Maps to the Stars

The framing star maps represent David Cronenberg’s two arenas of action here. The first, the map of Hollywood stars’ homes, points to the mundane glamorous world whose pretensions he approaches with acerbic satire. There are some great comic lines here. The stilted acting style, whether terse or flamboyant, suggests the artificiality of those characters’ lives. 

For their real drama lies beyond their awareness. That is represented by the last map, that of the heavenly stars. Where the streets are where the characters live — or used to — this map is where mankind functions. Even the powerful are but puppets of the gods. Here the satire gives way to the larger dimension of classical Greek tragedy, a powerful family doomed by a buried secret. Cronenberg visits a classical tragedy upon a silly Hollywood family. Small people can live big lives, even those small enough to think they’re living big lives. 

The two tones intertwine in the various characters’ quotation of a Paul Eluard poem. The libertines — who live in satire — yearn for liberty — freedom from the gods that control the tragic dimension. 

The family’s name, Weiss, is ironic because for all its power the family has very little wisdom. The married couple know their secret but have foolishly tried to hide it and its consequences. Dr Stafford Weiss (John Cusack) is famous for psychological texts that extoll the value of (of course) confronting secrets. His therapy method uses physical abuse to squeeze the last secrets out of his patients’ flesh. Wife Christina (Olivia Williams) manages their 13-year-old movie star son Benjie (Evan Bird), fresh out of drug rehab and contracting to star in the sequel to his hit comedy Bad Babysitter (which is not necessarily a reflection on his parents and their “chore whores”).  

The family’s key secret is that Christina and Stafford are siblings, separated in childhood, who unwittingly met abroad, fell in love, married, had two children and discovered they were enacting the most primal taboo. But their love was too great to part. The secondary secret is that four years ago Benjie’s older sister Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) drugged him (with “vitamin” pills) and then burned the house down. He was saved with only psychological scars, but she suffered burns to her body and face. The knowing Agatha and ignorant Benjie used to replay their parents’ marriage in a ceremony of reciprocal consecration. 

Released from the sanatorium, Agatha returns to Hollywood and gets a job as personal assistant to a fading star, Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore). A tragic heroine in her own right — and mind — Havana seeks to revive her career by playing her dead mother’s role in a remake of the ‘60s classic that made her mother a star. She first loses the part but gets it when the other actress loses her young son in a tragic accident. The gods move in mysterious ways their wonders to deform.

While the parents are haunted by their buried secret, Havana is haunted by taunting visits from her dead mother — even worse, as she was in her beautiful youth. Benjie is haunted first by the young girl whom he visited in the hospital and then by the actress’s dead son.The hauntings embody the chilling grip the past maintains on the present. When Agatha reappears she has the power of a disturbing ghost, provoking her brother’s confusion, their mother’s agony and their father’s futile attempt to assert his power, first with a big bribe then with a physical attack. At the end the whole family is destroyed, mother by fire and water, the kids by their parody wedding and the father by a death-in-life stupor — that probably wreaks havoc upon his much anticipated book tour.

Underneath all the glamour and Hollywood sunshine this is a Cronenberg horror movie. Each major character wrestles with personal demons beyond the call of normal neurosis. As the old maps used to say on their unexplored spaces — There be monsters here. 
     It’s a challenging film, as it interweaves two such incompatible genres, satire and classical tragedy, with some very unlikable characters, especially the Weiss males and the colonialist Havana. Unlike Benjie’s franchise, this film is one of a kind, that requires us to adjust to its quirks and disturbing inflections. It denies us our usual satisfactions — always a Cronenberg virtue.