At this year's Cannes Film Festival there were two actresses who generated a lot of buzz to win the best actress prize: Julianne Moore as a self-destructing actress in "Maps to the Stars" and Marion Cotillard as a woman trying to get her job back in "Deux Jours, Une Nuit (Two Days, One Night)". Moore walked away with the prize, but who's to say one performance was truly better than the other?
These are two different roles in two vastly different movies and the end result are two great films with strong empowered women driving them to greatness.
Maps to the Stars (2014, directed by David Cronenberg. U.S.A./Canada, English, Color, 112 minutes) No one can make a film more unpredictable and fluid than Cronenberg, and "Maps to the Stars" proves it. In this ensemble piece we follow the dark side of the Hollywood system. Julianne Moore is the driving force here as the washed-up, Lindsay Lohan-esque character Havana Segrand, who's trying to revamp her career. In her aura is her psychologist (John Cusack), his teenage movie star (Evan Bird), a limo driver (Robert Pattinson) and a recent L.A. transplant named Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) with mysterious motives.
All of the stars align in this unpredictable and totally engaging piece about the Hollywood machine, thanks in great part to Bruce Wagner's script and Julianne Moore's tip-top performance. Never have I seen Moore act like such a Hollywood wreck, and I enjoyed it so much. From an actress who has played so many dramatic characters, here she does a 180 as a partying, completely unstable product of overindulgence and a lack of talent... like Lindsay Lohan. Equal parts haunting, funny and sad, "Maps to the Stars" balances a lot of characters and storylines flawlessly and with delicate care to each. You may not like some of the characters, but who in Hollywood is ever likable? At least this tries to explain it.
Rating: A
