New York Film Festival Review: ‘Behemoth!’ Is Nine Composers and No Heart

Is there an uglier movie title in the history of cinema than “Behemoth!” — the New York Film Festival’s Centerpiece, which had its world premiere on Friday? Most of us need reminding what the word even means: The gigantic beast, probably a hippopotamus, described in the Book of Job; or, since the fourteenth century, any huge or monstrous thing.It is also inaccurate. No hippos are on view, let alone giants requiring the exclamation point of a 1950s creature feature. “Behemoth!” follows Alex Serian (Pedro Pascal), a former child prodigy from a family of studio musicians, who comes home to Los Angeles after twenty years on the road. A cellist, he takes a chair on the same Hollywood scoring stage where his trumpeter grandfather died mid-performance and plays other men’s music for hire while picking at the wreckage behind him — an abandoned orchestra seat in Chicago, a wildly volatile ex, Carol (Olivia Wilde), and unfinished family business. The film unfolds in flashback, cued by music — a downbeat in a recording studio cutting to a scene twenty years gone. What Alex records is written by nine of the industry’s leading composers, among them Michael Giacchino (“Up”), James Newton Howard (“The Sixth Sense”) and Alan Silvestri (“Forrest Gump”), billed together as the Behemoth! Collective. The title belongs to a fictional blockbuster whose scoring session the picture builds toward.These decisions were made by the writer-director Tony Gilroy, who made “Michael Clayton” (2007) and “The Bourne Legacy” (2012), then created and head-wrote “Andor”, the two-season “Star Wars” series for which, he has previously boasted, Disney+ gave him $650 million.‘Behemoth!’ Via Sebastian DoggartTo then pivot into a small film about a troubled man with a cello is a radical change of canvas, as he acknowledged at the premiere: “I’ve only ever done movies about people running and escaping,” he said. Perhaps he should have stayed in the action genre, for his film achieves no emotional or psychological engagement. I was eyeing my watch twenty-five minutes into the 127, largely because of his confusing management of the temporal shifts, the action hopscotching across Alex’s life with no clear indication of when or where we are.The script is also to blame, especially its on-the-nose dialogue. The most cringeworthy scenes are between Alex and his brother Andy (Will Arnett, who replaced David Harbour). Alex makes abundantly clear how pleased he is with Andy’s mental health: “It’s good to hear you excited.” Andy laments, “I’m dragging the lake, man. My life sucks,” and confides his Los Angeles fear of mortality: “I don’t want to die in the Valley.”That was one of the film’s genuinely funny moments. The others: A young musician, no more than twenty-two, opening a sentence to a man nearly thirty years his senior with “not to be toxically generational, but…”; a doctored clip of the young Alex on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show”; and a quip by Alex, playing at a wedding: “Play the Haydn, and let’s get the f–k out of here.”Could the film be redeemed by its leading man? The festival’s artistic director, Dennis Lim, thought so describing it as, “One of the performances of the year from one of our true movie stars.”In testing that proposition I should declare a partiality: I play soccer regularly with Mr. Pascal’s most famous doppelganger, George Gountas, who won a Pedro Pascal lookalike contest last year. That gave him his own taste of celebrity, including an appearance on “The Daily Show.” When we went out in London, I secured a VIP table by claiming to the doorman that George was Pedro.I am also an admirer of Mr. Pascal’s past work: “Game of Thrones,” as the seductive, vengeful Dornish prince Oberyn Martell; “The Last of Us,” as the fiercely loyal Joel; and last year’s romantic comedy “Materialists.” His biggest success here is his portrayal of a cellist, learned from scratch. At the press conference for “Behemoth!” he said, “The cello was the main character of my life for several weeks… You need to spend a year to hold the bow correctly, and I had a week. I never caught up to it. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do creatively.”The good news is that he earns his A. He blends seamlessly into wide shots of the full orchestra — 303 union musicians were engaged — and even when the cinematographer Damián García moves in on his hands, the bowing is believable. He joins the pantheon of actors who worked ferociously to master at least the illusion of virtuosity: Emily Watson on the cello in “Hilary and Jackie” (1998), Chadwick Boseman on the trumpet in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (2020).The opportunity cost was, by his own admission, the rest of the performance: “It overlapped with learning my lines for the movie, or remembering there was an actual character to play, like that was in a story other than the cello.”Tony Gilroy and Pedro Pascal at the premiere of ‘Behemoth!’ at New York Film Festival. Via Sebastian DoggartOn the plus side, Mr. Pascal delivers his trademark vulnerable smile and a cute mournfulness, the weight of the world across his well-honed trapezius. As a sex symbol in both the straight and LGBTQ worlds, Mr. Pascal must also be judged by the benchmark of whether he is hot. Alas, Mr. Gilroy’s treatment of him is chaste: Gorgeous Clark Gable-ish shots in a tuxedo, close-ups of the love-curl on his perspiring brow, and nothing more. If you are looking for Pedro-porn you will be disappointed: one topless scene, proud pecs above a white bath towel, no sign of him in his skivvies, and a single sexual encounter — fully clothed, in a restroom stall, and about as sexy as two overcoats colliding in a revolving door.He can justifiably blame his director for under-directing him. But it was still his decision to take a part that appears in every scene and must carry the picture. His acting choices suggest he has neither the range nor the appetite for it. An ill-timed wink comes across as supercilious. He signals emotions rather than embodying them. A passivity in the gaze hardens into the sense that he is sleepwalking through whole scenes. He weeps without any sign of a tear. And in one sequence he lets himself into a teenage girl’s bedroom and sniffs about in her bathroom: I had no idea why until well after it was over — he is hunting for proof of paternity. This later explanation did not stop him seeming a gross creep.The rest of the cast shows few more signs of relatable life. Ms. Wilde is a grotesque caricature of the stalker ex: wide-eyed, nipples pointing like spear-tips through a green silk revenge gown, histrionically spouting lines like “I bleed for you, and you shun me!”And what of the film’s inspiration, its score? Mr. Gilroy has said that “the whole movie is surfing on music.” In truth the music sinks it. He cuts from a studio orchestra recording a cue for another film to the action of this one: goofily amusing the first time, then cheesy, then incongruous, then insufferable. He seems keener to please his nine composers than to let the music serve the story. One would have been plenty.An audience member asked Mr. Gilroy yesterday what his favorite score was. He replied: “‘The Third Man’. It’s a terrible picture, but the second the zither appears, that put the whole movie on life support.” If only he had brought back Anton Karas’s cheerfully hypnotic instrument and dismissed the Behemoth! Collective, he might have put his own picture on life support too — under the irresistible title “Zither!”

New York Film Festival Review: ‘Behemoth!’ Is Nine Composers and No Heart

New York Film Festival Review: ‘Behemoth!’ Is Nine Composers and No Heart

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