Screechy ‘Vox Lux’ a dreadful mess
Natalie Portman delivers worst performance of her career
Just in time for the holiday season, here is a giant pile of shiny gift-wrapped garbage titled “Vox Lux.”
Open and proceed at your own risk.
The sophomore effort from the talented writerdirector Brady Corbet (following the excellent “The Childhood of a Leader” from 2015) shows flashes of provocative promise in the first half hour or so, but ultimately devolves into a screeching, empty, exploitative cinematic cacophony.
Pretentious deadpan absurdity abounds, starting with the instantly identifiable voice of Willem Dafoe as the unseen narrator, who delivers his lines as if reading a modern-day fairy tale about a girl who becomes a star.
And indeed, “Vox Lux” is about a girl who becomes a star — but one of the major problems with the film is the girl is at least interesting and sympathetic while the grownup version is a hysterical, egomaniacal, deeply addled narcissist and one of the most off-putting characters to appear in any film of 2018.
Making matters so much worse: the brilliant and beloved and greatly decorated actress playing that grownup star delivers arguably the worst performance of her storied career.
More on that in a moment, but first let’s sift through the early stages of “Vox Lux,” which manages to weave in (and exploit) not one but two fictional mass shootings as well as the horrors of 9/11 into a bold and wildly ambi- tious Pop Culture Statement that ultimately has almost nothing of value to say.
I mean, when a film is broken into “acts” and Act 1 is titled “Genesis,” it’s almost spoiling for a fight, almost daring us to fold our arms in skepticism.
Credit where its due: That opening segment, which begins in 1999 and continues through the first couple of years of the 21st century, is actually a darkly effective, borderline surreal passage — making the latter two-thirds of the film all the more disappointing.
Raffey Cassidy gives the best performance of the film as 13-year-old Celeste Montgomery, a sensitive and gifted girl who suffers nearfatal injuries in a Columbinelike shooting at her school.
While hospitalized, Celeste and her older sister Elle (Stacy Martin, also quite good), compose a song about the tragedy. When Celeste performs a beautiful, soulful rendition of the song at a memorial service with the news cameras rolling, she attracts the attention of a grizzled, veteran music act manager (Jude Law), who sets the wheels in motion to turn Celeste into a spunky, sexy little pop star.
Reminder: Celeste is a child. Any illusions we have about The Manager (as he’s billed in the credits) actually caring about Celeste and her sister as he takes them on the road and into the studio are shattered quickly when we see how eagerly he feeds the machine that forces both girls to grow up far too quickly.
Cut to 2017 and Act II, titled “Regenesis,” with Natalie Portman playing the 31-year-old Celeste, who is now a hugely successful,
often controversial, tabloidfodder, Madonna-esque international pop star with a teenage daughter. In a terrible and distracting piece of casting, Raffey Cassidy, who played young Celeste, is now playing the teenage daughter.
Jude Law is still around as the Manager and Stacy Martin is still with us as older sister Elle, though neither looks 18 years older than he or she did in Act 1. Elle has been raising Celeste’s daughter because Celeste has been preoccupied with touring the world, recording hit albums and video-friendly singles, racking up a DUI while running someone over, indulging in multiple addictions and generally making one horrible decision after another while behaving like a spoiled brat virtually every second she’s not onstage.
Natalie Portman is one of our finest actresses, but her over-the-top performance is a howler for the ages. Whether Celeste is stumbling about on a drug- and booze-soaked bender or cruelly berating a clueless restaurant manager, Portman portrays her as a vapid, loud, charmless vessel.
“Vox Lux” closes out on a series of sour notes, in the form of a splashy, seemingly endless concert montage, with Portman/Celeste performing a bunch of catchy, arena-friendly but almost instantly forgettable pop tunes (written by Sia).
Through it all, Natalie Portman is a gamer, but in the case of this neon nightmare of a film, it was Game Over long before she hit the concert stage.