![]() ![]() He and cinematographer Lol Crawley are constantly boxing the caterwauling chanteuse into concrete backstage corridors or eerily empty hotel hallways. But it’s also elegantly augmented here by Corbet’s cool visual control. Inspired in no small fashion by the antics of Gena Rowlands in John Cassavetes’ 1977 classic “Opening Night,” Portman’s ensuing mega-meltdown is enough to make the paint peel off most movie theater walls. ![]() But the superstar’s well-oiled publicity machine is knocked off axis by news of yet another mass shooting, this one on a beach in Croatia where gunmen were wearing the disco mirrorball masks made famous in Celeste’s most popular music video. The second hour of “Vox Lux” chronicles a chaotic press day intended to promote Celeste’s comeback concert that evening, her first after a troubled two years of substance abuse episodes and related legal woes. Nowadays I’m all-in for this insane accent phase of her career. (Speaking as someone often irked by Portman’s wan, affectless line readings, it took her baroquely stylized performance as the former First Lady in 2016’s “Jackie” to really turn me around on the actress. It’s a ferociously oversized, boldly theatrical turn that some critics have claimed capsizes the movie. (Cassidy sticks around to play the star’s teenage daughter in a bit of stunt casting that turns unexpectedly haunting.) A floundering basket case with a mile-high pompadour, talons for nails and eyeliner to match her school shooter’s, Portman fusses and fidgets while shrieking her lines in a deafening Noo Yawk honk. (Only Dafoe could put such a bone-dry spin on the line, “Celeste’s loss of innocence curiously mirrored that of a nation.”)īut it is in the “gaudy and unlivable present” that the film truly roars, leaping ahead to 2017 with Natalie Portman taking over as the now 31-year-old Celeste. Of course Celeste’s deflowering via a heavy metal guitarist would just so happen to coincide with not merely a heartbreaking betrayal by Eleanor and their scuzzy, dirtbag manager (Jude Law), but also news that a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center. “Vox Lux” is a burly, overbearing piece of filmmaking, often horrifically funny and excitingly unencumbered by questions of good taste or worries about when to say when. Corbet is the opposite of ingratiating, coming on strong again here with stark montages of brutalist architecture and a pummeling, discordant score by avant-garde musician Scott Walker. The 30-year-old Corbet came up as an actor working for international arthouse terrors like Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier, whose influences are all over both “Vox Lux” and his thrillingly nasty 2016 directorial debut, “The Childhood of a Leader.” He’s got a cutting, curdled sensibility you seldom see from actors behind the camera, who often exhibit a performer’s natural desire to please the audience. Fourteen-year-old Celeste Montgomery (played as a kid by the quietly coltish Raffey Cassidy) survives, albeit with a bullet permanently lodged in the back of her neck.Ĭeleste and her churchy older sister Eleanor (Stacy Martin) pen an uplifting ballad of perseverance to sing at the candlelight vigil - a song that with a few tweaks from a savvy producer soon becomes a smash hit single, cannily cashing in on our national tendency to turn individual grief into collective kitsch. Unsubtly subtitled "A Twenty-First Century Portrait," Corbet’s film is very much concerned with historical and cultural signifiers, beginning on “the eve of the new millennium” in 1999 with a harrowing school shooting on Staten Island. Or, as I texted a friend shortly after the screening, “This movie is kind of an a-hole and I think I love it.” How you feel about such a line will probably determine what you make of the movie, succinctly summing up as it does this picture’s bracingly ostentatious style and dyspeptic diagnosis of contemporary American malaise. ![]() ![]() About halfway through writer-director Brady Corbet’s electrifyingly obnoxious “Vox Lux,” the sardonic, unseen narrator voiced by a wry Willem Dafoe describes our pop superstar protagonist as "prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present that had reached an extreme of its cycle." ![]()
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