THE STORY – A former child prodigy living in the shadow of a storied musical family leaves his position with an orchestra in Chicago — fleeing a soured relationship with a manic ex — and returns to Los Angeles to record Hollywood film scores and resolve unfinished family business.
THE CAST – Pedro Pascal, Olivia Wilde, Eva Victor, Alexa Swinton, Kaya Ralls, Erik Griffin, JoBeth Williams, Margarita Levieva, Hank Azaria & Will Arnett
THE TEAM – Tony Gilroy (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 124 Minutes
Many crafts involved in moviemaking could be said to have the most impact on the final product. Some would say the “invisible art” of editing; others would say the cinematography, but the craft that has the biggest effect on the finished product is really the music. No matter what else is going on, the score is the primary driver of the audience’s emotions, guiding them towards the director’s desired emotional destination. Put a bright, jaunty piece of music over a tragically serious scene, and it suddenly becomes a comedy; play a racing piece with pulsing beats over a romantic scene, and it becomes a thriller where you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. Tony Gilroy’s “Behemoth!” understands this ability better than most films, using our cellist protagonist’s performance of fictional genre scores to color flashbacks of the events that led him to this point. It’s a potent reflection on making art and how storytelling conventions can shape our memories, and it packs an emotional punch even with its unexpectedly minor ending.
When we first meet Alex Serian (Pedro Pascal), he looks downcast and sits alone in a recording studio. His fellow musicians begin trickling in, and in their small talk, we learn that Alex is something of a prodigal son returning home and is quite uncomfortable about that. As they play the amped-up version of the last musical cue for a new film, Alex’s memory flashes back to his last gig, an orchestra in Chicago. After a beautiful gala performance, he’s informed that a big donor’s wife is looking for him, angry that he’s considering leaving. Carol (Olivia Wilde) and Alex have been having an affair for some time, and she’s gotten too attached. The driving rhythm of the film score grows in intensity to match Alex’s attempts to evade Carol, making for a fun, uniquely metacinematic moment. Alex says he’s leaving Chicago for his mother (JoBeth Williams), who is deteriorating from Alzheimer’s, out in Los Angeles. Still, everyone around him keeps implying that he’s running away from something instead of running to anything. As Alex navigates his fraught relationship with his brother, Andy (Will Arnett), helps a young cellist (Kaya Ralls) prepare for an audition, and searches for that next elusive gig, the music he plays sends him back further and further into the past, taking the audience on a journey to discover what’s really motivating him.
If you’re going to put an exclamation point at the end of your movie title, you really need to earn it. Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!” earns it through sheer over-the-top spectacle; “Airplane!” through the overwhelming number of jokes per minute. “Behemoth!,” Gilroy’s first feature film in over a decade (since 2012’s woebegone “The Bourne Legacy”), doesn’t earn it in such obvious ways. The film earns that exclamation point thanks to its metacinematic structure, where the film score Alex plays soundtracks his memories. Hearing the score for some nonexistent film over scenes from the film you’re watching screws with your head, leading to intriguing insinuations about the manipulative nature of art and how the art we view colors our memories. Life doesn’t happen like in the movies, but our memories often feel that way. We tend to experience them in the emotions of the present, casting a different color over the event in hindsight than when it actually occurred. Gilroy’s presentation of this idea, aided by John Gilroy’s buttery-smooth editing and Damián García’s striking cinematography, offers a completely fresh way of looking at the world. That score, which contains pieces from composers Michael Abels, Emily Bear, Lukas Frank, Michael Giacchino, James Newton Howard, Henry Jackman, Nami Melumad, Brandon Roberts, and Alan Silvestri (together known as The Behemoth! Collective), may even earn the exclamation point all on its own for just how thoroughly it covers the full scope of modern movie music. Every scene features a delectable new piece of music that sounds both incredibly familiar and totally new, in the best kind of pastiche. Gilroy and his collaborators skillfully swerve between present and past, diegetic and nondiegetic music, and wildly contrasting moods; the film’s score is the glue holding it all together.
If only Gilroy’s screenplay held everything together as compellingly as the score does. It has all the makings of a great character study, as Alex has a large amount of baggage to sort through. Born to a family of musicians, Alex was groomed for success from a young age, even appearing on the Johnny Carson show at the ripe old age of six. Since then, he’s bounced around from gig to gig, leaving a load of exes in his wake. One of them, a violinist named Nadia (Eva Victor), left him for a wealthy patron (Matthew Lillard) and died young, leaving behind a child who grew into a music prodigy (Alexa Swinton). The film’s dizzying structure makes it difficult to get a complete picture of who Alex is, and Pascal’s restraint in the role doesn’t help. Seeing the fallout of Alex’s relationship with Nadia without ever seeing it play out (apart from an incredibly sexy bathroom hookup) forces the viewer to take Nadia’s summation of his character at face value, and it doesn’t line up with how he’s been presented. Even during the film’s breathtaking final montage, it’s hard to feel the full weight of Alex’s arc when most of it takes place offscreen.
Pascal does admirable work carrying the film’s narrative on his shoulders, although his castmates make for fantastic scene partners. Victor’s sly sensuality and Wilde’s electric brazenness are perfect foils as Alex’s most significant others, while Arnett’s soulful sadness as Alex’s less accomplished brother and Hank Azaria’s lacerating self-obsession as Alex’s overzealous father offer their own clues to how Alex became who he is. Alex remains central throughout, though, leaving Pascal to do a lot of heavy lifting to make something whole out of the scattered pieces of Alex’s life. For better or worse, Pascal holds back, giving a performance so subtle that he almost seems to sleepwalk through it at times. Yet the layers he brings to that subtlety keep the performance compelling. In Pascal’s hands, even the slightest change in expression signals a seismic emotional shift, exactly what the film needs to work in the way Gilroy intends. But even with all of Pascal’s considerable charisma, Alex isn’t terribly interesting. His belief system is a blank slate, his emotional issues are standard-issue former-child-prodigy baggage, and his main motivation is so backgrounded for so long that it feels tacked on, despite how Gilroy and Pascal increasingly hint at it throughout the film.
If “Behemoth!” was meant to be a character study, the fact that Alex likely feels closer to himself at the end of the film than he did at the start while the audience feels no such proximity is a massive miscalculation. It is a relief that “Behemoth!” turns out to be so much more than just a character study. In its exploration of music’s power in cinema, it stands as a unique, compelling, handsomely crafted film.
