Maps to the Stars (2014)

Maps to the Stars is a project its writer Bruce Wagner has been trying to get made for decades. It had its start as a self published book called Force Majeure: The Bud Wiggins Stories, featuring the character of Bud Wiggins, a Hollywood limo driver, a job that Wagner had worked himself as a young man. Wagner would go on to a varied carrier as a novelist, screen writer, actor, and producer, even directing a couple of times. All of this, as well as a childhood spent in L.A., where his father was a producer on Les Crane's television talk show, would feed into this script (which Wagner would adapt into a 2012 novel called Dead Stars) and director David Cronenberg would turn into this movie.

The finished project has Robert Pattinson playing the young limo driver and aspiring actor/writer, only now his characters name is Jerome Fontana and he's not even the central player in the story. Instead that axial role is played by Mia Wasikowska as Agatha, a mildly disfigured 18 year old girl who comes to Hollywood from Jupiter, Florida and forces herself into the lives of a fading actress (Julianne Moore), a child star (Evan Bird), a high profile celebrity therapist (John Cusack), and others including Pattinson, Olivia Williams, and Carrie Fisher, who plays herself. Sarah Gadon also appears playing the mother of Julianne Moore's character, a long dead and more famous actress who appears in film clips, and as a ghost or hallucination who repeatedly visits Moore. This is a Hollywood indictment film in the tradition of Sunset Boulevard and The Player, and it can get pretty dark, and pretty odd. John Waters is on record as loving this film, which should tell you something about it.

One of the things I found quite interesting about this film is its repetition of themes with another of Wagner's works, one which I just saw for the first time this past weekend. Wild Palms is a television mini-series, and species of over the top, metaphysical soap opera, that aired on ABC in 1993, was written by Wagner, and based on a comic strip he first had published 1990 and later put out as a graphic novel. These are very specific, very odd themes and motifs which are repeated, including the phrases 'Maps to the Stars', and 'Everything Must Go', which appear as slogans on the walls at the headquarters of a Scientology type religion in Palms, as well as the presence of tattooed children, mantra type chants, accidental incest (though in Palms its actually between two first cousins, and secretly arranged by others without their knowledge), and dysfunction in seemingly successful, high profile Los Angeles families. There is an unusual psychology here which I am sure must permeate Wagner's other works, and which I'm oddly curious about, while at the same time it weirds me out. Why these themes?

Maps to the Stars is a strange film, it characters are mostly not pleasant, its plot peculiar, but it all works surprisingly well, leaving you with a film that's kind of fascinating. It's a voyeuristic movie that seeks the underbelly behind the surface sheen, part melodrama, part reality television, all bizarre, and ashamedly watchable. ***