Review: Vox Lux
Much like his debut feature, The Childhood of a Leader, Brady Corbet's sophomore effort Vox Lux is a wry fable tarred and feathered with portent, ambition and, for viewers who may find his execution not quite aligned with his narrative, more than a soupçon of pretension. It's heady and cumbersome, though not without intriguing provocations about the intertwining of pop culture and mass tragedy, and certainly not lacking for stylistic panache.
In the beginning, as a narrator (Willem Dafoe) reveals, there was Celeste (Raffey Cassidy), thirteen going on fourteen, kind and full of grace, not particularly special or conspicuously talented but possessed of a certain something. There's already a sense that she is destined for some sort of greatness, but greatness often comes at too high a price. In this case, Celeste not only survives a horrific incident in which a fellow classmate opens fire in her classroom, killing several and leaving her with a spinal injury, but lives to tell about it in the form of a mournful ballad that the nation will appropriate as its own. The ensuing publicity secures her a manager (Jude Law) and a record label executive (Jennifer Ehle), both of whom begin to mould her into the kind of pop star that promises a knowingness that belies their pure facade. Or, as Miss Britney Jean Spears sang, "I'm not that innocent."
Indeed, Celeste is thrust into a world of Faustian temptation - where she goes from recording sessions in Stockholm to shooting a video in Los Angeles within a small span of time, where she will lose her virginity to an older rocker who makes the kind of music "the boy who attacked me used to listen to" - with barely anyone to protect her except her older sister Ellie (Stacy Martin), from whom she will soon become estranged. Celeste's eventual and inevitable loss of innocence mirrors that of the nation, which has been shaken to its core by the 9/11 attacks.
Cut to 17 years later as a thirty-one-year-old Celeste (now played by Natalie Portman) is preparing for a comeback after years of scandal and addiction problems. On the morning of her show, however, she's rocked with the news that a mass shooting in Croatia was perpetrated by attackers wearing masks from one of her most well-known music videos. Thus, her birth and rebirth are both marked by tragedy. If the second half of Vox Lux seems even more unresolved than the first, it at least, with no disrespect to Cassidy's very fine performance as the younger Celeste, the electrifying presence of Portman as the jaded and snarling older Celeste. By turns volatile and vulnerable, she is nothing less than compelling to watch as a bratty and petulant diva struggling to get her personal and professional life somewhat back on track.
Yet it's not quite clear what the film is trying to say. Is it that stardom itself is a form of trauma that somehow both heals and erodes? Is it that there's a fundamental flaw in a society that drives people to extremes in their attempts to be seen and heard? Is it an observation of how fame warps one's self-image? Perhaps it's all of the above, but the thinness and tenuousness in which Corbet threads these insights into the overall narrative results in an incoherence that nags even as one is distracted by the glitz and bombast.
Vox Lux
Directed by: Brady Corbet
Written by: Brady Corbet
Starring: Natalie Portman, Jude Law, Willem Dafoe, Stacy Martin, Raffey Cassidy, Jennifer Ehle, Maria Dizzia, Christopher Abbott
