The antithesis of the other pop music heavy hitter that took a bow at the Toronto International Film Festival, A Star is Born, the Portman-led Vox Lux is blanketed in the kind of pitch black nihilism that remains evermore elusive in cinema. As an experience likely too twisted for Academy Award voters, it makes a striking contrast with the Lady Gaga film that reinvents Hollywood’s favorite industry fairy tale into an elegiac romance about self-discovery in the music industry. By contrast, Vox Lox suggests nothing can go through the prism of modern industry and come out the other side with a sense of discovery or enlightenment. Not when sweetness or sincerity must be reduced to 280 characters or a three-minute club beat. If this seems like a grim way to begin a dance tune, it is. Rushed to the ambulance while the picture’s ending credits play in the first several minutes, Celeste and her era’s last bit of innocence are on life support before the new millennium has even arrived. Still, she’s a lone survivor and her sincere songwriting tribute to dead classmates catapults her to national celebrity, and her ballad for the fallen becomes the anthem of a nation. At only 14-years-old she has a number one hit. The film establishes this years-long evolution, from survivor to pop star, via extended montages and a cool, disaffected voiceover narration provided by Willem Dafoe in the tenor of his Wes Anderson work, and then a single day of her adulthood. Thus splitting the running time equally between Jaffey and Portman as Celeste, we view the gradual shedding of adolescence and the then stark fruit of 18 years in a public spotlight that’s as equally distracted by war, terrorism, and social media as it is via Celeste’s happy melodies. see related: Halloween Review While only appearing in half the movie, Portman’s version of an exhausted but chipper diva is a fearsome creation. More than just self-obsessed, her egocentrism places her as the sun, moon, and stars, with those who put her in the sky nothing than the dirt long forgotten beneath her elevated feet. This can include Jude Law, who goes from her on-the-road manager and parental figure to drinking buddy, and Stacy Martin as older sister Eleanor. Intriguingly, Martin who is younger than Portman and begins the film as another daughter of blue collar Christian values, attempting to babysit and connect with the younger child, but who gets left behind along with her faith as Celeste’s self-worship grows all encompassing. Martin’s difference from Portman is not remarked on at all though, because in a film this allegorical, all that matters is Celeste, and she does not even notice that her daughter is the literal spitting image of herself. Indeed, Jaffe makes a strong impression while pulling double duty as the young Celeste and then the face of a new generation in daughter Albertine, who more than just resembles the Celeste before the shooting, not that her mother cares long enough to look. All of this is exposed in a day in the life of a comeback concert that allows Portman to lean with a wolfish grin into a coated Staten Island drawl, spitting Corbet and Celeste’s idioms with a mania that rivals the Saturday Night Live parody of her life. That is because the performance also pulls from observations in Portman’s career, be it beginning as the child star quickly objectified, or the revered intellect that is eventually scorned by a publicity machine that asks her to keep things non-confrontational. I can even attest it captures the inherent awkwardness of a “roundtable” interview in which a group of journalists take turns asking a celebrity questions (although if one guy tried to hog all the time as seen in the film, it wouldn’t just be Celeste rising in righteous fury). So when it comes time for a big show, and songs by Sia that are intentionally less warm than Gaga’s sentimental ballads in A Star is Born, the film is happy to just let you revel in the spectacle. You probably already have been your whole life. further reading: The Must See Movies of 2018 David Crow is the Film Section Editor at Den of Geek. He’s also a member of the Online Film Critics Society. Read more of his work here. You can follow him on Twitter @DCrowsNest.
