The film has been pitched as a satire on Hollywood, and there are certainly strong elements of this throughout. However, 20 minutes into the film, having suggested nothing new really about the LA Film Industry (I think everyone assumes a land of huge egos, dysfunction, shallowness, drugs and quack medicine) it gets exciting, because you start understanding what this film is really about.
The main story revolves around a family: Father (Cusack), Mother (Olivia Williams), Son (Relative newcomer Evan Bird) and sister (Wasikowska). Each of them are on the run from several uncomfortable truthes which would floor any average human being: Wasikowska, after an apparent childhood incestuous fixation on her brother - manifesting mainly as a harmless ritual of mock-marriage but which however culminated in homicidally drugging her brother and attempting to burn down the family house - tracks down her family in Hollywood (having eventually been released from her hospital incarceration), who in the meantime have built their lives centred around "empowerment." In other words they are psychologically on the run from this incident, (father now a shrink to at least one Star, mother manager to the child star her son has become).
We then find out that Wasikowska (I did tick Spoiler Alert, didn't I?) was only suffering trauma from the discovery that her parents are, in fact, brother and sister. A later revelation shows that the Parents themselves were not aware of this until too late.
There are two, as it turns out peripheral, characters who act as agents to this main plot. Julianne Moore is a fading Hollywood Star who, humiliatingly, struggles to get a part playing her own famous mother in a biopic, and who is having her own breakdown thanks to unresolved issues from her past, and Pattinson, a jobbing actor/screenwriter, suffering the occasional humiliation of chauffeuring the rich and famous in his day job.
But mainly this is a Greek Tragedy: the unwitting incest at the heart of this film is redolent of Oedipus Rex (I mean, what are the odds of marrying your estranged sibling?) and the potentially fatal psychological impact of not confronting the darkest aspects of your past recalls the work of Freud, himself inspired by the Sophocles play.
So "Maps to the Stars" has two meanings: not just the frivolous tourist excursion, but Stars in the Zodiac sense - where your fate and destiny are written. In the doom of this family, the film poses the provocative question: can you change your fate if you, as a therapist early in the film suggests, confront your demons?
It's a brave and effective treatment of this classic theme. If I had to level one criticism it is that it shares with its ancient forebears a slightly overly clinical exploration of the main conceit. It's hard to truly feel for the characters.
Postscript: some slightly more frivolous questions: 1) Did David Cronenberg see David Lynch's Mulholland Drive and was he influenced by it? 2) What is it with him and Robert Pattinson and Limos??
The main story revolves around a family: Father (Cusack), Mother (Olivia Williams), Son (Relative newcomer Evan Bird) and sister (Wasikowska). Each of them are on the run from several uncomfortable truthes which would floor any average human being: Wasikowska, after an apparent childhood incestuous fixation on her brother - manifesting mainly as a harmless ritual of mock-marriage but which however culminated in homicidally drugging her brother and attempting to burn down the family house - tracks down her family in Hollywood (having eventually been released from her hospital incarceration), who in the meantime have built their lives centred around "empowerment." In other words they are psychologically on the run from this incident, (father now a shrink to at least one Star, mother manager to the child star her son has become).
We then find out that Wasikowska (I did tick Spoiler Alert, didn't I?) was only suffering trauma from the discovery that her parents are, in fact, brother and sister. A later revelation shows that the Parents themselves were not aware of this until too late.
There are two, as it turns out peripheral, characters who act as agents to this main plot. Julianne Moore is a fading Hollywood Star who, humiliatingly, struggles to get a part playing her own famous mother in a biopic, and who is having her own breakdown thanks to unresolved issues from her past, and Pattinson, a jobbing actor/screenwriter, suffering the occasional humiliation of chauffeuring the rich and famous in his day job.
But mainly this is a Greek Tragedy: the unwitting incest at the heart of this film is redolent of Oedipus Rex (I mean, what are the odds of marrying your estranged sibling?) and the potentially fatal psychological impact of not confronting the darkest aspects of your past recalls the work of Freud, himself inspired by the Sophocles play.
So "Maps to the Stars" has two meanings: not just the frivolous tourist excursion, but Stars in the Zodiac sense - where your fate and destiny are written. In the doom of this family, the film poses the provocative question: can you change your fate if you, as a therapist early in the film suggests, confront your demons?
It's a brave and effective treatment of this classic theme. If I had to level one criticism it is that it shares with its ancient forebears a slightly overly clinical exploration of the main conceit. It's hard to truly feel for the characters.
Postscript: some slightly more frivolous questions: 1) Did David Cronenberg see David Lynch's Mulholland Drive and was he influenced by it? 2) What is it with him and Robert Pattinson and Limos??