They made me an offer my mother couldn't refuse.

Maps To The Stars
David Cronenberg 2014 Canada/USA
Starring: Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, John Cusack, Olivia Williams, Robert Pattinson, Evan Bird, Sarah Gadon, Carrie Fisher, Jayne Heitmeyer, Justin Kelly, Kiara Glasco, Dawn Greenhalgh, Gord Rand, Sean Robertson

Crazy as the number of years may sound David Cronenberg has spent almost fifty crafting what initially appear to be genre pictures before twisting them beyond anything his contemporaries (if indeed that's the correct term) could imagine. His 2005 hit A History Of Violence melded the action movie and the revenge thriller then used the resulting product to deconstruct the aggression inherent to the Darwinian model of evolution while his mainstream breakthrough The Fly went against its sci-fi core and, for all its special effects, essentially employed an almost Samuel Beckett-like minimalism to examine the effects of degenerative disease on humans. His latest, a Bruce Wagner screenplay that was later turned into a novel when Cronenberg's first attempt fell through, has been described as a "vicious Hollywood satire" but as much time is dedicated to musing on mental illness, Greek mythology and the prevalence of grief and familial trauma in modern society as is spent on vitriolic skewering of the film's supposed main target. And, as ever, Cronenberg's trademark exploration of sexuality and combination of terror and black comedy play a large part (if you'll excuse the phrase). The first time we see Julianne Moore's frenzied former star Havana Segrand she's stripped to her underwear and laid out on her stomach alternating between sobs and self-help mantras as John Cusack's life coach straddles her body, hissing instructions into her ear and guiding her through his patent physiological brand of regression before performing a spinal adjustment that apparently brings her to orgasm. Visually it's an image deeply distressing and hard to describe as anything other than psychological rape but later Havana has some of the funniest moments, spitting acidic rhetoric ("She's in rehab with all the other dope fiend personal assistants, they have their own wing") as she fingers an award statuette (not an Oscar but a Canadian Genie - just one of several in-jokes) and in bed with an ashtray watching the (awful) performance of her mother, the true movie legend Clarice Taggart, in the original of a movie soon to be remade, possibly with her playing a part. Despite many having credited Moore with leading lady status however Havana isn't the main character and in fact the film is closer to a ensemble piece than anything else. To be honest Mia Wasikowska's Agatha is the center of the story and the first face we see emerging from a replacement womb (in reality a large black blanket emblazoned with the phrase "I'm a bad babysitter", a phrase that foreshadows both her eventual role as Havana's P.A. and a late revelation about her past), burns speckling her body, her hands covered by ever-present leather gloves. As her personal tale advances it turns out she's actually returning to a figurative womb, "visiting family" as she so unsuitably deems it. Soon she becomes Havana's "chore whore", a job gained through her Twitter friendship with Carrie Fisher, who appears as herself, another troubled daughter permanently in the shadow of a mother she can never live up too, although Havana's maternal issues are far graver. Later Agatha evokes another cinematic Carrie during a bloodsoaked murder scene. There's also Cusack's Stafford Weiss, a charlatan life coach who veers between self-awareness and believing his own hype and who is convinced (or is he?) that various emotional problems have links to different parts of the body, his wife Cristina, an intense stage-mom with eyes as cavernous as exit wounds and just as wet, and the festering ball of obnoxiousness they call a son. Said pustule, Benjie, is a Justin Bieberesque heartthrob who, after a stint in rehab, has replaced his drug dependencies with an addiction to energy drinks and temper tantrums. In an interesting twist Wagner wrote the script a decade ago before Bieber was a global abomination so in a way he predicted the annoying little prick rather than being inspired by him. Benjie, like Havana, is haunted; she by the younger self of the abusive mother she both hates and wants to be, he by a sick child he visited and mistook for an HIV victim, whether either are ghosts or simply hallucinations conjured up by their victim's fevered brains is questionable. Some have spoken of Robert Pattinson's limo-driving actor/writer Jerome Fontana as the only innocent in the story but he's merely the sole person to enter the film's timeframe relatively uncorrupted (he is considering converting to Scientology as a career move but otherwise he's pretty normal), even a cute four year old child star is experienced enough to be cynical. Jerome's fall comes via an incredible screen seduction that calls to mind The Graduate and a cramped version of Pattinson's backseat fuck from his previous collaboration with Cronenberg, 2012's claustrophobic yet spacious Cosmopolis. Most of the actors are terrific - Moore particularly shines when, as the third wheel in a threesome temporarily interrupted by a phone call from an agent, Havana breaks down, her fraying nerves wrenching us before she's cruelly sidelined - but, as Benjie, Evan Bird struggles at times. The biggest shock however is Cusack stealing the film with a performance better even than Williams' crumbling ice maiden. As the unexpected yet highly improbable reveals and post-Oedipal twists pile up though the quality of the acting can't conceal the rapidly thinning credibility of the plot. Obviously the narrative is set within lives very different to those of most of the viewers and it could be argued that this was precisely Cronenberg's intention, a crack at mocking other Hollywood spoofs and the general unlikely melodrama of soap operas perhaps, but it comes off as a step too far either way and mildly sours the implication that the stories may be based on fact (Wagner was himself a limo driver to the wealthy while trying to hit it big as a writer in late 1970's Beverly Hills) and the film's satirical power. As ever Cronenberg is playful, accomplished, bursting with ideas and capable of creating the horrifying, the hilarious and the memorable but, like a lot of his more recent work, the lasting impression is still one of slight dissatisfaction. In this case it's strangely fitting though as, like countless fictional and real-life celebrities, the body may be fantastic but the spirit might just be found wanting.