Vox Lux

Starring: Natalie Portman, Jude Law, Stacy Martin, Jennifer Ehle, Raffey Cassidy, Chrstopher Abbott, Willem Dafoe (narrator)
Directed by: Brady Corbet
Rating: R
Genre: Drama
2018

Times Seen:
Tim: 1

Summary: A young woman gets an unexpected opportunity to show her talent, which leads to her success as a pop star.

Review:

Tim: I went into Vox Lux feeling quite excited about the movie. It had a little bit of a Black Swan vibe to it and it appeared to be a great opportunity for Natalie Portman to showcase her talent. Actually watching the film was a bit of an odd experience. It was expected- in a few good ways and in a number of disappointing ones. As a whole, I suppose this is a decent film, but it's a movie that feels a long way off from reaching its full potential.

As all the trailers and advertisements made this seem like the movie fully focused on Natalie Portman, I was surprised to discover that she didn't show up in the film for nearly an hour. The first half of this movie is fully focused on her character's younger days as she rises from a devastating tragedy to superstardom. You might think that the natural complaint would be that we were sold a bill of goods and that Portman only appearing in the last half of the movie was a disappointment. Strangely, it doesn't play out like that. The first half of the movie is significantly more compelling than the latter half. I was legitimately intrigued and invested in the story of this young girl who experiences an all-too-familiar attack and then uses that tragedy to launch her career. Those scenes were compelling and fascinating as you watch the machine spin around this girl and capitalize on the opportunity. I thought Raffey Cassidy did a great job as young Celeste. As the movie neared the hour mark, I was genuinely excited about the quality. I remember thinking, "If this movie is this good and we haven't even seen Natalie Portman yet, I can't imagine where it's going to go from here."

Unfortunately, the movie becomes much less compelling once Portman shows up. To reiterate, this was quite unexpected. We would have anticipated the exact opposite. The story just gets bogged down. Young, idealistic Celeste becomes a faded, self-absorbed pop star. I found all these scenes substantially less interesting. I know the movie is reflecting on what stardom and the entertainment industry can do to even the brightest lights, but it wasn't very entertaining. We see Portman with her daughter (brilliantly played by Cassidy) but it all feels so expected and predictable. We've seen the dark side of fame and fortune many times before. Portman is fine in this role, but it's missing something. She plays it too far to one side- she doesn't give us a reason to care about this version of Celeste. She's flawed and trying to hold it together, but there's no trace of the earlier version. This performance needed to give us a glimpse of the old Celeste so when we reflect on how much she's changed, it breaks our hearts. This doesn't happen. It doesn't feel like Portman connects to Cassidy's earlier performance. Some of this obviously is on director Brady Corbet- he needed to link these two performances more closely together. As such, it feels too disjointed as a film, split down the middle. Even worse, the first half felt so much more engaging than the second half. Now, all this being said, the second half still has a number of worthwhile moments. This is never a bad movie, but it ends on a much weaker note than we expected.

While I'm somewhat knocking Portman, I do need to stress that she's pretty good in the role. Her performance doesn't quite hit all the right notes, but it's still solid. Raffey Cassidy was surprisingly good. The movie also benefits from an effective supporting performance by Jude Law. He has a few strong moments throughout the film, although it does ultimately feel like he's a bit underutilized. I like Jennifer Ehle, but I wish she had more to do, too. It was interesting to hear Willem Dafoe narrate the film- he does a good job, but it also had the downside of reminding us how good Dafoe is and I was bummed that he didn't get any time in front of the camera. As a whole, the cast and their performances were slightly above average. However, no one was really great.

Vox Lux isn't a bad movie. It has a lot of things to like in both halves of the movie. However, the promise of the film is never realized. Corbet has some directorial talent, but he felt too inexperienced to really make this movie work. I'm not knocking him too hard because this is only his second feature film effort. He shows some promise here, even if the movie doesn't fully come together. I anticipate he'll direct some really good movies later in his career. This movie should have been better, but it was a decently entertaining movie.

Rating 1-10
Tim's Rating: 6.5



If You Enjoyed This Movie, We Recommend: Black Swan, The Childhood of a Leader