Vox Lux Review

R: For language, some strong violence, and drug content   

Neon, Killer Films, Andrew Lauren Productions, Bold Films

1 Hr and 50 Minutes

Written & Dir: Brady Corbet

Cast: Natalie Portman, Raffey Cassidy, Jude Law, Willem Dafoe, Stacy Martin, Jennifer Ehle, Christopher Abbott

Release Date: December 7th 2018 (Limited)

The film begins in 1999 with teenage sisters Celeste Montgomery (Raffey Cassidy) and Eleanor "Ellie" Montgomery (Stacy Martin), who have survived a seismic, violent tragedy. The sisters compose and perform a song about their experience, making something lovely and cathartic out of catastrophe and launch singing careers. The sisters draw the attention of a passionate manager (Jude Law) and are rapidly catapulted into fame and fortune, with Celeste as the star and Ellie the creative anchor. By the film's second half, set in 2017, the now 31-year-old Celeste (Natalie Portman) is mother to a teenage daughter of her own (Raffey Cassidy) and struggling to navigate a career fraught with scandals when another act of terrifying violence demands her attention.

If you’ve seen Yorgos Lanthimos’ previous film, “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”, you’re most likely familiar with Raffey Cassidy who played Colin Farrell's daughter. In the film, there’s a scene where Cassidy sings “Burn” by Ellie Goulding and during that scene you realize that she has a voice. This movie is here to say that she got BARS! The best thing about this film is Raffey Cassidy’s performance as young Celeste, for she can sing so wonderfully and express a wide array of emotions. Her performance, like her character early on, is mature and delivers dialogue that is contemplative and haunting. She shows how much she’s advanced as a performer and definitely deserves more acting opportunities.

Cassidy has the potential to be a full-blown lead and carry a film on her own and this film is the proof in the pudding. Even when she has to share scenes with Portman, for she also portrays the daughter of Celeste (odd because Celeste’s daughter is the spitting image of how she used to be as a kid which I think is bizarre), she kind of runs circles around her in my opinion. She carries that first half of the movie and is sensational and proves thoroughly that she has a great acting career ahead of her.

In a year where both Bradley Cooper (“A Star is Born”) and Elisabeth Moss (“Her Smell”) surprised as actors with a musical voice, “Vox Lux” is a major disappointment. The film is divided into three acts (because three act structure) and right when the film transitions into Act II, the film plunges down hard like:

As I said, Raffey Cassidy is the best part of the movie, but when the film deviates its focus over to Natalie Portman (and I can’t believe I’m saying this) it takes a major shift for the worse. It starts off with a serious tone and then becomes this dark comedy by ACT II. It comes across as uneven in its tone. When she comes on screen, she has this forced, fake New York accent that sounds like she’s impersonating Harley Quinn.

That said, some of her lines are hilarious, especially when she's insulting people. It’s fun to watch as she delivers an exuberant performance, but this character doesn’t match the movie. If she was to be a complete mess of a person, you could’ve done so without having to put on this NY accent when the youthful version of herself had no hints of an accent at all. She thinks that she’s in that Lonely Island Natalie's Rap SNL video again because that’s exactly her attitude throughout the remainder of the film. The nail in the coffin is her less than impressive singing voice. Unlike Cooper and Moss, Portman cannot sing. Cassidy could sing! But Portman...

God, I tried so hard not to be PC with this movie, but the way this year has gone with over a dozen school shootings, the last thing I needed to see, especially in a movie releasing in December, is the sequence that opens the film. The story follows this pop star who happens to find herself inadvertently associated with terrorists and mass shootings, even surviving one firsthand, but it never correlates with the character we follow. For a narrative about a girl’s rise to stardom, especially in the same year as “A Star is Born”, it feels off putting that the whole thing stems from surviving a school shooting. You see that the outcome of fame turns her into a bratty, spoiled woman-child who doesn’t know how to make proper decisions.

While it does juxtapose the girl she was in the first act, the subtext of terrorism mixed with tragic fame just doesn’t mesh well at all. Director Brady Corbet would've prospered from a different approach, for not only does it hit too close to home, but the subtext applied to the narrative and where it leads to is completely muddled.

While Cassidy’s portrayal of Celeste is more grounded, Portman’s portrayal of Celeste is this over-the-top hodge podge of Winehouse, Spears, and Gaga. Yeah, she’s supposed to be a riff on child stars turned divas, but we’ve seen this character type in countless films before and they’ve been done better. As I mentioned, Elisabeth Moss did this astoundingly in “Her Smell” which is a film I saw at NYFF a few months back. The massacre sequences integrated as some sort of subliminal, relevant message makes the film come across as not only pretentious, but also messy.

Guys, can we stop the trend of the asshole manager/producer in film? It has now become a full-on cliche and Jude Law’s character pushes it to the edge. Well, it was pushed to the edge in ASIB and was one of my only flaws of the film, but each line of dialogue uttered by Jude Law just oozes “asshole” whenever he’s onscreen. As the film goes on, you start to warm up to him because of the woman Celeste becomes in the future, but in the first act, he was one of the most irritable characters I just couldn’t stand. He even boasts about how his parents trusted him to take care of Celeste and her sister, but you never see any of the helpful qualities he has to offer throughout the film.

Inconsistent and unfocused, “Vox Lux” hits a major sour note by juggling too many themes that don’t correlate, but it’s mostly held together by up-and-coming actress Raffey Cassidy.

Rating: 2/5 | 46%

Super Scene: Young Celeste’s monologue