Review: Vox Lux

Image courtesy of Neon.

Actor-turned-director Brady Corbet follows up his haunting and impressive directorial debut "The Childhood of a Leader" with the wild, garish and somewhat messy "Vox Lux." The film opens with an engrossing prologue and the film's first hour is solid, until its second act - and the introduction of its lead actress - throws it somewhat off-kilter. Regardless, even though I question whether the film completely works and what exactly it intends to convey, it remains mostly interesting.

The picture opens with a horrific school shooting in the late 1990s that is clearly meant to resemble Columbine. A young girl named Celeste (Raffey Cassidy) is struck by the assassin's bullets, but miraculously survives. She is overcome by a burst of inspiration and writes a song about the tragedy with her older sister, Eleanor (Stacy Martin), that ends up attracting national attention and, in the process, becomes a hit.

Celeste and her sister are wooed by a sleazy producer (Jude Law) to take part in a recording session in Stockholm and end up quickly shedding their religious, good girl personas as Celeste is groomed to be a pop star. These early scenes are the film's best, and Corbet displays a mastery of film style, from the eerie opening credits, which unravel against a backdrop of an ambulance racing toward a hospital, to the almost funereal scenes of Celeste being trained by a choreographer and recording her first record.

The picture then jumps ahead to 2017, where Celeste (now played by Natalie Portman) has become a spoiled pop star whose multiple controversies - including crushing someone's leg in an auto accident and then shouting racial slurs at the victim - have not quite managed to derail her career. As she prepares for a tour based on her new science fiction-themed album, "Vox Lux," a group of terrorists wearing masks eerily similar to those donned by Celeste's backup dancers has opened fire on some tourists. Considering that Celeste's career was launched amid a tragedy, the terrorists' use of her imagery is seemingly not accidental.

But despite all of these compelling elements, "Vox Lux" never quite maximizes them to its full potential. The modern scenes featuring Portman are not as engrossing as the earlier sequences, and much time is spent on Celeste's tumultuous relationships with her sister and teenage daughter (Sophie Lane Curtis), including a diner freakout scene that goes on slightly too long and serves little purpose, other than to remind how much of a hot mess the lead character has become.

I'll give credit to Corbet and company for centering a film around a lead character who makes herself extremely difficult to like. However, Celeste is an anti-hero similar to Daniel Day Lewis' Daniel Plainview, in that she may be a nightmare to deal with, but she occasionally hits the nail on the head - at least, when it comes to modern pop culture's lack of value and an audience's willingness to forgive horrible behavior as long as one remains entertaining.

The picture clearly has some ideas - although they are not completely fleshed out to a satisfying degree - about how America commoditizes tragedy, repackages it and turns it into pop culture. It's also astute as to how meaningful art - for example, Celeste's heartfelt song borne out of the shooting she escaped - captures the attention of corporate America, which then drains it of its purity and churns out escapist fluff - such as the bland pop numbers that Celeste performs during the film's concert finale. At one point, Celeste tells someone of her work, "I don't want people to think too much. I just want them to feel good."

Corbet's film - which is, for the most part, consistently interesting, even if not as thoroughly impressive as his debut - is a movie that clearly has some things on its mind. Even if the film occasionally stumbles while doing so, it's good to see an actor step behind the camera and have something to say.