Vox Lux (2018)

(On Cable TV, September 2021) All right, Vox Lux: You have all the rights in the world to be as unpleasant as possible from the get-go (that is: graphic footage of a likable teacher getting gunned down in a school shooting during the film’s opening scene) and then being all mysterious and incoherent until the end… but that doesn’t force me to like you. Writer-director Brady Corbet certainly aims high enough to be considered pretentious, with a two-act structure that seemingly leaves much of the story in the backstory. Part one, beginning in 2000, has to do with a school shooting survivor becoming a national sensation for a song penned in the aftermath of the attack and then becoming a star. The second act picks up sixteen years later as our protagonist (now played by Natalie Portman), in her full-blown egomaniac mode, prepares for a concert and goes lunching with her daughter. It ends at a concert with the possibly-supernatural revelation that our protagonist made a deal with the devil for survival in exchange for perverting the world. Now that’s a premise… too bad it’s a tossed-off line after what feels like an hour of prologue and forty-five minutes of tangents. There are many fascinating things in Vox Lux, from the slightly alternate reality it plays with, to William Defoe voicing an unsettling narrator, to some visual ideas and directorial panache in setting up single-shot sequences. Too bad that it’s so incredibly scattered — thematically, narratively, visually, the film goes everywhere and nowhere at once, not quite understanding the power of focus… or even in following up with the ideas it has. Want to do a film about a deal-with-the-devil singer ruining the twenty-first century? I’m so there. But gallivanting in small-scale fame-building (albeit with Jude Law!), describing a European trip that turns out to be meaningless, glancing off September 11 as a personal tragedy, skipping over much of the dramatic meat of a decaying sororal relationship, playing with the idea of terrorism being inspired by her work, stopping to take a look at diva-like behaviour… Vox Lux is so undisciplined that it begs the question as to what purpose the film intended for itself. It’s just messy, overlong, underwritten, and afraid to poke at its own demons. It’s unconventional all right, but that means that the safety zone for a successful landing is practically non-existent.