Movie Muser

David Cronenberg and Hollywood were never going to be the best of friends. The Canadian body horror specialist’s strange, eerie and disturbing films slotting in well away from Tinseltown’s glamour. So it’s entirely appropriate that his satire on the City of Angels is nasty and very odd indeed, but the surprise is how funny it is.

Humour has never been Cronenberg’s forte, although The Fly has some moments of very dark wit, but here he gets stuck into all of Hollywood’s absurdity, ridiculousness and fakeness with sometimes wonderfully amusing moments. In the end it becomes a film every bit as dark as his other work, but it sets itself apart from them in many ways. It’s probably more Sunset Boulevard than Mulholland Drive, but has moments that would fit into either of those classic movies easily.

Arriving into LA like Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive comes Mia Wasikowska, an apparent ingénue from Florida who has become internet pals with Carrie Fisher – playing herself – who says she can get work as an assistant. Fisher introduces Wasikowska to Moore, a high maintenance, nervous wreck of a film star. Moore, like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, hasn’t worked in years, and is clinging onto the hope of playing her own mother in the story of her life – her mother was a famous beautiful film star who died in a mysterious accident at her peak. Moore apparently ‘smashed’ the audition but is up against actresses who are more marketable, more on trend and frankly younger. The two women form a strange bond, but all is, of course, not as it appears.

Wasikowska has scars all over her face and body from a fire she apparently started herself when younger – about the nearest we get to Cronenberg’s body horror – and she slowly reveals what happened on the fateful night of the accident. She also reveals that her parents are still living in LA, and by an amazing coincidence her father, Cusack, is Moore’s therapist. Her mother, Wilde, is a terrifying, hard-nosed control freak, running the career of her brother, Bird, a 13-year-old star of a crap film that Hollywood wants to turn into a franchise. He already has a history of substance abuse – remind you of anyone, Macauley Culkin fans? It’s a world obsessed with youth, where 23-year-olds are described as ‘menopausal’ and children have access to drugs, alcohol and sex, which they are already bored with – the only time Bird’s face lights up is when he is revealing to teenage girls how much he makes per episode.

However it is also a world where people cannot escape their dark pasts. Moore has visions of her dead mother in her bathtub, taunting her about her acting, and Bird, who visits a dying child fan in hospital, keeps seeing the girl in his dreams, her arms covered in tattoos of his name and her face getting ever paler.

The film, for obvious reasons, is littered with references to other films and actors – at one point Moore shouts “Do you think Nicole Kidman would put up with this?” – most of which hit the mark but some feel a little too in-jokey and easy targets. Bird puts in a sympathetic performance as the star who already has younger competition, but his shouting at his agent feels a little contrived and stretched. Similarly, Cusack’s turn as a new age hippie therapist borders on the caricature too often, he never really inhabits the character. Wilde is terrifying as the hard-faced mother, happily telling her son she has the studio ‘by the balls’ and chain-smoking her way through her problems in her gorgeous modernist house that she can’t stand because of all the wondows.

What really makes the whole thing work is the remarkable performance of Moore. Highly strung, vulnerable, needy and painful though she is, she somehow manages to remain sympathetic even in her most absurd moments. Bellowing ridiculously lengthy lists of her requirements at Wasikowska is one thing, celebrating the death of a child because it might help her career is quite another, yet she remains deeply human throughout. In one remarkable scene she holds a tender conversation with Wasikowska about her budding relationship with boyfriend Pattinson while sitting on the toilet, describing in some detail how her happy pills have left her ‘backed up’. Next thing she is flirting with Pattinson in his limo, monstrous, childish behavior by any standards yet somehow Moore pulls it off. She even manages to look alluring while droning onto her therapist while he rubs her thigh which is ‘full of memories’ apparently.

When the film does eventually take a much darker turn it loses the fun edge of the first half, and makes it slightly unsatisfying.

Overall verdict: Whether it will take its place alongside classic Hollywood satires, or merely minor ones such as The Big Picture or Swingers, remains to be seen. One thing is for sure, it’s much better than The Player – and much funnier. It’s something of a departure for David Cronenberg, but a welcome one, and featuring several strong performances and a sharp script, it’s one of the better films of the year so far. Maybe not quite a classic, but strong and acidic.

Reviewer: Mike Martin