Vox Lux review: A musical adventure for those who despise music

AFI Fest Review: Vox Lux

Vox Lux is an eccentric, shallow story of musical narcissism that hobbles Natalie Portman with a grating caricature of pop stardom.

The release of A Star is Born just a few months ago reminded audiences of the perils of stardom, something that’s been struck into audiences’ hearts with all the frequency and urgency of being told every year there are razor blades in Halloween candy. We know with great fame comes great responsibility, and, if anything, the desire to rip this apart is the only saving grace of Brady Corbet’s new film, Vox Lux.

Instead of giving us a perils-of-fame story, he gives us one of complete apathy, whose fictional musical sensation is so disinterested in anything that all her songs sound the same. But what reads as esoteric and complex on the page doesn’t translate to the screen. Vox Lux transforms into two hours of hoping you’ll bleed from your ears in order to drown it out.

Willem Dafoe narrates this “21st-century portrait,” introducing the Citizen Kane-esque story of Celeste (played as a youth by Raffey Cassidy), “born in America in 1986.” Starting in 1999, we meet this once kind and graceful girl as she sits down for band practice. An ordinary day turns tragic quickly when a boy comes in and starts killing his teacher and classmates, shooting Celeste in the process. This scene of extreme violence, now all to common for us in 2018, is shocking and surprising, especially if you recall that the Columbine shooting happened the same year.

This moment of graphic violence segues into an arthouse examination of one girl’s own state of becoming, from quiet victim to survivor to pop star. The pieces are all there and could fit together if not for Corbet’s frenetic style, both in terms of rapid-fire editing and numerous aesthetic tricks that only enhance the faux-documentary feel of the movie but never seem to provide insight into Celeste herself. We watch Celeste, alongside her older sister, Eleanor (Stacy Martin), cobble together a song as part of Celeste’s coping strategy. As Dafoe explains, this anthem soon turns into a pop phenomenon.

The problems lie in how, for all Corbet’s posturing about this looking at the making of a star, there’s little insight into how Celeste feels about anything during this time. Her parents disappear off the face of the Earth after one scene, leaving the two sisters to tour Europe together as Celeste obtains a manager (gruffly played by Jude Law) and is signed to a record deal. Dafoe narrates all these scenes, removing Celeste’s voice despite the film revolving around it (ironically, the title Vox Lux means “voice of light).

Celeste talks about selling her music, but there’s never a moment of insight into how she feels about the others around her or her place within it. She struggles to perform with chronic back pain and loses her virginity to an older man, but there’s no discussion of what this means to her, a teenage girl. We barely get to see her enjoy anything, let alone comment on it.

Dafoe is the male God overseeing Celeste’s life, acting as both the creator of her story and the huckster selling us an intentional bill of goods. Because he’s the only one providing insight, he, without being seen, is more compelling than the woman on screen. A moment of post-coital canoodling between Celeste and her older lover sees her discuss a dream she’s had involving dead bodies, but it’s a surface-level dream analysis that’s meant to act as the doorway into Celeste’s psyche, but just proves Corbet and crew bought one of those dream books at a Hallmark store.

During a Q&A after the film’s screening, Corbet discussed how Vox Lux is about the “spectacle of evil,” but the evil perpetrated in this movie tends to be exorbitant and exploitative, or happens off-screen without being commented on. Case in point, there are three separate scenes of people being picked off by mass shooters. One moment, coming during the second half of the movie, does little more than give audiences a different angle on the shooting they just saw. Are these moments of violence inspired by Celeste or are they a coincidence? The film posits this question and never answers it, which is fine, but continually going back leaves an odious aroma to everything. Meanwhile, Celeste’s parents are nowhere to be found and it’s unclear if Celeste has ever engaged in a sexual encounter that’s not coerced. These moments, which could have a profound impact, pass by without a whimper of comment.

The cast’s motivations seem just as frenetic, a possible result of filming a movie in only 22 days. Raffey Cassidy plays a dual role as young Celeste and grown’s Celeste’s teenage daughter, Albertine. As young Celeste, Cassidy’s enthusiasm is slightly above “petulant teenager” but generally feels dead-eyed. It’s as Albertine that Cassidy excels, showing embarrassment, concern, and ultimately love for a mother whose seemingly done nothing for her. Her scenes opposite Portman have a masochistic feel as we watch her mother scream, wail, and generally act as if she never wanted her, although Corbet never tackles motherhood properly.

As adult Celeste, Natalie Portman gives a performance that’s screaming style with absolutely zero substance. The character as an adult is written like Natalie Portman’s SNL rap sketches were turned into a movie. Portman’s all flailing hands, spewing out her lines with a mawkish Madonna accent as if this was a remake of Who’s That Girl. When Jude Law’s manager calls her a spoiled brat, that’s what she is. The performance is a 120-minute temper tantrum elevated to artistic proportions. Portman certainly proves she can handle pop stardom, though. Her concert scene during the finale is flamboyant, a discount Velvet Goldmine, but the songs – attributed to Sia – are terrible, every one as if A Star is Born’s “Why Did You Do That” was perceived as a chart-topping hit.

Law and Stacy Martin are the most interesting as Celeste’s manager and sister. Both of them have unspoken backgrounds that have enough grist to create fully formed characters if the film wanted to. Is Law’s character an enabler? Is Eleanor? Martin is particularly compelling as the older sister who’s dragged her younger sister to a place where now, at 31, the regret is setting in. These are more interesting questions than the vapid banality we end up with.

Vox Lux is a movie arthouse fanboys will say is wonderful. A gaudy affair of cinematic posturing with all the complexity of a bowl of a ramen. Natalie Portman is grating and over-the-top, surrounded by a story that only seeks to remind you that pop stars are troubled and we enable it. Maybe the movie is trolling us, knowing that those who will celebrate it are dumb, but I doubt that.