Seberg (2019)

'Seberg' is a bio-pic/(political) thriller about the actress Jean Seberg. Seberg had an interesting life, born in Marshalltown, Iowa in 1938, in her late teens she was the winner of director Otto Preminger's nation wide talent search for an actress to play Joan of Arc in his forth coming film 'Saint Joan'. So that was Jean's film debut, and all she had done before was school and community theater. Preminger was a notoriously difficult man, the filming was very hard on her, she was almost killed by fire in the 'burning at the stake' scene. The movie also tanked, Preminger doubled down that he was right to cast Seberg and built his next movie around her, 'Bonjour Tristesse' based on a young adult novel, that film did better. 

Seberg continued to act both in America and overseas, particularly France, where she became a huge star for her role in Jean-Luc Godard's 'Breathless'. Along her career she'd go through three husbands and multiple lovers, developed a drug problem and die at the age of 40 from a drug overdose. 'Seberg' the film focuses on Jean's at lest somewhat radical political activism, she was involved with the Black Panthers and had an affair with a cousin of Malcom X. The FBI developed an interest in her, wire tapped her ect thus feeding her paranoia. Seberg's last husband Dennis Berry directly blamed that FBI harassment for leading to her death. 

This film concentrates on the mental breaking down of Jean Seberg, here ably played by Kristin Stewart. However the film never really sucked me in, I never felt as invested as I should have been for the thing to truly work. It was a little too paint by numbers, obvious and on the nose. I could see what they were going for, especially with the one FBI agent who becomes troubled by the extent of the government harassment and really develops and sympathy for Jean; and you do feel sorry for her, however the film doesn't dig deep enough, it tries to telegraph what makes Jean work but something gets lost in the translation about how she ticks. I could never quite empathize with her. The film I think could have benefited by more of a sense of scale, and more of a sense of Jean as one of many victims of political harassments, to better see her as part of a larger whole would have helped this for me. A competent effort, but I can give it only **