THE FLY @ 40

Seth Brundle picks up journalist Veronica at a science and technology convention when she tells him everyone says their invention will change the world and he says, "yeah, but they're lying." He does have a point. He's developed a matter transporter which he demonstrates back at his digs in the rusty quarter of town. She talks her skeptical boss (and romantic ex) into putting her on the story and one night when Seth gets drunk and jealous he puts himself through the machine, not noticing the stray fly that's followed him into the pod.

The Fly is often cited as the moment that David Cronenberg met the mainstream but he'd already done that with The Dead Zone (which even fans forget, however unjustly).  What The Fly more accurately signifies is Cronenberg bringing his trademark body horror to Hollywood. The one before Dead Zone was Videodrome which would not have flown in Hollywood with its paranoid themes of controlling media but The Fly was a remake of a '50s move (incidentally, one set in the Canada of Cronenberg's childhood years) and felt like a bankable update the way that Body Snatchers had in 1978 or The Thing in '82 (though that one didn't hit).

Regardless of what they thought they might have been in for what the suits and the public got was the work of an auteur glad to have a roomy budget and one careful not to waste a cent. What they also got was one of his most toughly visceral outings, an unflinching look at bodily disintegration and mutation. Cronenberg consciously chose against an allegory of AIDS which he felt would not only date the film but provide an irrelevant distraction from Brundle's story. To that end he encouraged his FX and makeup crew to concentrate on the effects of human aging, rendering Brundle's transformation all the more universal.

As it had in almost all Cronenberg's previous films, the exchange between strange technology and corporate interests gives way to the most profound aspects of the horror. The exclusivity of the Starliner housing development in Shivers serves as a perfect incubator for the sexually transmitted parasite. The pop psychologist's cultish manifestation of his patients' rage in The Brood gives literal brith to an army of homicidal monsters. In The Fly the initial entry point of greed is through fame, Brundle's in the science community and Veronica's in the publishing world, but the obvious commercial potential of the invention is there to begin with and, while not exploited in the running time, is clearly pointing to the future.

What doesn't point to the future is the effect on Brundle as he edges toward life as Brundle-Fly. Going from constant sexual arousal, climbing the walls, predigesting his food with acidic vomit, he is soon enough filling a display case of his unnecessary human features. They adorn the glass shelves of his museum of human history. The shedding of his humanity is reduced to a series of squelches and tearing dead tissue. As he narrates to a video camera how he is changing, we are increasingly aware that he is travelling on a one way ticket. This is a major departure from the '50s original in which rthe hapless Dr. Delambre continually resists his new state. Brundle not only accepts it but, thinking his new strength is a result purely of transporting, encourages Veronica to try it. When it's clear that he has fused with the insect his chief drive is curiosity and excitement. Only when this turns into deterioration does his philosophical acceptance emerge. Before the catastrophes of the final act, this is the scientist and his examination of his own passing.

The casting of the film included real life couple Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum who were about to have very good '80s and '90s. Goldblum exhibits the nervous intellect that still keeps him famous and it is perfect for Brundle's mix of rapid thought and frenetic self-effacement that gives the character his depth. He'd already delighted audiences with his similar turn in The Big Chill and this is his rarified version. Geena Davis with her sharp intelligence and warm deeper voice provides a presence that can complete the picture, beat for beat. This film always feels like a two hander rather than Goldblum's showcase and that is down to Davis' presence.

Also starring is the work of Cronenberg's workshop of effects and make up masters who served up a wealth of grotestquery that outdid all of Cronenberg's previous body horrors put together. From the mangled baboon to the various stages of Brundle's disintegration, to the maggot baby (with Cronenberg himself as the obsretician) to the final mess of a thing that yet invokes our pity and sorrow. All of it looks both physical and a little dated but dramatically so strong that we effortlessly watch along. 

The Fly saw David Cronenberg, the maestro of the weird idea in contemporary city life, reach the point where it felt he was finally comfortable with his actors. He's already worked with many highly accomplished casts but their performances can feel, in those earlier films, on the stilted side. With the young power couple at the centre of The Fly for the first time we know warmth in his stories. That final ingredient that makes The Fly more easily rewatchable than anything he'd already done (though my favourite will always be Videodrome) and it was an experience he took to almost everything he did thereafter that didn't require a cold touch (like Spider or Cosmopolis) completing the pieces to allow him to move between the mainstream and the personal without stylistic compromise. It depicted a terrifying transformation but it resulted in his own creative one. 

Viewing notes: I don't know if there will be a 40th Anniversary 4k of this in 2026 so I went ahead and watched my old Blu-Ray which is a superb transfer with clear impactful sound (frequent collaborator Howard Shore really got to play around with a big orchestra this time). On Disney+ with subscription, rent from Apple, Prime and Youtube, and out of print in Australia but always affordable through a market for around the $20 mark. 

Review: MAPS TO THE STARS

Havana is a star of a certain age and rapidly shooting toward invisibility in the night sky. Benjie is still a child star but is on probation in a sequel after almost self immolating on a drug binge at thirteen. His nail hard mother guards his progress while his Beatle-quoting father relieves the stress of the Beverly Hills A-list as a kind of physiopsychiatrist. Carrie Fisher (the real Carrie Fisher) recommends a "chore whore" to Havana whose last one is in a recovery oubliette. This is Agatha, whom we actually meet first as she alights a bus to Hollywood and magnetises the driver of the limo she has arranged (beyond her means). She is scarred with burns. Getting that story will prove dramatic.

Take all this and handle it normally and you might have a passable melodrama or, more likely, a stinging satire pushing boundaries set by Entourage or perhaps a more humane contrapuntal narrative fugue by a Robert Altman or a Paul Thomas Anderson. But, no, David Cronenberg is at the helm and we are not going to get out of it so easily.

Don't get me wrong, the narrative machine is well oiled and works with a Swiss movement. DC even rolls back the visual style to a muted high-placed Californian good taste. The Terror of Toronto is at his least when he allows the action and linear pull enough sway to make you forget it's him. At his best, whether elbow deep in bizarre prosthetics like Videodrome or shiveringly rareified like Crash, he serves up a muscular narrative and throws the essay booklet in. At his best, he is all about the notion.

This is not an attack on Hollywood or even much of a comment on it. The setting, however, is essential. In what better milieu could we trial such a tale of scarifying incest and the passage of sin
between generations than in the central hive of meme production that is the Dream Factory?

Havana knows to air kiss the rival she would sooner eviscerate. Her sessions with Stafford the massaging shrink give us the most Cronenbergian visuals as Julianne Moore (Havana) distorts herself under his (John Cusack's) professional intimacy to the border of recognisability. The star (a particularly honestly freckled Moore) must touch real ugliness for her redemption. The always impressive Moore went to a similar realm in the undersung Safe. Like Keira Knightley in Dangerous Method, she is pushing the envelope with the odd effect that we both sympathise with and recoil from her.

That's the other thing about a good Cronenberg film: performances that go places. Moore's is the most external but the others are no less impressive. The ubiquitous Mia Wasikovska (I should tally how many times I've seen her on screen this year alone) warms us with pathos, terrifies us with madness and somehow also charms us. Olivia Williams steps into frame hard and unflatteringly almost monkish in appearance and turns our frown at her hardness into real pity. Newcomer Evan Bird as Benjie bravely plays a waxwork detachment up to the end, his pubescent forehead pimples giving us a grasping handle on his fragility as he tests our patience with his constantly self-abused power. I also found John Cusack's grown up teen star (a casting decision rather than a plot point) poignant. Current young adult idol Robert Pattinson surely finds a kind of satisfaction as one aspirant actor/writer among a million working a day job.

I've left the plot out of this review because it doesn't need any help from me. This piece that allows its sobering proposition to slowly swell up through the easily conventional narrative has more on its mind than giving us logic dots to join. For it's here on the cinema screen that we are shown our own affection for ideals wrenched earthward as we perhaps maybe might and kinda should aspire not to the stars made of flesh and anxiety but to fabulously refulgent light in the distance of the night whose outnumbering lightlessness taunts us toward the sparks.

Review: ANTIVIRAL

So why did the only person who could never get away with his thematic choice being automatically questioned by virtue of the circumstances of his birth choose this film to make as a debut?

Sid works as a lifestyle consultant at a firm that supplies people with the diseases of their idols. His spiel to the customer is creepy for both its insidiousness and the rote-learned delivery Sid tries to conceal with a sensuous purr. As he leaves work each day he is frisked and asked to declare that he isn't carrying (dig the double entendre) any property of the company. At home he inserts a smuggled sample into a machine that looks like a clanking prototype and proceeds to remove the copyright from the virus he's just injected. He's going to sell it on the black market whose outlet is a butcher's shop that sells steaks derived from the cells of celebrities.

Got all that? There's more. The first half hour of this film hits you with a new wow concept every few minutes. How does one celebrity get an unscheduled disease? She went to China and caught a knock off. And on. This is the work of someone who has paused after a brainwave notion and thought about the world it describes. When this approach goes flat it grates like overthought comedy but here everything we encounter about this society seems to fit as though it was in the room when we got there.

Just as natural is the choice of casting. Caleb Landry Jones wears his suits like a coat hanger. When you first see him you wonder if there's anything under the fabric except a wire frame. He skulks and shifts as though the light of the interiors, though artificial, will only increase the population of ginger freckles on his small, intense face. He's like a very young Brad Dourif without the brutality. As such he moves through his character's phases with the adaptiveness of a camouflaging insect, convincing us variously of his health, ill health, intellect and survivalism without showing any of his working.

That's good because this is a film that threatens to collapse under the weight of its ideas in a second act weakened by inertia and repetition. This is the aspect that doesn't look well schooled or confident. So much time is spent drawing out the consequences of his fateful action at the end of the first act and at the same time blending his (intentionally) awkward relationship with a particular celebrity that by the time we get to the inevitable twists and turns they feel like they're being read out of the screenplay seminar handbook.

But then the third act finds its feet and delivers the promises of the first up to the final breathtaking image of consummation.

I should point out that even though I saw this film much earlier this year I was unable to review it as the preview screening I went to at the Nova stalled when the projection or the DCP caught a virus (yes, everyone in the audience was cracking that one) and I and my friend decided to leave after a seemingly interminable ten or so minutes. Until I caught up with it recently and got to the ending it had left an unbreathing sense of disappointment in me which no amount of guessing could placate.

But the finale is as strong and awe-inspiring as anything out of the director's Dad's mind. This film that would have been called Cronenbergian if the director's name was Smith offers no slight to the family tradition. Even the dumpy middle act is no mark against when you consider how the effects and ideas took precedence over the performances in Cronenberg senior's early pieces.

So why did Brandon Cronenberg, the only person who could never get away with his thematic choice being automatically questioned by virtue of the circumstances of his birth choose to make a body horror first off? I Googled interviews with him and he emerges well. The idea of celebrity culture plus a digitised biology got his mind soaring. He didn't do a musical or a buddy movie because this one got in the way of everything else.

Also, he doesn't have to be David Cronenberg's son to want to make a Cronenberg film. Cronenberg Snr put such a bug into film culture with his early work that no sci-fi that isn't just high (i.e. single) concept popcorn what-if can quite escape the duty to add that, yes, viral strain of satire to be fulfilling. There are so many but straight up Todd Haynes's deep and troubling Safe comes to mind. More recently the films of Zal Batmanglij and Britt Marling (Sound of My Voice or The East) have had no trouble taking aim at the hive-mindedness, venality or political sleaze their authors see around them and coating it all in the alien sheen of a Videodrome or a Crash. The time is never the future. The time is always now.

Catchup Review: COSMOPOLIS

A fable of the 1%. Eric Packer, citizen of the oxygenated bubble of the billionaires club, wants a haircut. His security man reasonably suggests he spend some of his unimaginable wealth calling a hairdresser into the office. Eric wants the mirrors and smell of pomades, soap and the sound of clippers. It's a rootsy thing. So he gets in the limo and heads across town. Traffic's slow. The president's in town and creating traffic jams. Eric's favourite rapper whose beats supply the sound of one of his elevators is also going across town but in an open casket, slowly, mourned by thousands. There are anarchist riots. There are sexual opportunities and places to lunch and dine. It takes a long time to get across town. Eric, in the capsule of the limo with his data screens in the armrests, vodka and ablutionary facilities, is about to watch his life change from the root upwards. Oh, there's also a threat on his life.

This might be thriller territory except that the interest is far more in the examination of the pieces of his lifestyle, his power, health and business methods. If you thought the description in my crammed opening par made for action be warned that this is one of the coldest, most inert, most talkative examinations of a character you are likely to see outside of experimental cinema (and by experimental I mean lab conditions).

But it does play fair with this. Once in the limousine we see the impeccably groomed and smooth faced Robert Pattinson in the car and the back projection of the city behind him and for the first few shots it looks fake. If your tv has a high frequency setting like 100 Hz try it and see how that organic look of film with its grain and colour richness suddenly looks like cheap home video. That's what this looks like.

It's not a mistake. If you don't much about David Cronenberg then wiki or imdb are your friends but for now you do need to know that he is an extremely deliberate filmmaker. After Videodrome when his budgets started improving and his skill grew ever finer there is nothing that happens on screen or comes through the speakers that he hasn't intended. No awkwardly stumbled line or inappropriate facial expression is chance or lack of skill. In any way at all. So when we see our protagonist looking like the groom in a wedding video we are being clued in to the idea that we are going to see a lot of surface, a lot of skin and no heart, and it will be our job to find whatever's beneath. If we don't want to do that work we shouldn't be watching this movie.

This movie is talk. It's so much talk that it can be easy to miss the action and the visual feast going on. The talk is often abstruse but it's not hard to get the gist without feeling left out (indeed, if you were to try and follow it all the first time around you will be left behind very quickly). Keep your focus on how Packer's character changes throughout and you'll be ok. This is not an easy thing though. The verbal delivery is so dry to create distance between these people and the rest of humanity that you might want to pack a jogger's bottle before you sit down in front of it.

Since The Dead Zone (a Cronenberg film that even fans forget to count because it is so early and conventional)  David Cronenberg has split his jobs into increasingly mainstream fare like The Fly, Eastern Promises or A Dangerous Method and the products of his own personal laboratory like Spider, Crash or this one. While all of them look like his work and he's never softened into unrecognisable normality like Scorsese did, the gap between these approaches is wider than that of Guillermo Del Toro who jobs in action sequels in English to fund his singular masterpieces in Spanish. Maybe Cronenberg has just been doing that, playing the game here and reinventing it there on smaller budgets with the idea that his peaks will appear to history from among the innovative pieces. Well, history will take its pick.

Meantime we have Samuel Beckett in New York. People delivering lines rich in information but low on emotion. The great Samantha Morton's near monologue is like something out of a Matthew Barney video it is so poised and creepily monotonous. Juliet Binoche's turn is unsettlingly sexy. Sarah Gadon as Packer's wife is so sexlessly groomed and prepped she might be from the cast of Mad Men. Paul Giamatti is a real treat. His is the final line. It makes sense of a lot of the preceeding and it kills.

I don't know more about Don De Lillo who wrote the novel pon which this is based than my failing to enjoy an earlier book his lent me by a friend. I considered that to be a kind of lo-cal Anthony Burgess meets John Irving, all quirk and scholarship but no substance. Remembering that made me wonder what Cosmopolis could be like on the page as one thing Cronenberg has shown a genuinely astouding talent for in the past in his knack at imaginative literary adaptation. Crash and Naked Lunch, for example, play like companion pieces to their novels rather than rote visualisations of them, they extend the source material into cinema; you can enjoy both without one experience threatening the other. Now it looks like I'll be breaking my vow of non readership of De Lillo just to find out.

Even if I hate the book it will have been worth it.

Review: A DANGEROUS METHOD: "Jung and easily froidened."

A young woman is taken kicking, screaming and laughing demoniacally into an ornate old building. It's 1906. She's not possessed. She's hysterical, according to the newborn science of psychoanalysis. A little later, twitching in a chair in a sunlit room she receives a visitor. He's young and pleasant mannered. "I'm Dr Jung," he says. "I thought we might just talk today."

So begins a triangle first professional intrigue and then ethics-breaching sexual compulsion as Jung nuts it out with the paternal Freud and Sabine the hopeful future doctor and mix it up like it's Saturday night. Jung becomes increasingly dissatisfied with the Moses of Vienna and wants to explore the imperceptible. Moses supposes neuroses are gnoses and knowses that the nascent science's already fragile hold on acceptance will only be weakened by such apparent charlatanry. The big splitteroo looms and happens. Psychoanalysis grows branches.

This is a film of threads rather than acts and while supported by sumptuous visuals is really all talk. Well, mostly talk. The mainstream sheen of this and the more recent Cronenberg films belies the treasures beyond the surface; it's subtle rather than bland.

Much of this must be conveyed by performances and we have a wealth of them. The progressively impressive Michael Fassbender brings the light to the eyes of Dr Jung that glows beneath the calm exterior of  his training as a respectable Swiss bourgeois. Viggo Mortensen, unrecognisable to the eye and ear, is Dr Freud of the LAW who feels the vulnerability of his age against the younger man's recklessness. Kiera Knightley lights up every scene she's in with the black flame of danger as her personal power increases.

She is also the deliverer of the sole typical Cronenberg moment in the film in the early scenes of Sabine's therapy. Whenever a memory approaches the pain threshold and she can't speak it her lower jaw shoots out transporting her from delicate beauty to eel-like ugliness. It's an extraordinary transformation achieved with no more than facial muscle but it expresses a kind of intimidating self-disgust and panic impossible to render in dialogue.

Two other performances I'll mention as a pair for they serve to illustrate the contrary forces tearing at Jung. Sarah Gadon (an ice and gold beauty so pale she's almost transparent) provides a Frau Jung whose external fragility belies the knowledge of her husband's wilfulness. Vincent Cassell is both unsettling and funny as the nihilistic libertine who says an effortless yes to every temptation. Anima and animus? Sure but also the rising western woman and man of the coming century.

So this is a good review, isn't it? Well, not entirely. Having established itself comfortably as a talky movie A Dangerous Method makes no scruple of talking well beyond its initial interest. The first of its one and a half hours transcends the natter fest by keeping everything we are witnessing intriguing. There's even a scene with a home made polygraph which looks so much like a Rube Goldberg contraption that I kept looking for a plastic mouse to fall into a bucket that dropped on to a scale that lifted a switch that ....  My problem is that, having established its points it just keeps them centre frame and replays them.

And then it ends. And then we get something I always wince at in films like this, a series of title cards revealing what happened to each character afterwards.

So, is this a good film? If the director's name were taken off the credits I wouldn't pick it but I'd think it was several notches above the average Hollywood biopic. We're asked to examine rather than be shocked at the sadomasochistic scenes. The performances are restrained rather than flat. There is a soggy lawn where most of the third act would be but there are indications that the creative team behind this movie wanted to do much more than play out the lives of historical figures. Still with the muddle of themes on screen father/son, science/esoterica, sex as both procreation and compulsion, etc etc, it's hard to discern the point.

There is no danger of this in the director's earlier work which was so steady and signature that his surname became an adjective for cinema of challenging ideas, mostly about human potential. Even when your old tv started going off and switching to noisy white static you could talk about a Cronenbergian experience you had the other day. These films endure because the ideas they contain have become surprisingly persistent over decades to the extent that they transcend any of the very early lapses in production standards or acting proficiency or anything deemed sneerworthy as low budget.

But since M. Butterfly, a blind spot in the career for even ardent fans, Cronenberg is perceived to have softened, lost flavour, joined the bottle of white you've had in the fridge for a week in going all watery. While Spider or Crash are roundly celebrated as real points of progress in Cronenberg's development towards subtlety, other films like Butterfly, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises almost universally disappoint. A Dangerous Method disappointed me but should it have? Should I really have been surprised by what I initially saw as a wasted opportunity of a powerfully visionary filmmaker to tackle psychoanalysis with his singular conceptual courage?

Let's look at a little context. I described the Cronenberg moment in this film a few pars up. It's extraordinary and  very few other directors would have allowed it through. Lynch, yes, but he wouldn't have allowed it the depth it gets to here. It's not just a weird moment with a facial contortion, it forces us to think about the character's past.

Wind back to the 70s film that no one wants to admit is Cronenberg's, Fast Company. It's a standard drive-in movie about formula one racers and their battle against the forces of evil big business. I used to give up even on reading the synopses of it as nothing among those spare words interested me. (I bought a copy finally as it was a two disc set which featured a pair of hitherto inaccessible early features: Stereo and Crimes of the Future.) But Fast Company has two moments in it that demand a place for the whole film alongside Shivers, Rabid, Scanners etc. The "funny cars" revving up with roars and screeches are like a small herd of terrifying alien animals, not machines. A group sex scene gets to the point of introducing thick black engine oil, not as a lube but as a kind of ritual ointment. Those are in the middle of a petrol-head movie.

The most mainstream early Cronenberg piece is also often overlooked: Dead Zone. It's an intriguing piece but very difficult to distinguish from any other early 80s sci-fi or horror. And yet there's that suicide scene with the scissors. No gore or violence on screen; it's just disturbingly ugly. And there's the sauna scene in Eastern Promises. The sex scenes in M. Butterfly and its Genet-like finale which pull it far from the conventional piece it otherwise is.

There's always Cronenberg in a Cronenberg film. By contrast, it can be a real challenge finding the director of Taxi Driver in almost any Scorsese film since Goodfellas. The only filmmaker Cronenberg feared to meet (it was mutual, btw), the cinematic infuser of Dante and Dostoyevsky with a Little Italy accent took the devil's shilling and the rest is just nuts and bolts craftsmanship. But a few seconds of undiluted Cronenberg to tell you he's still here, can lift even the soft descent of A Dangerous Method from a pure fall and give it a few momentary thrilling seconds of anti-gravity. Down but not out, he has his byline on another release this year, Cosmopolis. I'll be in line.