Another star is born, this one with an odd evolution
Corbet’s sophomore film about celebrity gives a nod to Kanye
Actor-turned-writer/director Brady Corbet’s debut feature was 2015’s The Childhood of a Leader, a festival hit that told of the rise to power of a fascist ruler. (No, not Hitler.) His followup, Vox Lux, is another study in beginnings. The Latin title means voice of light, but it might have been called Cantor Pueritia — the Childhood of a Singer.
No, not Lady Gaga. We first meet Celeste as a 13-year-old in 1999, when she’s played by Raffey Cassidy. Injured in a school shooting — not Columbine; the film is fiction, though inspired by a hodgepodge of real events and people — Celeste and her sister Ellie (Stacy Martin) pen an anthem of pain and survival. Record producers take note, convince her to change the song’s pronoun from “I” to “we,” and a generational hit is born.
That’s the prelude to this stagy story, which includes an “end credits” scroll about 10 minutes in and occasional omniscient voice-over narration by Willem Dafoe. Act I picks up a year or so later, with Jude Law as Celeste’s manager, and Jennifer Ehle as a sympathetic publicist, guiding the young singer and her in-the-background songwriting sister into the maw of celebrity.
Here’s where things get jarring. About halfway through the almost two-hour film, Act II kicks in, set in 2017. In a series of odd casting choices, Cassidy is still in the film but now plays her own daughter, Albertine. The adult Celeste is played by Natalie Portman (who doesn’t really resemble Cassidy). Everyone else, even sister Ellie, is the same. It’s a kick from which this viewer never fully recovered.
Corbet is clearly looking to explore fame and its effects on someone who wasn’t born a celebrity. But the sudden shift in the film robs him of the chance to dramatize the journey — we go from seeing Celeste on the cusp of stardom to her being in the thick of it, handling substance abuse, paparazzi and pushy fans — one fascinating scene has a restaurant manager asking for a photo, only to have the whole interaction spiral out of control.
Even so, there’s much to take away from Vox Lux. Adult Celeste must deal with a bizarre bit of unwanted publicity, when a group of gunmen in Croatia open fire on a tourist area while wearing masks modelled on one of her old music videos. Her response to the media is a Kanye-esque rant; Corbet has said West (or “Ye,” if ye prefer) was a major inspiration for the character.
So while the film is an intriguing portrait of fame, it functions as more of a snapshot than a moving picture. And much as I love Dafoe’s narration, it might have been better to let Vox Lux tell us less and show us more.