Maps to the Stars (2014)
Directed by David Cronenberg
Driven by an intense need for fame and validation, members of a dysfunctional Hollywood family chase celebrity, one another, and the relentless ghosts of their pasts. Their fragile ecosystem is disrupted by the arrival of Agatha, the scarred and estranged pyromaniac daughter.
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3 films that influenced Maps to the Stars
What critics say influenced Maps to the Stars
But the unmodulated and overweening bile is reminiscent of the severely negative films about Hollywood from the 1970s, such as Myra Breckinridge, Alex in Wonderland and The Day of the Locust, and it’s unlikely this one will have any better a box-office fate.
Comparisons to the other David’s film, “Mulholland Drive,” are certainly apt, in that there is an inner layer of howling desperation, though they have very little formal similarities.
Not since David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" has Hollywood gotten such a severe, and entertaining, skewering.
The mood at the start is thick not with mystery, as in David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” but with exasperation, as we struggle to work out who is related—or helplessly clamped—to whom.
It’s as if the film takes place after the cautionary tales of A Star is Born and Mulholland Drive have been told, and promptly ignored.
She seems to be clueless about the fakeness of it all when she asks her driver (Robert Pattinson) where she can obtain a star map, acting as almost an alternate-universe reflection of Mulholland Drive’s sweet Betty-meets All About Eve’s evil Eve Harrington, in her initial naiveté.
The creepiest haunted Hollywood movie since Mulholland Drive, David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars is working an even deeper graveyard groove than David Lynch did.
Cronenberg, the director of the edgy 1996 Crash (not the Oscar-winning 2004 film) seems fascinated by off-kilter, injured and disfigured people.
Wasikowska, perfectly fine in the role, is even dolled up to look like Holly Hunter in Cronenberg's Crash, only worsening the comparison between this and his earlier work.
Assault, murder, immolation, even incest — we expect gruesomeness and perversity in a movie by David Cronenberg, the one-time “body horror” auteur whose four-decade professional filmography includes “The Brood,” “The Fly,” “Dead Ringers” and “Crash,” to name a few; even so, we flinch at the selfishness and hatefulness expressed here.
"Maps To The Stars" has some of the same issues that "Cosmopolis" did, and at this point, I feel like some of the blame has to fall on Peter Suschitzky, whose work on films like "Crash," "Dead Ringers" and "The Empire Strikes Back" is above reproach.
Cronenberg’s preoccupations haven’t altered noticeably from Shivers, through his 1990s films of taboo novels (Naked Lunch, Crash), and on to his mid-2000s thrillers starring Viggo Mortensen as two different kinds of infiltrator (A History of Violence, Eastern Promises).
Canadian auteur David Cronenberg has a well-documented fascination with seeing social systems disrupted by chaos, whether they be romantic (The Fly), domestic (A History of Violence), psychological (A Dangerous Method), criminal (Eastern Promises), automotive (Crash) or technological (Videodrome, eXistenZ) in nature.