The movie is about a heart of a Hollywood family chasing celebrities. Things may turn out on a different path as their relentless ghosts of the past haunt everything in Hollywood.
"Maps to the Stars" loses some steam near the end, and its resolution has the predetermined quality of Greek tragedy writ small. Still, I found it (as the Replacements song says) sadly beautiful.
Hollywood has been disemboweling itself since... Sunset Boulevard and The Bad and the Beautiful, but those movies seem like Cream of Wheat compared to Cronenberg's wicked vision.
Really this is more a barrel of fish than of monkeys - mostly a jaded movie-industry satire (in a cameo, Carrie Fisher plays herself), but also, being Cronenberg, a horror film, full of ghost stories and little monsters.
There are scads of scabrous inside-Hollywood psychodramas, but never a festering pyre on the order of David Cronenberg and Bruce Wagner's Maps to the Stars. What a hyperfocused duo of ghouls!
Although it's been dismissed in some quarters as minor Cronenberg-and criticized for "getting Hollywood wrong," or something-it's a sneakily powerful movie.
We watch to see the worst in Maps, it's revealed, and absolutely nothing about it is surprising. (Even the ghosts are predictable.) Also, unforgivable in the inside-Hollywood canon, Wagner can't craft dialogue or be funny to save his life.
Something of a fascinating misfire, still shot and edited with the precise authority that has defined Cronenberg's recent period, but jumbled in the search for narrative control and originality.
