Pop, violence and an attempt to say something

Powerful moments in Vox Lux don't quite add up.

Director Brady Corbet's Vox Lux might be a case of a movie taking a bite out of a big subject but failing entirely to digest it. Filled with pretentious title cards (Act I: Genesis 2000-2001, for example), the movie begins with a school shooting and propels itself toward a portrait of a pop star who's having a bad moment, perhaps after a long series of bad moments involving sex, drugs, and alcohol and trauma dating back to her high-school years.

Corbet opens the film with a riveting display of violence that takes place in the music room of a Staten Island high school. After suffering grave wounds, high-schooler Celeste Montgomery (Raffey Cassidy) writes a mournful song with her older sister (Stacy Martin). Because she's seen as a bona fide national victim, Celeste's song becomes a sensation.

Celeste's career rises from her horrific experience -- with help from a manager, played by Jude Law with an attitude of hard-boiled pragmatism.

Cassidy does a fine job of showing how Celeste -- with help from her sister -- begins to taste the high life that accompanies stardom. Maybe the movie never should have left those teen years in which Celeste still hasn't found her footing.

Natalie Portman takes over the movie's second half as the grown Celeste, who we meet on the day she's supposed to play a concert in her hometown. Natalie is having an awful day for a variety of reasons: She's arguing with her sister, trying to come to terms with her teenage daughter Albertine (also played by Cassidy) and meeting with a press corps that's bound to ask questions about the connection between one of Celeste's videos and another violent incident, a mass shooting on a beach in Europe.

Corbet plunges violence, celebrity, and cultural degradation into a jumbo-sized package as the movie searches for hyper-meanings. But the movie feels most convincing when it isn't reaching for thematic gold but making smaller observations, like how a journalist interacts with Celeste after being warned by a record company executive to stay away from certain subjects.

In a scene between Celeste and her daughter in a Manhattan diner, Corbet's camera generates the kind of uncomfortable immediacy that makes us a third party to their conversation.

But Portman's version of Celeste -- complete with leather jacket, baggy jeans, a New York accent and tons of attitude -- seems forced. To me, her performance screamed of striving more than it suggested a believable character.

Corbet's style, which comes on like fragments from a vivid dream, can't compensate for what I saw as the movie's lack of clarifying viewpoint about the amorphous web that's woven from elements of fame, violence and pop culture.

With Celeste vying for the title of the year's most unpleasant character, Vox Lux sweats its way toward something I think we're meant to take as seriously as the intermittent narration offered by an off-screen Willem Dafoe.

All I can say is that I tried, but I also wondered if effort (a palpable sense of reaching for something) didn’t outweigh the movie’s overall achievement.

Exploring the making of a fascist

Actor Brady Corbet sets his strangely evocative movie at the end of World War I.

The Childhood of a Leader immerses itself in a volatile moment in history without trying to replicate it.

Instead of recounting real events at the end of World War I, first time director Brady Corbet takes a highly interpretive look at the conditions that might give rise to a fascist totalitarian leader. To accomplish this task, Corbet focuses on Prescott (Tom Sweet), a boy who's living outside of Paris with his parents, a German mother of chilly disposition (Berenice Bejo) and an American diplomat father (Liam Cunningham) who's working on the Treaty of Versailles for President Wilson.

Corbet divides his slowly evolving tale into three chapters titled Tantrums 1,2 and 3.

It's worth pausing to consider these titles as we watch an often unpleasant boy react to a harsh and loveless world that's full of disquiet. It's almost as if Corbet, who co-wrote the screenplay with Norwegian actress Mona Fastvoid, wants to tell us that authoritarian leadership amounts to a kind of sustained tantrum, an unleashing of puerile anger from a dictator who believes the world deserves to be smashed and brutalized.

Much of the movie's discordant feeling derives from an avant-garde score by Scott Walker.
Nowhere is Walker's influence more evident than in opening newsreel footage that serves as a prologue for what's to follow. The black-and-white images of diplomats gathering in Paris to determine the shape of Interwar Europe are accompanied by a soundtrack that might be suitable for a horror movie. And, in some ways, The Childhood of a Leader is a horror movie. Corbet turns over the soil in which bad seeds can grow.

We first see young Prescott through a window at night. Dressed as an angel, he's about to participate in a Christmas pageant at the local church. No sooner has the pageant ended, than Prescott races into the woods, finds a perch and begins throwing rocks at the local priest.

Other adults in Prescott's world include a tutor (Stacy Martin) and a maid (Yolanda Moreau). Only the maid demonstrates anything resembling affection for the boy.

At times, Prescott -- with long locks that his mother refuses to trim -- is taken for a girl. His mother won't let him be a boy, which signals trouble for his pending manhood.

Robert Pattinson does cameo duty as a journalist who has periodic discussions with Cunningham's character and who may be a secret lover of Bejo's character.

Corbett infuses his dimly lit movie with a sense of dread as he allows scenes to play out in often-ambiguous fashion. By no means an inviting movie, The Childhood of a Leader can seem unremittingly harsh, even forbidding.

The Childhood of a Leader, which takes its title and perhaps some inspiration from a 1939 short story by Jean Paul Sartre, has been compared to the austere work of Austrian director Michael Haneke (The White Ribbon). Corbet, who acted in Haneke's American version of Funny Games, obviously knows the director's work.

Wherever Corbet finds his influences, it's clear that he wants to speak in his own voice as he explores the murky origins of fascism. And if we're uncertain about his intentions, Corbet emphasizes the point with an eerie postscript, a brief look at the trappings of a fictional fascist state in which the now-grown leader has ascended.

It's possible to argue that Corbet leaves too much unstated in his depictions of daily life or that he moves too slowly. And, yes, watching The Childhood of a Leader requires patience, but Corbet deserves credit for imbuing his movie with an unquestionable seriousness of purpose. He makes you want to probe its mysteries.