Stewart’s spirited turn lifts haphazard thriller
Seberg Cert TBC, 102min ★★★★★ Dir Benedict Andrews Starring Kristen Stewart, Jack O’connell, Anthony Mackie, Vince Vaughn, Margaret Qualley, Zazie Beetz
Benedict Andrews’s punchy period piece about the FBI’S illegal surveillance of the actress Jean Seberg has enough material for two fascinating stories, and enough space to do justice to one. The first centres on Seberg herself (Kristen Stewart): Hollywood’s prodigal daughter who quit town after finding fame to make offbeat films in Europe and returned five years later as a crop-haired, art-house icon. (I’m talking about both of them.)
The second follows Jack Solomon (Jack O’connell), a (fictional) young radio specialist at the bureau, whose bugging and spying of Seberg, supposedly justified by her involvement in civil rights activism, takes on a voyeuristic, stalkerish edge.
Solomon is the obsessive superfan who dreams himself into the starlet’s bedchamber, yet has the government funding to actually do it. Meanwhile his wife Linette – a mostly thankless role for Margaret Qualley – is the jilted spouse waiting meekly at home while the light in her eyes slowly fades.
A film about either one of these characters could have been gripping – particularly since Stewart and O’connell are two of the most compelling young actors around. But screenwriters Joe Shrapnel and Anna
Waterhouse split their attentions between the two in a prescriptive, almost dutiful way, and the result, though still worthwhile, is an occasionally haphazard thriller diptych that doesn’t match in the middle as neatly as it should.
Still, Stewart is a wonder as Seberg – the billion-watt embodiment of the vitality, presence and sheer now-ness that made the actress a leading light of the French New Wave. A beautifully done flashback to Seberg’s peppy screen-test at the age of 17 enables Stewart to play notes well outside her comfort zone – vivacity, naivety, archness – and she does so with breathtaking ease.
After an opening shot that pointedly recreates Seberg’s first screen role, lashed to a stake in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan – martyrdom subtext alert! – the film commences with her return to the US in 1968 to audition for Paint Your Wagon, a western musical pitched as “a housewife with two lunks”. On her flight she meets Hakim Jamal (Anthony Mackie), the blackpower activist, and, seemingly on a whim, poses with him for a clenchedfist photograph on the tarmac.
Observing from afar are agents Solomon and Kowalski (Vince Vaughn), who peg her as trouble and embark on a staggeringly invasive surveillance regime with an obsessive fixation on her relationship with Jamal. As an agent notes when they discuss wiring her bedroom: “[J Edgar] Hoover likes to hear the bedsprings creak.”
So too does the film – occasionally at the expense of psychological depth or historical context. But it’s a snappy, absorbing watch nonetheless. RC