Review: Maps to the Stars

What beautiful beasts David Cronenberg dissects with surgical relish on the operating table that is Maps to the Stars.

There's actress Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), famous but fading, a living corpse in an industry where 23 is considered menopausal. Thirteen-year-old megastar Benjie (an impressive Evan Bird) is an uncontrollable tyrant whose summertime drug escapade has the studio bosses concerned for their hugely profitable Bad Babysitter franchise. Coddled by his icy manager and mom (Olivia Williams), he's barely acknowledged by his therapist to the stars father Stafford Weiss (John Cusack) who is performing his unorthodox massages on Havana to purge her of childhood traumas suffered at the hands of her legendary movie star mother Clarice Taggart (Sarah Gadon). Into this snake pit arrives Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), face and body scarred with burn marks, Havana's latest chore whore and Stafford's estranged daugther intent on making amends with her family.

Immolation and incest thread this evisceration of Hollywood and its celebrity culture: Clarice perished in a fire perhaps set by Havana, whom she allegedly sexually abused; Agatha thought to protect Benjie in their younger days by "marrying" him in a ceremony that ended in a near-overdose and a conflagration. Both Havana and Benjie are haunted by ghosts - she by her mother who mocks her accusations ("It must have been your stepfather.") and her ambition to make her comeback in a remake of her Mommie Dearest's most well-known film; Benjie by the sick little girl he visited in a hospital as part of a goodwill tour. She could easily be a double for his memory of Agatha. There's no escape for either of them, victims of the cycle yet perpetrators of it.

Bruce Wagner's acerbic screenplay takes no prisoners. Bridges are burned, names and industry lingo are dropped with alarming alacrity, misdeeds are means to more money via apology tours; this is a cesspool inhabited by self-serving reptiles.

There's an intestinal atmosphere that coats Cronenberg's film, a sense of inner rot and decay. You feel it especially in Moore's Havana, a vortex of desperation who has no qualms about celebrating a child's drowning if it means her getting the part she wanted. Though the character may remind one of a certain freckled redhead, Havana is closer in spirit to Norma Desmond or Baby Jane Hudson, divas ensconced in the delusions of their own making. Moore is flat out fantastic, completely abandoned to embodying this American horror story.

Everyone eventually gets their comeuppance but the organism lives on, an ever fertile breeding ground of more monsters.

Maps to the Stars

Directed by: David Cronenberg

Written by: Bruce Wagner

Starring: Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, Evan Bird, Robert Pattinson, John Cusack, Olivia Williams, Sarah Gadon