It’s not so much news that Hollywood is full of secrets and seedy people, and director David Cronenberg scratches at this sentiment in the chilly but simple Maps to the Stars.
Cronenberg’s cynical satire is a slow-brewed tale of modern day movie star obsession and paranoia that finds fever dream playfulness in having Hollywood’s ghostly pasts literally haunt and taunt them in their 90210 mansions.
There are a few storylines here, including a troubled actress, a now-sober child-star, and a new mysterious L.A. transplant with facial burns, that ultimately connect to realize the same cosmic justice fate, of guilt and sins they just can’t escape. Cronenberg, a man who sees monsters everywhere, shows the Entourage lifestyle as one of disgust, but he never makes it any more delicious of a tear-down, as it all plays in too-much a rhythmically mapped out story.
Much like an L.A. Star Maps tour itself, you might have a familiar idea of where you’re headed in this dream theater staging, but Cronenberg the director knows a few interesting routes of how to take you there.
Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), an A-list pill-popping mash-up of Sunset Blvd.‘s Norma Desmond and an eventual Lindsay Lohan, is one of this town’s troubled characters. A delusional mess who is up for the same part of a re-make that her also A-list mother once played (and whose ghost also torments her daughter with the reminder of once inappropriate behaviors), Segrand is every bit the caricature of the Hollywood type, to who Moore renders quite brilliantly here (for whom the actress won the Golden Globe Award for).
Incestuous storylines run deeper still in the arrival of a black-clad Agatha Weiss (Mia Wasikowska), young and beautiful with facial scars and arms-length gloves. Wasikowska plays the mysterious girl with fun and flair, and when her past and identity is revealed, punches in the darkness.
Much like an L.A. Star Maps tour itself, you might have a familiar idea of where you’re headed in this dream theater staging, but Cronenberg the director knows a few interesting routes of how to take you there.
Maps to the Stars is in theaters now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwxmnyoofPs
