Recent Articles
Showing posts with label Julianne Moore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Julianne Moore. Show all posts
Monday, March 2, 2015
Monday, March 2, 2015
- 0 Comments
Hey you! Yes, you! You want to be miserable? Really really miserable? Then boy do I have the film for you. Still Alice is a precision targeted assault on tear ducts everywhere, with the secondary objective of scaring the crap out of you by revealing the world to be a chaotic, nightmarish hellscape from which the only true escape is the blessed peace of the grave.
This is the story of Alice Howland (Julianne Moore), a 50 year old linguistics professor at Columbia University. We meet her living in satisfied metropolitan intellectual cosiness with her scientist husband John (Alex Baldwin). Between publishing some highly regarded textbooks and language and being a sought after conference speaker, she's managed to raise three intelligent, independent children, who've now flown the nest. Yep, with their financial security, healthy marriage and close-knit family things are just peachy...
Then her brain turns to mush.
Following a series of unnerving memory lapses she visits a neurologist and is given a diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer's disease. Alice's intellect and language are her defining characteristics, and she's understandably terrified at the idea of gradually losing her mind. She's absolutely right to be scared; the rest of the film chronicling her inexorable, Flowers For Algernon-style slide from smartest person in the room to a burbling, confused piece of living furniture.
 |
| A typically depressing moment. |
I'm getting miserable again just thinking about it. If films were judged on how effective they are at wringing tears, Still Alice would be right up there with other emotional nukes like Grave of the Fireflies, Requiem for a Dream, Amour etc. Julianne Moore, making use of every atom of her prodigious talents, drags us through a litany of horrifying humiliations. You'll weep as she forgets her children's names. You'll wail when she pisses herself. You'll feel a cold, existential dread as, in the later stages of the disease, she quietly asks whether she used to be intelligent.
Though undoubtedly effective as misery porn, Still Alice isn't that good of a movie. Most of its problems stem from an overly straightforward narrative. The central issue that this (or any film centred on a character with memory lapses) has to overcome is finding a cinematic way to depict the condition. At first things look fairly promising; the early stages are handled with a light touch, introducing dissonant strings to the score and keeping Alice in tight focus while the scenery around her becomes fuzzy. These techniques aren't going to win any awards for innovation but they're, at minimum, broadly effective.
But the directors fall short in depicting the later stages of the condition. The audience viewpoint shifts from Alice to her family, with the dislocating effect that we move from scarily uncomfortable empathy to a more conventional sympathy. Cinematically conveying memory lapses from the sufferer's POV is a tricky, but not impossible, proposition (see Memento). This structural unadventurousness keeps Still Alice stuck in standard weepie territory, whereas a touch more experimentalism could have elevated it to something special.
 |
| Getting some bad news. |
It's a pity that the film remains stuck in first gear, though Julianne Moore's excellent performance prevents it from ever becoming. She gives Alice a palpable aura of intelligence in the early scenes, her eyes full of flashes of inspiration, pride in her achievements and contentment. This makes her sheer terror jab like a knife in the guts, especially when we sense the fire behind her eyes fading. In the final scenes, where she blankly stares at her family through dulled eyes, shoulders loose, jaw slackly hanging open, the tragedy is almost too much to bear.
She's so good that not even a lacklustre supporting cast can drag her down too much. Best of the middling bunch is Kristen Stewart as the youngest daughter Lydia, who believably creates an aura of mild frustrated understanding as she deals with her increasingly forgetful mother. The rest are a bit blah, particularly a miscast Alec Baldwin, who doesn't appear to give a shit about his sick wife.
By the time the credits roll, the title Still Alice has become a cruel joke. Whether it be intentional or not, the infantile husk of a woman of the closing scenes has nothing in common with the genius we meet at the beginning. This is, by all accounts, an accurate representation of what it is to succumb to Alzheimers, a disease that few without personal connections spend much time pondering. But after this, screw all those knife-wielding psychos, bloodthirsty demons and monsters from beyond the stars, this condition is the scariest thing I've seen in cinemas lately.
Still Alice is worth watching for Moore alone. But be warned, it will ruin your day.
★★★
Still Alice is released 6th March 2015
Monday, September 22, 2014
Monday, September 22, 2014
- 0 Comments
You can't beat a hallucinogenic trip around the Hollywood hills. We expect the rich and famous to exist in a heightened, alien world and so there's perverse satisfaction to be had in watching it all come crashing down; mashed-up brains dripping from plastic surgery perfect noses. Film-makers from Billy Wilder to David Lynch have ploughed this fertile territory, mixing up vicious cocktails of narcissism, delusion and cruelty. Now David Cronenberg joins them on his Maps To The Stars.
With a screenplay by Bruce Wagner, intimately familiar with Hollywood life away from the flashbulbs, this is cinema with bite, intent on scraping away the artifice to reveal the horrors that lie behind fluorescent smiles. The film begins, like so many Hollywood fables do, with a girl getting off a bus. She blinks in the light, breathing in as if inhaling the potential in the air. This is Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), but we soon learn she's no innocent ingénue.
Agatha is the stone tossed into the Hollywood pond and her waves that disrupt the lives of a cast of familiar LA types. There's established star Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), desperately trying to appear young enough to be cast in leading roles. At the other end of the scale is troubled child star Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird), amoral, spoiled and fresh out of rehab. His parents Stafford and Christina (John Cusack & Olivia Williams) are wrapped up in questionable acts of psychotherapy and anxious helicopter parenting. We also meet Jerome Fontana (Robert Pattinson), part-time actor and writer, full-time limo driver for whom "everything is research."
We quickly realise that these people are fucked up beyond repair, hungrily chasing the carrot of fame, suffering from self-medicated mental illness and plagued by hallucinations and ghosts. Pitiful though they are it's next to impossible to feel sorry for them. Wagner's script takes a shark-like pleasure in putting these people through the wringer and we cackle ghoulishly at their pain. And why shouldn't we?
Whereas Lynch went for the genuinely nightmarish in Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, in Maps To The Stars Cronenberg settles on camp. This is a film where creepy ghost children show up dressed in spooky costumes, intoning cryptic sing-songy remarks to the terrified celebs. It's more cheesy than scary, as if even the ghosts of Hollywood are shallow, self-involved and unimaginative.
Cronenberg has left behind the body horror of his earlier career, but replaced pulsating tangles of flesh, blood and cum with disturbing mental mutants. Prime among them is Julianne Moore's Havana Segrand, a broken human being who regresses to a huffy toddler when she cannot have what she wants. There's something of the uncanny valley about her, something sinister incubating behind that glossy hair and too-perfect smile.
Ironically, the most likeable character in all this is the scarred, murderous, schizophrenic pyromaniac Agatha. She's borne the brunt of casual cruelty and though she's as broken as the rest at least she's a sympathetic sort of broken. Against stiff competition, Wasikowski's performance emerges as the most impressive within the film, combining shy, gangly awkwardness with cunning and drive Within a cast of characters play-acting their desires and emotions she stands alone as one who genuinely feels, even if it is an extremely warped way.
Given this distortion of emotions and desire, it's appropriate that Cronenberg and Wagner's recurring narrative motif is incest. Siblings burn with secret, forbidden passions for each other, children lust for their mothers, therapists draw out forgotten (and implied to be false) memories of child abuse. This interbreeding serves to distance these people from the audience's reality, making us view the perfect little child star as a eugenics experiment, the human equivalent of a drooling, wheezing pedigree dog, bred for amusement and unable to survive in the wild.
Maps To The Stars is constructed like a house of cards, a precarious artifice liable to collapse at any moment. Occasionally it feels a touch too silly, the characters so venal they strain the limits of believability. But Wagner is writing from personal experience, claiming that the film isn't a satire, that "I’ve given you the lay of the land as I see it, saw it, and lived it." Under Cronenberg's careful, precise direction we peer into this world like children hovering over an anthill, magnifying glass in hand.
As the credits roll we can't help but wonder what it would be like to live this life, swimming in money but drowning in depression. Worryingly, these awful people are the dreamers of dreams, pumping out the entertainment consumed by the rest of the world. Perhaps it's just that they bear the brunt of producing all this unreality, entirely natural that their lives disintegrate into melodrama, cheap horror and hoary old cliche.
Maps To The Stars is far from perfect but it's goddamn interesting, and interesting goes a hell of a long way in my books.
★★★★
Maps To The Stars is released 26th September 2014
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)