Maps To The Stars

In David Cronenberg’s seething LA satire Maps To The Stars, Hollywood is a place where a “disfigured schizophrenic” gets off the bus from backwater Florida and a week later is driving a convertible, instantly at home in this rarefied realm of grotesque wealth and sociopathic privilege.

A Greek tragedy in the form of a caustic comedy, Bruce Wagner’s script turns the lives of celebrity-culture’s modern-day gods into fable for a self-consuming society, Hollywood, here, a realm of decadence and death. Its denizens are haunted, often literally: Julianne Moore an aging starlet involved in a vindictive/victimised dialogue with the cruel ghost of her belle-who-died-young mother, Sarah Gadon; Evan Bird a cunty tween superstar visited by the spectre of a girl he PR-opp visited on her deathbed; Mia Wasikowska the upwardly-mobile schizophrenic whose burns are the scars of past building-to-the-big-reveal trauma. John Cusack plays a new-age soothsayer who presides over the trio – and a media empire – with his healing hands, spouting quasi-mystical jargon rich with self-help platitudes, 12-step philosophies and self-mythologising horseshit.

Wagner’s righteously-revolted, smirkingly-namedropping script is full of familiar satirical tropes – Machiavellian momagers, Shylock agents, production power-plays – but Cronenberg, as is his way, literalises the horrors-of-Hollywood into a horror-film, the movie-biz a glittering necropolis, celebrity itself a veritable deathwish.