revulsive can be entertaining and nightmares surpass dreams. Material that is worthy of David Cronenberg's body of work. Paper is a flammable material and so are movie stars.
