Vox Lux

Writer/Director Brady Corbet's "Vox Lux" is a seminal exploration of a fractured psyche, one that becomes consumed by popular culture's viral consumption and obsession with celebrity as gratified through the glorification of tragedy and violence. It tells the story of a pair of sisters, but only one of them is really of importance – really! Natalie Portman plays Celeste, who as a teenager in high school is shot by a fellow student, a classmate who was a friend. She survives the bloody massacre, though not unscathed, Celeste has a bullet lodged in her spine and along her path to recovery and recuperation, she writes a song.

Well, actually – her older sister, Eleanor (played by Stacy Martin) writes the song which Celeste appropriates and decides to perform in commemoration of the victims of the school shooting. Inevitably, the song strikes a chord and before long it propels Celeste to the forefront of the zeitgeist, turning her into an overnight sensation – a pop star! It is 1999 after all and the commercialization of the most trivial is seized upon by Madison Avenue, scooped up while the iron is hot to be packaged, processed and proliferated. Celeste is taken under the wing of a manager (Jude Law) and immediately tapped by a record label to lay down a debut album.

The single is a roaring success, the debut album inspires strategically plotted public appearances, Celeste and her sister travel to Europe to work on more music, to return to the states to produce a music video – and embrace newfound fame and pop stardom! Celeste appears unstoppable and falls upon the tropes of celebrity leaving a life of excess and privilege. Cut to 17 years later and while promoting her latest new album project, a collection of eclectically inspired electronica entitled "Vox Lux" a tragedy occurs that forces Celeste to consider postponing a concert appearance.

In anticipation of her promotional record tour, a squad of masked terrorists opens fire on a beach full of innocent people; the fact that their masks are reminiscent to those worn in one of Celeste's early videos and that it is a public shooting, prompts her manager and PR team to consider putting off the show. Initially, Celeste doesn't see the connection, but it isn't long before her entourage has the pop star convinced the attack is a statement on her own experience, orchestrated in some way to resonate with her upcoming concert. When the press connects the events, Celeste can help but marry the events – she is a star after all, and as a celebrity infinitely relevant.

Natalie Portman continues to prove herself shrewd and cunning in her selection of roles; any other actor approaching the archetype of a "pop icon" would have dove deep into the stereotypes and pitfalls. Celeste is far denser and fleshed out and piercingly more authentic, though every bit as self-involved and destructive as she's supposed to be, especially when everyone around her is making her believe that everything revolves around her. Celeste isn't an all-together terrible person. She legitimately wants to be a good mother to her teenage daughter, even though her older sister Eleanor is raising her, and guilts Eleanor when she learns said daughter is having sex.

In the same afternoon that she is confronting Eleanor over her daughter's situation, citing her irresponsibility, Celeste and her manager get high and drunk, hours before said concert is set to go on. But Celeste pulls it together, gives the crowd exactly what they came to see, feeding their appetite for that once in a lifetime moment to bathe in her celebrity, wash off of the controversies, and glean into her fabulousness. She is an unstable product, the embodiment of an era that has cultivated and manipulated consumerism through the media force feeding an already inebriated culture struggling to find its identity, though not from within.

Yes, Portman is able to vocally immerse herself in the performance part of Celeste's character. Singing tracks written by SIA and wearing tight glitter-ball spandex, dancing the same 8-count steps with back-up dancers and pyrotechnics galore, and the audience eats it up!

"Vox Lux" is enigmatic in its approach to making its statement on the insanity of our celebrity-driven culture, and even how that culture has permeated to the echelons of understanding that it's lead to the perception that fame is all powerfully influential and that pop stars indeed do drive the narrative. That's what social networking and PR managers would have you believe; it's that disconnect that leads to most of the tragedies most plaguing us today. It's dangerous and we lose sight of it, especially under the hypnotic pulse of pop music. We'd rather forget all our cares, shudder any responsibility, so long as we all get our 15-minutes in the spotlight.

"Vox Lux" starring Natalie Portman, Jude Law, Willem Dafoe
is available in Blu-ray and Digital Download.
$22.99