Review: ‘Maps to the Stars’

“Maps to the Stars” is a satirical dark comedy about Hollywood and its denizens, namely the psycho-babble loving, attention whoring, secret hiding folks who pop up within the movie industry all over the place. A family with multiple shameful secrets, an aging actress trying to revive her career, a limo driver with acting aspirations of his own, and a mysterious girl all come together to form this weird little tale of hidden regret, sought redemption and psychosexual revenge.

“Maps to the Stars” initially focuses mostly on Havana (Julianne Moore), an actress with a famous, very respected and very dead mother, who is on the verge of an emotional breakdown, with the root causes for this being her quickly declining stature as a working actress in Hollywood and her memories of a mother whom she felt abandoned and mistreated her. Havana’s mother made a movie called “Stolen Waters,” and a remake of this movie is being planned, so Havana wants to play the same role her mother did, with the hopes that this would be her comeback. But people really don’t want to take Havana seriously, and it is kind of hard to take her seriously when she comes across as super flakey very often, as well as emotionally needy and somewhat unpredictable. It feels like Havana, especially as she is played by Moore, is a middle-aged version of Lindsay Lohan – once promising and in demand, but now washed up and the butt of all the jokes, she spends her time smoking cigarettes in her mansion, doing yoga and wondering why no one will work with her.

Through a series of events and a Twitter-based friendship, Havana ends up hiring a young girl as her new personal assistant, Agatha (Mia Wasikowska). Agatha is fresh off the boat, or the bus anyway, and she tells people she is visiting from Florida to see some family, but also has some plans to work within the industry in some manner. She has a number of burns and scars on her body, apparently from an accident when she was a kid, but these burns turn out to have a very sinister source, one that reveals itself eventually. At the start of the movie, Agatha is easily the most innocent and least corrupted person in the whole story, especially since she seems to be an out-of-towner, hence untouched by the evil hand of Hollywood, but as the story progresses, we find out that this is not the case and there is something actually very wrong with Agatha. But is it her fault?

Seemingly unrelated at first but then coming together later in the movie is the Weiss family. Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack) is a self help guru and psychiatrist of some sort. The weirdest sort, actually, as he seems to operate his therapy sessions as a mixture of yoga, pressure point physical therapy and some form of transcendental meditation. He works with Havana and has her go through her memories and try to relive them in her mind in order to confront them, the whole while straddling her near naked body from behind and rubbing her shoulders, arms, back and legs, and it can’t help but seem pretty sexual for him. Then there is his wife Christina (Olivia Williams), who is the worst kind of stage mom, which is to say, she is the enabling kind. Her teenage son Benjie (Evan Bird) is a mega star thanks to the breakout movie hit “Bad Babysitter” and due to this success plus his horrible parents he has turned into a complete shit. At the age of 13 he has already gone through a rehab program and has to count his days of sobriety. When he has to sit down with movie executives and explain to them that he is clean and ready to work, he finds it a humiliating experience, and instead of explaining to her kid that he wouldn’t have to go through stuff like that if he wasn’t a fuck up, his mom rubs his back and says “I know, I know,” as if he was wronged. So she not only makes his feel better despite his fuck ups, but she also is willing to let him go through something like that in order to secure his next big pay day. Pretty gross.

And then there is Jerome (Robert Pattinson), the limo driver hired by Agatha who reveals himself to be an aspiring actor and screenwriter. Just like all the other limo drivers, waiters, bus boys, valets, window cleaners and truckers in Los Angeles, he doesn’t see himself as a limo driver, he sees himself as an artist who drives a limo just to make ends meet. On the surface, he is the least neurotic or crazy of all the people in this story, but then again he also is in denial of who he is and his potential in this town, and this takes a certain level of self delusion. The closest he can get to stardom is having sex with an actress in his limo, and really he should be happy to have even that much.

Oh yeah and both Havana and Benjie, two actors on opposite ends of the career spectrum, have visions of dead people visiting them and tormenting them in different ways; Havana has to deal with the ghosts of the past, while Benjie is dealing with the ghosts created in his immediate wake. So that doesn’t help matters for the two of them.

Without giving away too many details, there is a theme of incest throughout this movie, both figurative and literal, and obviously it reflects the viewpoint of the makers of this movie, director David Cronenberg and writer Bruce Wagner. How can one look at Hollywood and NOT see incest? Both in working relationships and in actual relationships, people get together in all sorts of different combinations depending on what they need at the time, and even the art that gets made reflects this need to use and recycle what is already within their own spheres of influence.

There are some moments in this movie that are meant to be played for laughs, and it actually feels a little out of place compared to the overall tenor of this film. Sure it is a dark comedy and meant to poke fun at these people, but a story that involves so much incest and suicide and schizophrenia and murder is hard to get across as “funny,” and really just feels more darkly humorous, but only to people who find such things funny (and sure enough, there are plenty of people out there who fit this description). The real problem with “Maps to the Stars” is that it doesn’t really say anything that people don’t already know or feel. We all suspect that the secret lives of Hollywood’s elite are filled with excess in order to hide their emptiness and lack of self worth, and we all know that actresses are treated like shit compared to actors, just like women are not provided with equal pay, so focusing on an actress struggling with being perceived as “bankable” in a business that prefers younger women is not all that shocking or damning, it is just the truth.

This also feels like the least Cronenberg movie David Cronenberg has made to date. Sure he left the body horror of “The Fly” and “Scanners” and even “eXistenZ” behind years ago, so I wasn’t expecting Havana to grow weird appendages or to have her face melt off and change into a giant bug’s head, but there is a certain level of weirdness and a sense of being just off-center that makes movies like “A History of Violence” and “Spider” still fit very much in Cronenberg’s filmography. But outside of one scene towards the end of the film, this could have almost been done by anyone. It has Cronenberg’s clean style and no-fuss direction, but it also kind of feels like lesser Cronenberg, something that will go down as more of a footnote in his career than a highlight. Which is fine, considering that many artists would love to have something like this movie under their belt.

Weird and a little funny and occasionally shocking, “Maps to the Stars” will surely make some people feel uncomfortable when they finally get around to seeing it, though Cronenberg fans may be left wanting a little more from one of theuir favorite filmmakers.