A collection of great scenes in search of a movie, MaXXXine opens with a quote from Bette Davis – “In this business, until you’re known as a monster you’re not a star” – and ends with the song Bette Davis Eyes.
Between those bookends, the story of a porn actress (Mia Goth) trying to go legit in the 1980s United States, where Ronald Reagan is promising “morning in America”, Christians are campaigning against satanism in rock music and filth on the screens, and a serial killer is on a spree butchering young women like Maxine.
We first met Maxine in X, this trilogy’s opener, when she was a 1970s burlesque dancer with ambitions to become a porn star. Then a pause for the second film, Pearl, a prequel in which Goth played a 1940s ancestor of Maxine. Now Maxine is back, porn star ambitions fulfilled and itching to go legit because the clock is ticking and age is even tougher on the female porn star than the straight actress.
In each episode of the trilogy writer/director/editor/producer Ti West has had fun delivering a pastiche of his chosen era. X was all 1970s light in the lens and motes in the air. Pearl was melodrama of a particularly 1940s sort. Now it’s the 1980s, the era of ZZ Top, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and New Order, big hair, double denim and the home video explosion.
West is less interested in Maxine as a person and more interested in her as a pole around which he can deliver reminders of that time. Here’s where the supporting cast come in. Lily Collins as a scream queen, Kevin Bacon as a seedy sleuth investigating Maxine’s past, Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan as two cops on the serial killer case, Elizabeth Debicki as the ballsy feminist director of Puritan II, the film Maxine is hoping will give her a break, Giancarlo Esposito as Maxine’s sleazy but benign agent. Every one of them – Monaghan and Cannavale in particular – would really benefit from having more screen time.
There’s a tentative lurch in the direction of giving Maxine an emotional hinterland with the introduction of Moses Sumney’s video-store nerd, Leon, who is in the friend zone with Maxine but would dearly like to go further. But West abandons that, and any real chance of this film having an emotional tug.
Does he want it to have one? That’s the question. As it stands this looks like an attempt to perform cultural excavation on America’s current situation, focusing on the Reagan era’s Christian revival as a political pivot. America as a possible theocracy seems to be West’s tentative suggestion.
The pastiche is strong in this one. When someone dies, blood splatters artfully as if Jackson Pollock were doing the slaying. There’s a death in a car crusher that’s comedically nasty if you like pools of blood, and the soundtrack feels like it wants to break into full-bore Jan Hammer here and there (composer Tyler Bates is also doing something with subsonics, which is all very off-piste but very welcome).
Eventually West moves the action onto a movie set, where pastiche is heaped on pastiche, and there’s a visit to the Bates Motel and the Psycho house. There is the sense that too much has been heaped on the plate. The eat-as-much-as-you-like buffet was also a 1980s thing, right?
Throughout, Mia Goth is a magnificent latter-day Bette Davis – head up, chest out, unimpressed by everything, Maxine’s sun-damaged skin a testament to a life lived in the glare.
There was at one point a suggestion that Maxine would return for a fourth time, but that is now not to be. Which is a pity. The trilogy has been a great vehicle for Mia Goth, who was at her best in Pearl, when she could give her screen legend/monster full rein. That’s the rankings, in my book – Pearl, X, then MaXXXine – the three of them points in Goth’s transition from just after her breakout (in The Survivalist) to A list star. Now let’s watch her go.
MaXXXine – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
