VOX LUX Review
One would hardly associate a horrific school shooting with the turbulent journey of a worldwide pop music sensation but director and co-writer Brady Corbet is a filmmaker whose imagination knows no bounds apparently. Following up his highly stylized slow burn profile of a rising fascist in THE CHILDHOOD OF A LEADER, with assistance from co-writer Mona Fastvold (who returns for co-writing duties here), Corbet naturally pivots to the highly stylized slow burn profile of a rising superstar in VOX LUX. Go figure.
Anywho, this “Twenty-First Century Profile” as the film’s supporting title states, follows Celeste, the future pop superstar of music at various stages in her career. Just as in his previous film, Corbet stylishly separates the film into “Acts” that detail Celeste’s ominous beginnings as the sole-survivor-of-a-school-shooting-turned-nationwide-starlet (Raffey Cassidy) all the way to her present standing as a world famous pop star (Natalie Portman) on the verge of flaming out. Throughout this journey, narrated with ethereal omniscience from Willem Dafoe for some reason, Celeste deals with her internal trauma in addition to her interactions with her attached sister (Stacy Martin), her gruff and troublesome manager (Jude Law), her put-upon daughter (Raffey Cassidy, again) and a world that only uses her for her hit singles.
Powered by an atmosphere of creeping dread and random acts of mass violence, VOX LUX is otherwise a standard tale of the pitfalls of superstardom placed on the shoulders of the very young and naive. Despite those moments of brutal violence that surround Celeste’s life, which are shot with slow creeping malice and coldness, the story itself seems to be content with staying close to a familiar path that showcases a superstar’s downfall without any of the smaller details that would allow an audience to truly care for its protagonist. While the story practically seethes with anger at a system designed to use up any unlucky young talented kid caught in its path, VOX LUX can’t overcome its familiarity. In fact, one could easily describe this as a brutal cinematic rebuttal to films such as A STAR IS BORN, which despite that film’s penchant for wallowing in its characters misery as well, nonetheless soared on the film’s central love story. In VOX LUX, Celeste has no love, outside of her sister who she of course slowly pushes away with cruelty and resentment, exemplifying the film’s core idea that superstardom is a never-ending hell of drug habits, mental breakdowns, and violent massacres. While the film doesn’t need a central love story to be good, the film’s pattern for displaying a lack of humanity for no other reason other than to say something about pop culture in America is less than enthralling and the film sometimes threatens to drown in its own coldness.
Despite this coldness, the performances on display seem to try and bring life to the proceedings (to various effects) as Cassidy plays Young Celeste with the right mix of innocence and trauma and Law plays good counter to that with his devilish smarm. Elsewhere, it was disappointing to see Portman put in a less than stellar performance as Adult Celeste, as she adopts an SNL-worthy Staten Island accent out of nowhere (which granted, the character is a SI native, but Cassidy displays little of that accent in her time as Young Celeste causing a needless peculiarity) and plays her character more as a cartoon-ish depiction of a celebrity on the downturn rather than the more human performance showcased from her younger acting partner. And oh yeah! It’s nice to see Christopher Abbott pop up for a bit and play a nosy reporter for one scene.
Even so, one cannot deny the cinematic style on display here from Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley whose lush images nevertheless effectively evoke a cold and decaying world while still displaying a perfect feel for the film’s more “poppy” elements such as Celeste’s dazzling music videos and concert performances. With assistance from real-life popstar Sia, who penned the film’s original (and more or less forgettable, probably intentionally so) pop songs, VOX LUX seems to have a handle on the world its targeting. Additionally, while definitely superfluous, I did highly enjoy the film’s old school beginning and end credits, which scroll from the bottom or top of the screen, enveloping the screen with the cast and crew of the film.
Overall though, VOX LUX is another pretty picture with a frustrating lack of details from Mr. Corbet. Ironically so, in his cinematic quest to show the deeper hollowness of a pop star’s life, the film becomes what it portrays, displaying images of grandeur and excess with style which inevitably mask the emptiness beneath all the theatrics.
2.5/5
