David Cronenberg does his best impersonation of David Lynch in Maps to the Stars, and while he doesn’t reach the operatic highs of Mulholland Drive, he does manage to shear away the peculiar vanities found in most “cynical” Hollywood dark comedies.
Even when Hollywood movies get cynical there remains an affectionate aura that soothes the sting. Barton Fink, Sunset Boulevard, Adaptation, Tropic Thunder, and even 2014 Best Picture winner Birdman deliver critical points about celebrity culture, studio cravenness, and artistic compromise. But only Maps to the Stars seems to hold genuine contempt for its satirical target, exposing the self-regarding sentimentalism of every other Hollywood dark comedy.
Maps to the Stars Trailer
Maps to the Stars opens with Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) arriving in Hollywood. She's a strange young woman, with a dark secret made literal by the burns all over her face and body. After Agatha we are introduced to vicious child star Benjie and his craven parents, who hope to score for their son another starring role in the Bad Babysitter series that made him rich. Benjie's Dad, TV psychologist Stafford Weiss (John Cusack) delivers New Age bromides, regression massages, and Dalai Lama quotes to celebrity clients, especially aging actress Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), who desperately wants to live up to her dead movie star mother. Agatha turns out to be the hub around which all of these self-absorbed, idle, and nasty people revolve.
Maps to the Stars is an aggressively ugly movie, both in its cinematography and in its noxious characters. Maps to the Stars may also be a bad movie. Does it matter if it is intentionally so?
Movies that attempt to personify stylistic or artistic failure can soar. Adaptation comes to embody its own struggle with writer’s block and meaning, intentionally throwing up its hands and indulging in ridiculous plot contrivance and action. It succeeds by standing so far apart from its target: capturing terrible writing with exceptional writing. Maps to the Stars skewers its targets, but gets blood all over itself in the process. As the movie progresses it becomes impossible to disentangle what is satirically “bad” and just plain bad.
Like with Adaptation, our main character Agatha dreams of writing a screenplay. Her dream script is full of incest and drama, and as the "real life" of the Maps to the Stars characters becomes increasingly incestuous you may begin to suspect you're watching Agatha's movie script come to life. Is this amoral opera of petty vengeances and inexplicable familial masochism just the ramblings of Agatha's psychotic mind?
Maps to the Stars is loaded with nastiness, pill-popping, and violence, but the script, by Bruce Wagner, pulls its punches in the strangest places. When a gun is carelessly waved around I found myself holding my breath, until a dog enters the room and immediately deflates any real danger. Instead it becomes about petty brinkmanship, a middle-schooler's midnight dare. "You didn't think we'd really shoot the dog did you?" Maps to the Stars says with a triumphal tone. Of course we did.
There are several more moments like this, when you can feel real darkness get momentarily swapped for a gleeful, stupid acidity. Absent Cronenberg's pitch-perfect instinct for nastiness, Maps to the Stars would never land a blow.
Mulholland Drive Trailer
With Cronenberg in charge Maps to the Stars becomes a fascinating mess. By the time it all collapses into violence you may find yourself laughing at the movie's unending contempt for its own characters. There's a lot to recommend Maps to the Stars, especially Julianne Moore as the stupid but canny monster, Havana Segrand. But ultimately it feels like Cronenberg failing to achieve the dreamlike state of darkness that Lynch mastered with Mulholland Drive. Still, one great director aping another is worth the price of admission. Maps to the Stars is best when it's busy being terrible, and terrible when it tries for more. Cronenberg can throw as many Woody Allen/Ingmar Bergman ghosts at the screen as he wants, it still doesn't hold a candle to Julianne Moore taking a smelly shit while Agatha and the audience is forced to watch.
