Fleur Macdonald

David Cronenberg’s Map to the Stars: threesomes, incest, a dead dog and whiny farts

In a scene that sticks from Map to the Stars, David Cronenberg’s Grand Guignol of a Hollywood satire, Julianne Moore, playing an ageing Hollywood never-has-been, sits on the loo in front of her PA, expelling tired whiny farts from her arse, while listing – her trout pout doing its best impression of a quivering anus – the names of the laxatives and prescriptive drugs she needs as if they were old friends. Except she doesn’t have any friends; the only people she knows are casting directors who don’t call back.

And it’s no wonder Havana Segrand’s bodily functions have stalled (surely a first for Cronenberg). Not only is she plagued by visions of her dead mother, a cult actress who died in a fire, but her therapist, John Cusack – ever brilliant and a dead ringer for David Guest these days – seems to be an alumnus of the same school of self-help as Patrick Swayze in Donnie Darko or Tom Cruise in Magnolia.

Her hallucinations could well be caused by her attempts to resurrect her career by starring in the remake of the film that made her mother famous. But her therapist’s too busy massaging her thighs in search of childhood trauma to suggest that. His own family is playing up too: his wife, glacial tiger mom Olivia Williams, seems on permanent edge of a nervous breakdown and his son, a child star who makes Justin Bieber look balanced, is hurtling towards his second.

So far, so Hollywood. But everyday life is disrupted by the arrival of Mia Wasikowska’s Agatha, an out-of-town ingenue with mysterious scars who, through a chance meeting with Carrie Fisher, gets a job as Havana’s PA, or rather her ‘chore whore’. It says something that among the denizens of Hollywood, a ‘disfigured schizophrenic’ comes across as relatively normal – even though she’s clearly up to something.

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