Thursday, August 1, 2024

Maxxxine (dir. Ti West, 2024)

I was excited to watch Ti West’s latest film Maxxxine because I loved Pearl, the previous movie in West’s accomplished neo/retro-horror trilogy. Pearl was like an old-school graphic novel come to life in Technicolor, a film that changed the game rules of the horror genre in my view. Even if Maxxxine is no Pearl, it’s also not too far off the mark. Indeed, Maxxxine is a consummately enjoyable ’80s horror-comedy throwback that’s impeccably made for its particular genre. A mainstream film director’s job is to assemble a reliable machine, a contraption that the viewer can set into motion anytime, not just on a device or player, but in their own memory as well, which is why no artistic medium taps into the sensory capacities of the human mind better than film does. Set squarely in Hollywood in 1985, Maxxxine revels in the fun aspects of memory, with touchstones from the decade to which it pays homage tucked away in all corners of the movie. For instance, when Mia Goth’s central pornstar-in-trouble character heads out for a night of clubbing (simply a lure to entrap the detective who’s pursuring her), her makeup with a bold streak of color airbrushed across her eyes invokes Dale Bozzio’s look from the cover of Missing Persons’ classic 1982 album Spring Session M.

There’s no need to synopsize the plot of Maxxxine (which includes standard elements like a night-stalking serial killer, a religious cult, an evil daddy, etc.) because it’s a character-driven movie. The actors all know that and appropriately play to it. Despite a male presence in some key roles, this is essentially a women’s movie, and it’s a movie about being a woman in Hollywood. Elizabeth Debicki’s precisely haughty director Liz Bender, who’s at the helm of The Puritan horror movies within the fictional world of Maxxxine, is a stand-in for someone like Kathryn Bigelow, and she’s also a professional oracle for Maxine Minx, the pornstar whom she’s hired to star in her new sequel. Liz pointedly dispenses lessons to Maxine in dialogue that Ti West has smartly crafted to speak to the realities that actresses and female directors have dealt with in Hollywood for decades now. In Liz’s weary worldview, Hollywood is a beast, with all that description implies. It’s a town that gives zero fucks about artists. Is Maxine an artist? Does she want to be one? For the duration of this film, she’s merely trying to survive, and in order to do so, she must first beat down the beast of her own past, a sinister one that originated in the first movie in West’s trilogy, X, which we see a multitude of important flashbacks to throughout Maxxxine.

Mia Goth opens Maxxxine with a movie audition monologue of several minutes in length, picking up where her long devastating monologue that ended Pearl (in a performance that deserved way more awards attention) left off. In combination, those two scenes prove that Goth is now the single-most actress to be reckoned with in her generation. Her monologues have an emotional sweep and amplitude that showcase her range, which was clearly Ti West’s main aim in writing all three films in his trilogy with Mia Goth specifically in mind. At the close of Maxxxine, when the newly crowned “legitimate” Hollywood starlet Ms. Minx gazes in the mirror and says, “You’re a fucking movie star,” Mia Goth herself is obviously saying the same thing. And when Liz Bender asks her what she wants to do next, Maxine replies, “I just never want it to end.” Maxine’s comment early in the film that actresses in hardcore pornography age like bread, not wine resonates more deeply in that final context. Actresses in the mainstream film industry are nearly always faced with a cruel and unfair expiration date for their careers, an ageist cutoff (or more typically, a gradual fade-out) that’s based on their appearance rather than their talent.

During the closing credits of the screening of Maxxxine that I attended, I overheard a guy of about 23 in front of me remark to his girlfriend, “I wish I’d liked it more.” I rolodexed back through the movie’s feminist moments and thought, “It’s not as easy to like a movie when it’s not about you, is it?” To paraphrase Susan Sontag’s 1966 critical text Against Interpretation: a work of art is what it is. It is not — contrary to popular belief in our current era of endless streams of comments that nobody reads — only what you want it to be.

at

No comments:

Post a Comment