THE EXORCISM
*½/****
starring Russell Crowe, Ryan Simpkins, Sam Worthington, David Hyde Pierce
written by M.A. Fortin & Joshua John Miller
directed by Joshua John Miller
MAXXXINE
**½/****
starring Mia Goth, Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, Kevin Bacon
written and directed by Ti West
by Walter Chaw Joshua John Miller is Hollywood royalty: the son of actor/playwright Jason Miller (best known as The Exorcist‘s Father Damien Karras) and grandson of bang-zoom Jackie Gleason. He’s vampire royalty, too, having played foul, bitter Homer in Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark around the same time his brother Jason Patric headlined Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys as almost-turned heartthrob Michael, making Joshua John ideal for helming a film about the goings-on behind the scenes of a genre flick. The film-within-a-film in his The Exorcism is codenamed “The Georgetown Project,” a requel/redux/remake of The Exorcist in which Russell Crowe’s Tony Miller, a broken-down, widowed, recently in his cups actor seeking a comeback, essays a role very much like Father Karras while hoping to reconcile with his offscreen daughter Lee (Ryan Simpkins), who has come to live with him after being kicked out of school. The director is unctuous piece of shit Peter (Adam Goldberg), whose main motivating tactic for Tony is to remind him of Tony’s multiple failures as a human being while dangling his career in front of the lumpen actor like a spider over a Jonathan Edwardsian abyss. Credit Crowe for making Tony’s humiliation feel so familiar and lived-in that even his flinches from Peter’s gut punches are understated and resigned.
On board the production as a spiritual advisor is ravaged Father Conor (David Hyde Pierce), who, when asked why he became a priest, obliquely answers that as a child, his heroes had always been of the cloth. When he first meets Tony, he jokes, “My eyes are up here,” as Tony fixates on the priest’s Roman collar. Father Conor is so threadbare he’s almost diaphanous; I felt like a mild wind would pick him up and toss him around. Pierce is legitimately astonishing. Really, all the supporting work in The Exorcism is on point for a piece about the end of lives, the extinguishing of optimism, the toll of the world and this industry on the individuals who hope to find succour in its fantasias. Once the shoot starts, the demonic doings in “The Georgetown Project” bleed over into Tony’s personal life, and everyone around him looks for answers save the obvious one. To be fair, it may be more obvious to us because we have witnessed, during The Exorcism‘s prologue, the actor Tony is replacing, Tom (Miller’s Near Dark co-star, Adrian Pasdar), run through his lines on an empty set before having his throat crushed by an invisible force. The shoot is cursed, you see, and The Exorcism is very good when the curse is a metaphor for the weight of experience on imperfect people. Once it succumbs to convention with regularly spaced jump scares, cacophonous musical stings, and the usual possession hullabaloo, well, it’s never exactly terrible, but the gulf between what is honest and what is programmatic is wide enough for the fall to be a fatal one.
I have a good deal of empathy for The Exorcism. Admiration, too. I think I know what it’s going for, and I respect the fight it must have taken to land it anywhere near where it started. The compromises seem clear, and the wounds from tentative cuts are deep and slow to heal, if they ever do. I believe Miller intended this as a serious reckoning of his relationship with his father, setting it in the environment of a movie set because, for him, it might hew closest to his experience as a child growing up in a family of performers. This is all conjecture, of course. What I can see is a tender, sincere performance from Crowe as a man heavy with shame, haunted by how he’s treated people who cared for him in the past. All of them have fallen away but for the daughter he’s arguably wronged the most. I see a lovely turn from Simpkins, whose Lee has been hardened by her father’s abandonment but remains hopeful that her love and ministrations can heal their relationship. The power shift in The Exorcism from The Exorcist is powerful–from a parent nursing a sick kid to a kid nursing a troubled father. Compare the scene where Regan pisses herself and her mother bathes her, concerned and embarrassed, with a scene in The Exorcism where Tony pisses himself and Lee has to undress him, stick him in the shower, and ask from the door if he’s taken his meds.
In a screening room showing dailies of her dad flubbing his performance due to anxiety and a fall off the wagon, Lee has a beautifully underwritten conversation with Father Conor that is packed with subtext. “What are you, a shrink?” Lee asks, and Father Conor confirms that in addition to being a priest, he is, indeed, a licensed psychiatrist. They smile at that point because I think they recognize, like we do, that he’s an expositional two-fer–a character who fulfills multiple narrative purposes, and a good one, at that. (Father Karras, for what it’s worth, was also a shrink.) At the hour mark, about 60 pages into a 90-page screenplay, The Exorcism becomes, well, an exorcism movie, and I’d love to see the draft before Miller got the notes about how audiences coming to see a movie called “The Exorcism” by Father Karras’s son will be disappointed if there isn’t an extended exorcism climax. The Shining, both book and film, could conceivably be read for the first two-thirds as the story of a mean drunk who hurts his family and his future, then does it all over again. The haunted hotel is, yes, just a metaphor. When it becomes something else, it is arguably less for it. The Exorcism is a serious independent drama with extraordinary performances that is personal and eviscerating…until it’s the same old shit, complete with green lighting and shouted Latin over nervous chorales, gravid cathedral bells, and jittery strings. Boy, did everyone involved in this deserve a lot better than the same old shit.
Ti West’s Maxxxine is another inside-baseball meta exercise about the fatal allure of Hollywood that, like West’s needle-drop of The Fixx’s “One Thing Leads to Another” in his The House of the Devil, uses the 1980s correctly in a sentence. Nailing the period is a lot harder than it appears. Credit West for using Abel Ferrara, Robert Vincent O’Neill, and Gary Sherman as his exploitation touchstones. There’s even a healthy dose of DePalma in the use of jagged split-screens, while a scenery-chewing Kevin Bacon completes the VHS grindhouse wonderland vibe as John Labat, a skeevy private dick seemingly modelled on Mickey Rourke’s Harry Angel from Angel Heart. You can smell the cigarettes and stale sweat when he’s on screen. Giancarlo Esposito similarly does yeoman’s work in a terrible wig and polyester suits–jogging and otherwise–as Teddy Knight, the talent agent-cum-muscle to our avenging angel, Maxine (Mia Goth). After she thanks him for doing something particularly unsavoury on behalf of his client, Teddy takes a puff on his cigarette, shrugs a Little Steven-on-“The Sopranos” shrug, and says, “What’re agents for?” If Maxxxine sounds like a comedy, it is–a bit of a shit-eating one, self-conscious at all times and maybe inordinately pleased with itself. But does it feel right? When West slowly pans up to a street sign marking “Starlight Drive” in an L.A. twilight while Tyler Bates’s electric-guitar-and-synth-driven score pulses on the soundtrack, hell yeah, it feels right. It feels a lot like Lamberto Bava’s Delirium, as it happens: another sunlit giallo complete with a black-gloved killer who, turned on by hot girls, gets his rocks off murdering them in media-obsessed ways. Subtle it ain’t, but what the hell.
Maxxxine sees Satan as Tinsel Town in literal terms. Like The Exorcism, it ends with a failed exorcism executed by a cult comprising families of starlets who were drawn to the bright lights before being butchered by all the wolves in this shiny, plastic-fantastic forest. The final showdown happens at the base of the Hollywood sign, and an epilogue does some of the things Mulholland Drive does while shoehorning in cuts from both New Order and Kim Carnes. (I should mention that Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Welcome to the Pleasuredome” gets showcased here in much the same way their “The Power of Love” was in last year’s All Of Us Strangers; if this means a Kate Bush-like resurgence for them amongst generation-Spotify, so be it.) Maxxxine is spot-on in its satire, in other words. Some would say it’s “on the nose,” and yes, it’s that as well. What I liked about it is what I eventually came to respect about West’s briefly controversial SIGHT & SOUND list: that it’s so disingenuously guileless, such a complete and total asshole towards earnest expectations, that you either applaud it for its bullying or reject it for the reasons he hopes you’ll reject it. Oh, Maxxxine is a simplistic takedown of ambition and stardom? Well, no fucking shit, Sherlock. Look at the scene where Maxine is chased down a blind alley by a Buster Keaton street performer brandishing a switchblade. Turning the tables, Maxine pulls her gun on him and says, “Drop it, Buster!” without a hint of awareness that she’s naming his cosplay. She tortures him–essentially rapes him, in a homophobic moment that’s entirely period-appropriate–and then castrates him in high Ms. 45/I Spit on Your Grave-style. It’s vile. It’s also a troll.
“Just like a Hitchcock blonde,” praises ruthless producer Elizabeth (Elizabeth Debicki), in case you didn’t savvy from the sequence centred around the literal Bates Motes on the Universal lot. Maxxxine treats its audience with derision and its subject with contempt. It’s an indie filmmaker with a defensive streak capping his trilogy of slasher pastiches with a reminder that he’s above it–an attitude perhaps feeding itself with praise from Martin Scorsese and confused outrage from Scorsese scribe Paul Schrader. This is the kind of movie Peter of The Exorcism makes: the guy honking with laughter and explaining Penelope Spheeris’s Hollywood Vice Squad as it unspools. Movies as a cudgel, filmography as a flex. Ti West is a talented filmmaker with a chip on his shoulder, and sometimes it manifests in heartbreaking, surprising work like the revisionist slasher Pearl or the thunderstruck The House of the Devil. And sometimes it comes out like Maxxxine: technically adept and obsessively detailed, yet incapable of fully committing to the gag without reassuring us at every step that it’s as above it as you are. Cool gore, though. And Delirium is still right there; Fear City, too.
