WHAT HAPPENED, MISS SIMONE? 2015

The life and artistry of Nina Simone illuminated in poignant documentary

The best documentaries exist as something more allegorical than the rote, history-lesson cataloging of the biographical details of a public figure’s life. Also, in spite of the vast scope of the subject’s fame and influence, they tend to be more effective when honing in on a selective perspective or point of view. 

In the marvelous What Happened, Miss Simone?, documentary filmmaker Liz Garbus explores the personal and professional life of the legendary jazz/blues/ folk artist by submitting her film as the literal answer to the titular question, one originally asked by author/poet Maya Angelou in a 1970 article penned for Redbook magazine.

Angelou’s interview with Simone coincided with the famed singer/composer/musician's turbulent transformation from jazz concert poet to The High Priestess of Soul in the late 60s. A time when the Civil Rights Movement so significantly influenced her work that she alienated her pop music fan base while simultaneously giving voice and inspiration to the nation’s unsung with her Top 100 single, “Young, Gifted, & Black” ( a song co-written with Weldon Irvine to, as Simone put it, “Make black children all around the world feel good about themselves forever.”).

The question Angelou posed: “Miss Simone, you are idolized, even loved, by millions now. What happened, Miss Simone?” - is tellingly ambiguous and suggest perhaps a contradiction. Is it the typical press agent query, “How did you get to where you are?”, or the more complex and infinitely more painful, “What happened to you in your life to make your music so raw and impassioned?” 

The High Priestess of Soul
(1933 - 2003) 

Garbus’ documentary, co-produced by and currently streaming on Netflix, examines the life of Nina Simone by turning the story of her tumultuous career and private life into a larger examination of what can happen when an artist—an individual devoted to the freest expression of truth—is born into a society which tells them everything they are, everything that comprises their very essence and being, is unworthy of dreams. Unworthy because of the color of their skin. The broadness of their nose. The thickness of their lips. That they are born female. As the film progresses and grows darker than you might expect, the social focus of the opening question morphs into the personal, "How did it come to this?"

As an African-American piano prodigy born in the Jim Crow-era South (“I played the boogie at (age) three and gave concerts at twelve”), Nina Simone, nee Eunice Waymon, was an anomaly in her small North Carolina hometown. Crossing train tracks to the “white” section of town to take piano lessons, practicing so much she barely had a childhood; Simone’s keenly-felt separateness defined her attitude towards both her musical gift and her ambitions.

Simone dreamed big: she wanted more than anything to be the first black female classical pianist to play Carnegie Hall. But when she was turned down by the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and had to take up performing jazz and pop music in clubs, the teenage Simone felt for the first time that most common, but nonetheless soul-killing, of African-American experiences- being certain but never truly knowing if race played a part in her rejection.

Nina Simone graduated valedictorian of her high school class and was awarded
a one-year scholarship at Julliard School of Music in New York

With this, the seeds of rage, self-doubt, and indignation began to take root within her just as firmly as her talents as a singer and musician blossomed. Fueled by an ambition to succeed, blessed with a talent that couldn’t be ignored, yet led by circumstance down a path not wholly of her choosing, Nina Simone’s demons were manifest in the same questions that plagued many frustrated African-Americans in pursuit of the American dream in those nascent civil rights years. The lingering oppression of separatism and Jim Crow led Langston Hughes to pen the 1951 poem, “Harlem.” A poem whose words articulated the conundrum facing all black artists and dreamers in America.

What Happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? 
Or fester like a sore
And then run? 
Does it stink like rotten meat? 
Or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Throughout her life, Nina Simone’s mainstream success stood in the shadow of her unrealized dream to be a classical musician. Similarly, the material rewards of her success only reinforced her childhood sense of isolation…a gap she always sought to bridge with her music. Following the 1963 murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers and the Alabama church bombing that killed four little girls that same year;  the discrepancy she felt between her quality of life and that of the average black person living in America, altered and politicized her artistic expression.

We witness Nina Simone's transformation from demure, evening-gowned chanteuse playing to an all-white audience on TV's Playboy After Dark, to vibrant political activist joyously singing songs of protest and revolution (No pacifist, she. Simone believed in violent retaliation). The documentary juxtaposes these wildly contrasting professional images with equally at-odds-with-themselves accounts of her stormy private life.

Revolution Evolution

Through interview footage, rare recordings, snippets from her journals, and a mercifully sparse sprinkling of talking head commentary from her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly (the film’s executive-producer), husband /manager Andrew Stroud, and lifelong friends; we learn not only was Simone’s art and life matched in complexity and anguish but that each in many ways grew out of the other.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

What Happened, Miss Simone? is gratifying on many levels. As someone who knew of  Nina Simone, but next to nothing about her, this look at her life is quite revelatory. Hats off to director Liz Garbus (Love, Marilyn) for mounting such a clear-eyed portrait of a legendary icon. I also like that it’s a fairly straightforward documentary. Eschewing the contemporary trend toward visual gimmickry and the overuse of showy graphics, What Happened, Miss Simone? deals with its subject in a direct, head-on manner complementary to the great woman herself. Neither hagiography nor hatchet-job, What Happened, Miss Simone? is merely honest. Honest in a way that ultimately proves very real and very moving.

What Happened, Miss Simone? has some exceptional interview footage

*Scary side-note (make that terrifying): Sobering and sad how so much of the film's difficult-to-watch violent footage from the 60s Civil Rights Movement looks like just America in 2015.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Although running a brisk 100 minutes, a major asset of What Happened, Miss Simone? is the amount of time it allocated to footage of Simone performing. Her voice has mesmerized me for years, but it's truly a remarkable experience watching her in action. She's electric and unpredictable. I especially got a charge out of a bit of concert footage showing Simone stopping mid-song to point to and shout authoritatively at someone in the audience, "Hey, girl, sit down!" followed by a loooong unbroken stare and a second demand, "Sit DOWN!" Following a satisfied nod of the head signifying either the patron's compliance or execution, Simone calmly resumes the song at the exact point she left off.
Magnificent! 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

My mother loved Nina Simone and played her records constantly when I was growing up. But as a child, I actually thought Nina Simone’s music was kind of scary. Not scary as in frightening, but somehow deeply sad and troubling in a way I was too young to understand. Of course, in retrospect, I know it was because the songs were too real. They weren't pop, they weren't escapist...they were authentic. Authentic in a way where I must have sensed (in that way kids can) that perhaps in her songs, she was saying things my mom felt, but could never say aloud.

Many years later, when the soundtrack to the 1993 movie, Point of No Return, introduced a whole new generation to Nina Simone (mostly hipsters and yuppies who, like those Playboy penthouse guests of yore, adored black music but black people, not so much), I seemed to listen to her with fresh ears. In place of what I once heard in her voice that scared me I heard the kind of naked self-exposure of a true artist. She wasn't just trying to make pretty sounds or packaging melodies for cocktail party consumption.

She was sharing the dejection of a sensitive, impressionable child told by the country of her birth that she was somehow less valuable, less beautiful, because of her skin. She sang about being a black woman of financial privilege who had to put on a smile and entertain while all around her African-American figures of hope were being killed off, one by one.
She opened up about her frustration in knowing that the more she sang about her personal truth as a black woman, the smaller her audiences would grow. In the midst of this was a woman battling a mental illness, a woman in an abusive relationship who visited that same violence onto her daughter. The dark, the light.
Nina Simone's genius lies in her ability to make poetry out of the contradictory and confounding ugliness and beauty that was her life. That triumph of What Happened, Miss Simone? is that it presents these sometimes unpleasant realities without ever diminishing the artistic legacy of this legendary woman with the soul-searing voice who was rightfully dubbed, The High Priestess of Soul.

PERSONAL FAVORITE NINA SIMONE RECORDINGS
Little Girl Blue (1958)
New World Coming (1971)
Just Like A Woman (1971)

Do What You Gotta Do (1968)
Sunday in Savannah (1968)
Here Comes the Sun (1971)

To Be Young, Gifted, and Black (1970)

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2015

DIE! DIE! MY DARLING! 1965

“Every play you send me is about a fiend! If I don’t murder somebody, I’m just about to. And if they are not after me, I’m after them. I tell you I cannot stand it any longer! Don’t you think I’m human? Don’t you think I’m ever helpless?”

Tallulah Bankhead playing a parody of herself (her full-time career by this point) in the 1953 film, Main Street to Broadway. Her penultimate film before Die! Die! My Darling!

Although I don’t recall now which program I saw initially, my first exposure to that legend of the American theater known as “The Alabama Foghorn”—Miss Tallulah Bankhead—was either when she portrayed the villainous Black Widow on TV’s Batman, or when she camped her way through a large-as-real-life impersonation of herself on reruns of The Celebrity Next Door episode of The Lucy & Desi Comedy Hour. The time was 1967, I was ten-years-old, and in both instances, what stands out strongest in my memory is that I’d never seen anything quite like her.

A prodigious personality who all but dared you to watch anyone else, Tallulah Bankhead didn’t just occupy space onscreen; she filled it. Her one-of-a-kind persona fairly overwhelming the senses of sight and sound. There was that trademark, thick mane of glamorous, movie-star hair; her broad range of almost-cartoonish facial expressions and reaction takes; the bold extravagance of her scene-stealing flamboyance of her gestures. But of course, Bankhead's chief distinction was her voice. That famous basso-profundo, bourbon-&-cigarettes drawl which eventually grew so slurred, just trying to decode her dialog became part of the fun.

Even at a time when distinctive, impersonation-worthy celebrities were in abundance (Garland, Merman, Hepburn, Liberace, etc.), Bankhead was still a heady dose of drag-queen bearing and outsize star quality.

Bankhead as Regina Giddens in the original 1939 Broadway production of The Little Foxes

As it would be several years before I’d see Bankhead playing it more or less straight in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944), and even more before the internet made possible the availability of her 1954 TV adaptation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler; for the longest time the exaggerated, panderingly self-parodic Tallulah Bankhead was the only Tallulah Bankhead I knew. A perception made indelible by the time Die! Die! My Darling!—Britain-based Hammer Films’ 1965 entry in the What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? / Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte psycho-biddy sweepstakes—began making the rounds on late-night TV.

Tallulah Bankhead as Mrs. Trefoile

Stefanie Powers as Patricia Carroll

Peter Vaughn as Harry

Yootha Joyce as Anna

Donald Sutherland as Joseph

Maurice Kaufmann as Alan Glentower

Adapted from the 1961 novel Nightmare by Elizabeth Linington (under the pseudonym, Anne Blaisdell), Die! Die! My Darling! is, as its UK title Fanatic, suggests, something of the flip side to Hitchcock’s Psycho. Or, to put it more accurately, it’s a movie that takes on Psycho’s Oedipal conundrum from the perspective of Norman Bates’ mother.

A pre-The Girl from UNCLE Stefanie Powers stars as Patricia Carroll, an American of unspecified profession visiting London with her British fiancé, Alan (Maurice Kaufmann), who’s a TV producer of some sort. Although essentially on a pre-wedding holiday together, Patricia (who, perhaps in the spirit of tourist bonhomie and “When in Rome” kinship, frequently lapses into a British accent) abandons her fiancé and motors to the countryside in an effort to achieve whatever the '60s word for closure is with the mother of her deceased ex-fiancé, Stephen.

Tallulah Bankhead is, of course, Stephen’s grieving mother, one Mrs. Trefoile, a devoutly religious eccentric living in ascetic seclusion in a somewhat dilapidated Gothic-Revival country house far away from telephones, neighbors, or anything else that might come to prove beneficial to an individual held captive. The widow Trefoile shares her home with an imposing, rather grim, lifesize portrait of her late husband in full military regalia; innumerable shrines to her departed son (including, it would seem, his ghost); and a cowed and cowering household staff she keeps at her bellowing beck and call.
The staff, a vaguely sinister-looking trio, each member appearing to have stepped right out of a Charles Addams cartoon, consists of Harry (Peter Vaughn), the lecherous, eternally skulking handyman; Anna, his compliant, strapping wife (Yootha Joyce); and the lumbering, simpleminded groundskeeper, Lurch…I mean, Joseph (Donald Sutherland). 

Let Us Prey

The initial meet and greet scenes between Patricia and Mrs. Trefoile are played for dark comedy and uneasy culture-clash laughs, the old woman’s despotic hospitality and strict religious adherence—no mirrors, makeup, or physical adornments of any kind—presented as whimsical eccentricity. But it isn't long before it becomes obvious that Mrs. Tefoile's pious exterior masks a pathological religious fanaticism broaching no leniency in matters perceived sinful or morally transgressive. In addition, Mrs. Trefoile’s devotion to her late son reveals a smothering maternal attachment rivaling that of Violet Venable in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer. 

It seems Mrs. Trefoile blames Patricia for her son’s abandonment and premature demise, and also sees the once-betrothed bride as her son’s rightful, eternal wife in the eyes of God. Confident in the belief that her son died a virgin (“So much more beloved by the almighty"), Mrs. Trefoile takes it upon herself to “cleanse” the soul of the deep-in-error Patricia by holding her captive, and, in true Christian tradition, induce her spiritual redemption though means of torture, abuse, and waving firearms about.

Although never seen, the presence of the much-discussed Stephen Trefoile is keenly felt throughout.
The too-pretty face staring out from the many portraits and paintings 
on first viewing had me anticipating a third act revelation that Stephen was gay.

Die! Die! My Darling! is an amusingly outré damsel in distress melodrama whose potential as an unsettling exercise in Gothic grotesquery is consistently undermined by Hammer Films’ characteristic insistence on giving the material its customary Vincent Price-style, tongue-in-cheek/ high-camp horror treatment. Indeed, part of what contributes to Die! Die! My Darling! eliciting more giggles than gasps is how there is rarely a moment in the film where one feels the cast, director Silvio Narizzano (Georgy Girl), screenwriter Richard Matheson (Trilogy of Terror), and composer Wilfred Josephs are all working in concert. No two people are making the same film at the same time.

Happily, the pitfalls of repetition that usually bedevil films in the cat-and-mouse genre (the wittily literal-minded title sequence features a demonic green cat in pursuit of a fuzzy pink mouse) are largely absent in Die! Die! My Darling! thanks to the appealing performances of the lead players and the dominant role afforded the female characters.
I generally tend to find movies about men holding women captive to be too laboriously misogynist in their execution to inspire anything other than indifference or impatience on my part (I disliked William Wyler’s masterly The Collector [1965] as intensely as I did the infinitely inferior Tattoo [1981] and Boxing Helena [1993]). But when captive and captor are of the same sex, the sight of a loony bible-thumper and her butch maid taking the starch out of a genteel sophisticate proves not only a lot less problematic, but said spectacle is substantially sillier and more entertaining than it has any right to be. 

Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves

Had Die! Die! My Darling! been released in the US under its UK title, Fanatic, perhaps one could entertain the idea of a serious-minded thriller about a mentally unbalanced religious fanatic enacting revenge on the woman she deems responsible for her son’s death. After all, films like The Haunting, Psycho, The Innocents, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and the aforementioned Suddenly Last Summer have shown that bizarre themes don’t automatically lend themselves to the exploitation treatment. However, a title like Die! Die! My Darling! primes you for one thing and one thing only: Craptacular entertainment. Thus, with the horror genre bar set roughly around ankle height, and tongue lodged firmly in cheek, Bankhead & Co. head off to Camp Hammer.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Considered to be the first color film in the Horror Hag genre, Die! Die! My Darling! is a straightforward, if tonally at-odds-with-itself, exercise in funhouse terror. Self-aware to the point of self-parody, Die! Die! My Darling!, in its attempt to cash in on the '60s trend of casting aging leading ladies of the silver screen as human gargoyles; dusts off every cliché in the damsel-in-distress book and employs them with the dutiful compliance to format as a child with a paint-by-numbers set.

After an efficient, exposition-filled opening sequence, Die! Die! My Darling! quickly gets down to the business of clocking up as many genre cliché’s as its 97-minute running time will allow. First, there’s the lovely and refined Stefanie Powers as the victim/heroine, embodying just the right balance of resourcefulness and dumb-as-a-doornail stupidity necessary to the genre. Playing a strong-willed, independent-minded character, her mode of dress, makeup, and coiffure are so highlighted by the film that we know right off the bat that the film will soon ask us to revel (a la Tippi Hedren in The Birds) in her ultimate humbling and degradation. Fans of glamorous suffering are certain to enjoy monitoring the effect prolonged captivity and abuse have on Powers’ pouffy ’60s hairdo and tastefully natural makeup.

Stefanie Powers, Seized By Panic Upon Discovering 
She's Been Forcefully Imprisoned Without Any Moisturizer

Next in line, appearing in what Hammer Films at this point might as well have labeled "The Vincent Price Role," is the absolutely splendid Tallulah Bankhead. Splendid not because her performance is especially nuanced, but because, for the material at hand, she's 100% on the money. Like Price, Bankhead has the gift of deliberate excess; she pitches her Mrs. Trefoile forcefully and hammily over-the-top, yet it lands precisely at the level of serio-comic histrionics a chunk of chiller-diller cheese like this calls for.

Tallulah Bankhead, who once said to a director, "Don't talk to me about camp, dahling, I invented it!" gives a terrifically raw and epically theatrical performance in Die! Die! My Darling!  Her delivery and facial expressions alone being worth the price of admission. If you've ever wondered what it would look like for a human being to react in the pop-eyed, exaggerated manner of a Tex Avery cartoon character, just get a load of La Bankhead's reaction in the scene where Powers enters the room wearing a scarlet red sweater. She's pure camp cinema gold!

"The Devil's Entertainment!"
Legendary hedonist Bankhead is cast as a former stage actress saved from a life of sin by religion.
The in-joke irony was not lost on audiences

PERFORMANCES

Had director Silvio Narizzano been granted his wish of casting British stage actress Flora Robson (Black Narcissus) in the role of Mrs. Trefoile, Die! Die! My Darling! would have been a very different film indeed. A director from television making his first feature film, the openly-gay Narizzano had no interest in turning his debut effort into a flaming camp-fest, but Bankheads's attachment to the project made it a fait accompli. Narizzano has gone on record as not being very fond of Bankhead’s performance here (not surprisingly, the actress was intoxicated a great deal of the time) and for finding the hyperactive musical score more appropriate to a cartoon than a suspense thriller. 

Similar Themes - Similar Posters

As psychological thrillers go, Die! Die! My Darling! suffers a bit from having an atmosphere that's neither afoot nor horseback. It’s not sufficiently committed to the genuinely dramatic potential of its premise, nor is it truly willing to just go for broke and be the full-on black comedy self-sendup it keeps flirting with. For a sense of what Die! Die! My Darling! could have been had they played it straight, check out the terrific 1972 Patty Duke thriller You'll Like My Mother. Stabbing suspense! Shear shock!

Personally, I think Bankhead totally slays as Mrs. Trefoile (no pun intended). Sure, she's camp as all getout, but I don't find her performance to be any more overcooked than say, Al Pacino in Scarface or Jack Nicholson in The Shining. In fact, she has quite a few moments where she's genuinely quite affecting (her reading of the line, "This was his room," while showing Patricia the house is heartbreaking). I relish every minute she's onscreen.
Meanwhile, the likable and always appealing Stefanie Powers—a Columbia Pictures contract player at the time and assigned to the film—relies a bit too heavily on "indicating" her emotions. When in peril, her eyes widen, her mouth falls agape, she even trembles...but I never believe for a minute she's ever in the throes of any kind of anguish.
After reading her memoirs, in which she comes across as smart and self-aware, I wonder if she simply knew exactly what kind of film she was making and merely played to the genre.

Harry & Anna
Game of Thrones' Peter Vaughn and the late Yootha Joyce are first-rate as the bickering couple drawn into Mrs. Trefoile's plot. Bankhead's oft-repeated baritone bellow,  "ANNA!" is a thing of beauty.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Hammer Films are known for their low-budget extravagance and overripe Gothic style. Die! Die! My Darling! is no exception.

This Psycho-inspired scene makes stylized, vivid use of color

The dramatic visual compositions of cinematographer Arthur Ibbetson (Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,  A Little Night Music) are often at odds with the film's overly-jaunty musical score.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

What is the whole Grand Dame Guignol genre but an amplification of the movie industry’s (society’s?) fear & loathing of women no longer young and desirable? Is the popularity and proliferation of  “Hagsploitation” films in '60s directly attributable to the boxoffice clout of the youth market—a generation of moviegoers disdainful and distrustful of the elderly? Can the genre’s deep-rooted fear of women, specifically those perceived as threatening due to an absence of male-defined role identification (the villains in these films are always single, widowed, divorced, or spinsters), be traced to that gynophobic film noir archetype, the femme fatale? 

I daresay that even my own lazy signifier, camp, when attributed to these films and their stars, betrays a somewhat dismissive attitude toward the depiction of female aggression. 

I don’t know if the genre began with Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond in 1950s Sunset Boulevard (“There’s nothing tragic about turning fifty. Unless you’re trying to be twenty-five!”), a film that subtly exploited Gloria Swanson’s age and real-life status as a silent movie queen. But like that film, Die! Die! My Darling! relies, at least in part, on getting subliminal mileage out of the public’s awareness of Tallulah Bankhead’s fading theatrical renown and visible decline.
The horror genre has never been particularly kind to women anyway, but if one can extract a positive out of this curiously popular subgenre, it's that it provided some marvelously juicy lead roles to many actresses who'd otherwise be relegated to the sidelines in mainstream fare. (My mind goes to that great femme fatale of the '40s, Jane Greer, abandoned to a nondescript "mom" role in 1965's Billie.)

In a world of Tallulah Bankhead imitators (Lucille Ball on her TV show, Bette Davis in All About Eve, and my favorite, Roddy McDowall in Evil Under the Sun), Tallulah Bankhead was still the best Tallulah Bankhead impersonator around. Which is precisely why I can enjoy her work in Die! Die! My Darling! without a trace of pity or sense that she is being exploited. I can’t help but take my hat off to the actress, plagued as she was by addictions and fears, coming back to films after so many years and still able to wipe everybody else off the screen. She was camp, she was over-the-top, but she was her own creation…one of the first genuine divas, and a true original.

Although she did voice work for a stop-animation children's film in 1966, Die! Die! My Darling! was Tallulah Bankhead's final feature film appearance. She died in 1968 at the age of 66.

BONUS MATERIAL

Looped

In 2013, Stefanie Powers, stepping in for an ailing Valerie Harper, portrayed Tallulah Bankhead in Looped. A Broadway play based on the real-life events surrounding an inebriated Bankhead being called in to loop a line of dialogue for Die! Die! My Darling!

The single line of dialogue:“And Patricia, as I was telling you, even though that deluded rector has in literal effect closed the church to me, I have, as you’ll note, tried to maintain proper service to the Lord in my own home." - allegedly took eight hours to record.

Bankhead's triumphant return to London in August of 1964 to begin filming on Die! Die! My Darling! hit a literal snag when (according to Powers) the actress's foot caught on the lip of a stair at the entrance to The Ritz Hotel with cameras present to capture the event. Of course, the press had a field day, resulting in the insecure Bankhead developing an instant case of laryngitis.

Unless it's been removed, somewhere online is a marvelous video of Stefanie Powers speaking at a screening of Die! Die! My Darling! She relates many amusing anecdotes about Bankhead and the making of the film. For instance, Bankhead and Powers developed a friendship while making the movie, and all during the filming and for years after, Bankhead referred to Powers exclusively by her screen name, Patricia. 

Tallulah takes a trip to The Automat  1957

UK Quad Poster with Original Title 

Die! Die! My Darling! opened in Los Angeles 

on Wednesday, June, 16, 1965 at the Pix Theater on Hollywood Blvd. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2015

MAPS TO THE STARS 2014

Warning: Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay on David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars, not a review, therefore many crucial plot points are revealed for the purpose of analysis. 

A treasured volume in my library is a hardbound copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology, gifted to me by my sweetheart countless birthdays ago. This entertaining, exhaustively encyclopedic collection of classical Greek and Roman myths (with the mysteries of the universe interpreted and scaled to human dimensions) is something of a folkloric map to the stars itself. Here, the inexplicable is named, given human form, and all that is mysterious and random in the galaxy is attributed to the capricious whims and petty rivalries of an incestuous clan of demigods and goddesses holding forth from their thrones in the heavens. At their core, these ancient fables are operatic family dramas and morality tales about overindulged gods & goddesses with too much power and too few boundaries. Leading insular lives of emotional inertia, these mythical deities manipulate the elements (e.g., fire and water) for amusement, and are not above creating chaos out of boredom.

The unfettered moral license of these gods (who have the power to reward favored mortals by turning them into constellations) leads to the marrying of siblings; the abandoning of their temperaments to fervid jealousies and rivalries over imagined slights; and, more often than not, the sort of violent and bloody final-act retribution that gives Greek Tragedy its name.

All of this filled my mind and fueled my thoughts while watching David Cronenberg’s brilliant Maps to the Stars. A modern mythological family tragedy set amongst the flawed, emotionally disfigured gods and goddesses of contemporary pop culture (movie stars) from the airless heights of that insulated Mount Olympus known as Hollywood. 

Julianne Moore as Havana Segrand

Mia Wasikowska as Agatha Weiss

Olivia Williams as Cristina Weiss

John Cusak as Dr. Stafford Weiss

Robert Pattinson as Jerome Fontana

Evan Bird as Benjamin Weiss

Havana Segrand (Moore) is a Hollywood falling-star suffering the first pangs of impending obsolescence, and, consequently, lives in a near-constant state of naked desperation. A desperation not quelled by yoga, meditation, narcotics, age-regression therapy, or “purpose fucking” (sex with well-placed industry types for the purpose of their putting in a good word for you when they can). In a town where the question, “Isn’t she old?” ‒ the definitive dismissal ‒ is asked in relation to 23-year-olds, Havana literally clings to her prominently-displayed Genie (Canadian Film Award) while discussing dwindling career options with her pragmatic agent, whose name is, oddly enough, Genie. 

Hungry for career rejuvenation, Havana fixates on landing the starring role in Stolen Waters, a reimagining (Hollywood-speak for remake) of a 60s cult film which starred her late mother, actress Clarice Taggart (Sarah Gadon) who died tragically in a fire in 1976. Havana’s desire to be cast in a role that would in effect have her playing her mother, is an obsession unabated by claims on Havana’s part that she was a victim of her mother’s physical and sexual abuse as a child. Nor the distressing fact that her mother – abusive as ever  –  has begun to appear to her as a ghost. 

Clarice Taggert in Stolen Waters

This film within a film, which gets its title from the biblical proverb "Stolen waters are sweet, bread eaten in secret is pleasant," figures prominently in the lives of several characters in Maps to the Stars. 
The film itself, which seems to be about a seductive, schizophrenic patient at a mental institution, not only carries allusions to the character of Agatha (Wasikowska), but reminded me a great deal of the 1964 Jean Seberg/Warren Beatty film, Lilith. In that film, Seberg plays a schizophrenic patient in a mental institution and Beatty a therapist who's doomed by his obsession with her. In Hebrew mythology, Lilith is the name for a female demon representing seduction and chaos.

Astronomy maps may reveal the gravitational interlink of star clusters in the heavens, but the boulevards and intersections on those geographical maps to the stars’ homes sold on Los Angeles street corners can’t begin to chart the inbred network of aligned interests and commingled gene pools that make up Hollywood. In Maps to the Stars, Havana’s central storyline is orbited by a cast of characters whose lives at first seem unrelated, but later reveal themselves, in almost Altmanesque fashion, to be just as incestuously interconnected as everything else in the City of Angels.

First, there’s Benjie Weiss (Bird), the obnoxious child star of a lucrative movie franchise. A recovering drug addict at thirteen, Benjie is already beset by the fear of being replaced by a new and younger model, and his nights are haunted by visions of the ghosts of two dead children. His ambitious stage mother (an anxiously flinty Olivia Williams) dotes on him as one would a valuable commodity, while his narcissistic father (Cusak) is too busy managing his career as the nation’s best-selling self-help guru (“Secrets Kill!”) to be of much help to anyone beyond his high-profile clients.

The Magical Child
The ghosts that appear to Benjie are those of the drowned child of a rival (another of Havana's manifest wishes - like the fiery death of her mother), and a cancer victim whose body in death is adorned with tattoos of maps to the stars. Tattoo patterns that look unsettlingly similar to Agatha's disfiguring burns.

The mysterious catalyst for joining these individuals is Agatha (Wasikowska), a schizophrenic teenage burn victim of mysterious origin who comes to town to, in her words, Make amends,” but serves as the narrative’s uniting thread and unwitting agent of chaos. Representative of the interrelated nature of this city of beautiful grotesques itself, Agatha is biologically linked to some characters, spiritually linked to others.
 Agatha’s journey from Florida to Los Angeles by bus suggests a meagerness of funds contradicting her engagement of the film’s final character, Jerome Fontana (Pattinson), the limousine chauffeur with the celebrity-ready name, to escort her to a particularly significant Hollywood site upon arrival. Fontana, like everyone else in Hollywood who isn’t already actually in the film business, is a wannabe. In this case a wannabe actor/screenwriter hired to drive the chariot for someone who turns out to be this modern myth’s angel of doom/redeemer.

A cast-out *angel surveys the ruins of Mount Olympus (aka the Hollywood Hills)
*After I posted this screencap, my partner brought my attention to the fact that the holes in Agatha's top create "wings" on her back (or the scars of the wings lost after breaking the rules of heaven)...how did I miss that? 

Written by one-time Hollywood chauffeur Bruce Wagner (who penned 1989s rather awful but marvelously titled, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills), Maps to the Stars has the wittily bilious tone of the work of a Hollywood barely-insider: someone close enough to get the details right, but not so favored by the gods as to have been ensnared and blinded by the intoxicating siren song of fame, wealth, and status.

Less a Hollywood satire than a fame culture fable with elements of magic realism, Maps to the Stars is my kind of movie…which isn’t the same thing as saying it’s a slam dunk crowd-pleaser I’d recommend to everyone. Like a great many of David Cronenberg’s films, your appreciation of it has a lot to do with how comfortable you are being made uncomfortable.

But like the dream fantasies of Robert Altman (Images, 3 Women) or Polanski’s raw glimpses into the dark nature of relationships (Venus in Fur, Carnage), Maps to the Stars is an exploration of the condition I find most compelling in films: humanity in extremis.

Worshiping at the Altar of Fame

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Whether a genuine part of Cronenberg’s vision or merely a projection born of my fondness for Greek mythology (I suspect it’s a little of both), I love the idea of Maps to the Stars being something of a modern take on the classic Greek tragedy. 

Hollywood, with its temporal gods and goddesses engaged in hollow conflicts in pursuit of ignoble victories, makes for a terrific modern-day Mount Olympus, just as the town’s self-centeredness and overabundance of swimming pools suggest the reflective springs of Mount Helicon which seduced (and ultimately drowned) Narcissus. 

Wash Away My Sins
Plagued by guilt and the burden of secrets, Cristina suffers an emotional breakdown. The dual elements of fire and water - to either purify or destroy - are recurring motifs running throughout Maps to the Stars. 

In the interwoven stories of the protagonists, all the elements of Greek tragedy are there: Secrets, ambition, incest, jealousies, violence, ghosts, visions, morality, purification through self-immolation, redemption, liberation, and the godlike summoning of the elements of fire and water. 

Agatha, whose name means “good” in Greek, arrives in Hollywood dressed in a manner to conceal the scars from burns suffered in a fire she started as a child. Among the Hollywood trendoids, she looks as if she's from another planet. In fact, when asked where she’s from, she responds, “Jupiter.” We know she's been institutionalized for arson in Florida, so we take it to mean she’s from the city of Jupiter, Florida. But Jupiter is also the name of the Greek god who married his sister, Juno. And as we later learn, Agatha is a child born of incest.

Carrie Fisher as Herself
A central theme of Maps to the Stars is the incestuous nature of Hollywood. Havana Segrand is an actress haunted (literally) by her actress mother, yet longs to play her in a film. Carrie Fisher, daughter of actress Debbie Reynolds, wrote Postcards from the Edge, a semi-autobiographical book and film about the troubled relationship between an actress and her considerably more-famous mother. The presence of Carrie Fisher in the film can't help but also evoke thoughts of Star Wars and all those incestuous Leia/Luke/Vader familial subthemes. 

PERFORMANCES

Maps to the Stars reminds me so much of those 70s films that made me fall in love with movies in the first place. Of course, a major selling point from the getgo is the absence of anything Comic-Con suitable in the narrative, but I really found the characters and the film’s attempt to say something real about our culture incredibly fascinating. It's a funny, frightening, ugly, sad, brutal film that is ultimately very moving (and touching). And the film earns bonus points for doing so in a way that refuses to spell everything out. 

Best of all are the performances of the uniformly excellent cast. John Cusak oozes smug menace, Evan Bird’s repellent child star shows the wounds of neglect, and in the film’s least-developed role, Robert Pattinson (this is the first film I’ve ever seen him in) is so good you wish he’d been given more to do.

However, Maps to the Stars really belongs to the women. Oscar-winner Julianne Moore gives one of those totally raw, risk-taking performances that's likely to divide audiences. Me, I've met my share of Havana Segrands in my time, and Moore seriously nails it in her willingness to “go there” in her searingly naked depiction of the ugliest aspects of what it has come to mean to be a movie star.

False idol?
Havana's Genie award plays too significant a role in her life.
Incidentally, director David Cronenberg is a five-time Genie Award winner 

I first saw Mia Wasikowska many years ago on the superb HBO series, In Treatment. She impressed me then, as she does now, with her natural presence on the screen. A calming presence that nevertheless has an edge to it. An edge bordering on mystery, vulnerability, and a lurking sense of something perhaps unsavory in her nature. She's quite hypnotic here, appearing open yet as closed off as a clam.
Love how when we first see her she is cloaked in a souvenir crew jacket for "Bad Babysitter," Benjamin's endangered movie franchise. Of course, we later discover find out Agatha herself was the ultimate bad babysitter; almost killing her brother when they were children and he was left in her charge.

Rounding out this trifecta of female perfection is Olivia Williams. Long one of my favorite actresses, Williams balances out Moore's scattered self-enchantment and Wasikowska's cloaked inscrutability with an intense characterization of a woman hanging on by a thread on the verge of an abyss. As one of those armies of bright, intelligent women whose every waking moment is devoted to the career of her child (Hollywood is loaded with them), Williams is a vibrating livewire of frustrations and barely contained tensions, Williams is both terrifying and heartbreaking as the stage mother whose fatal flaw is that, deep beneath her steely facade, she may not be quite soulless enough to survive in Hollywood. 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

A major asset to any film is having a director in control of what message they’re trying to convey. Like many films set in the world of privilege and power, Maps to the Stars is an indictment of the malignant allure of wealth and fame and its potential to foster delusions and corrupt the soul. But Canadian-born David Cronenberg - this is his first film [partially] shot in the US - succeeds where Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby and Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street so miserably failed: he’s able to depict the excesses of extensive wealth without simultaneously glamorizing it.  

On the Rodeo Road to Recovery
Havana (seen here with brand-new personal assistant, Agatha) self-medicates
by spending $18,000 on clothes at Valentino

As a longtime LA resident who’s worked for many years as a personal trainer in the same peripheral capacity to celebrities as Map to the Stars’ interchangeable chauffeurs and “chore whores” (personal assistants); trust me, there’s nothing satiric or exaggerated about the details of celebrity life depicted in this movie.

The grotesquely oversized homes feel sterile and devoid of inhabitants; the children who act like adults, the adults who like children; entire identities are invested in one’s desirability or employability (often one and the same); and everybody feels so guilty for living lives of such undeserved privilege they seek absolution in self-serving spirituality, health foods,  narcotics, holistic drugs, and alcohol. Better than any film I’ve seen in recent years, Maps to the Stars captures the isolated, bubble-like existence of Hollywood’s rich and famous. A space so airless and devoid of perspective or self-awareness it actually could be what so many already assume it to be…another planet.

Stafford Weiss, self-help shaman-to-the-stars, guides Havana through one of her body's
"Personal history points." *Note the barefoot shoes - an instant douchebag signifier

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Maybe it’s just me, but movies set in Hollywood seem to take on a mythological quality without even trying. The stuff of Greek tragedy: fate, love, loss, retribution, redemption, ambition, hubris, abuse of power – sounds like your typical studio pitch meeting!

What makes Hollywood so ripe for mythologizing is the city, in its present incarnation anyway, represents something of a Paradise Lost. It's a place blessed by the gods with ideal weather and sublime vistas, yet it's also a community of artists with the potential to globally elevate and inspire (figuratively speaking, people in the film business make dreams for a living). But what is Hollywood in reality? A place where everyone has smiled into the face of the devil and allowed themselves to be blinded by the golden glare of fame and wealth.

Inner Peace
Movie stars tend to use spirituality as a means to justify self-absorption and rationalize materialism.
Here Havana's tranquility takes a major hit with the news that she's lost out on a coveted movie role 

David Cronenberg, master of the “body horror” genre, parallels Agatha’s external disfigurement (which she goes to great pains to conceal) with the internal spiritual decay of Hollywood’s beautiful people (which they make no effort to conceal at all). Agatha’s arrival is disruptive because her desire to make amends really means forcing others to confront and/or expose their secrets.  

Just as Havana’s regression therapy is a means of confronting her past through the reliving of it; Agatha ritualistically recites Paul Éluard’s poem, Liberty, while one pair of siblings ceremoniously restages the wedding of another pair of siblings (their parents), in order to free themselves from the toxic damage of that bond. To free themselves from the chain of addiction, cycle of abuse, legacy of mental illness, and the curse of ghostly hauntings.

Dressed for A Date With Destiny

The burning of Los Angeles is a vivid metaphor of purification in Nathanael West's classic novel, The Day of the Locust. In that book and in the brilliant 1975 film, West depicted a Hollywood devoid of love and undeserving of redemption. David Cronenberg finds contemporary Hollywood to be at least as monstrously grotesque as West did back in 1939, but he also posits the possibility that it is a city capable of reclamation.

"Love is Stronger than Death"

On my school notebooks
On my desk and on the trees
On the sand and on the snow
I write your name

On all the flesh that says yes
On the forehead of my friends
On every hand held out
I write your name

Liberty

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2015