Director: Tony Gilroy
Writer: Tony Gilroy
Stars: Pedro Pascal, Olivia Wilde, Eva Victor, Will Arnett
Synopsis: Gifted cellist Alex Serian returns home to Los Angeles after 20 years on the road. Music, which has been the constant, all-consuming river of his life, begins to carry Alex on an adventure that will change him forever.
Alex Serian is a tough nut to crack. He’s a world class cellist, that we know. He seems to do pretty well with the ladies – he’s played by Pedro Pascal, so it’s not hard to solve that puzzle – but only to a point, rarely (if ever) allowing them to broach relationship territory. He has a mother who old friends ask about in the way you would ask about an ailing relative, offering a “How is she?” plus a head tilt and a hesitant tone, using but a few words in the hopes that you’ll learn something new and foundational. There’s a brother in the picture, too, but that seems complicated. In fact, it all seems to be complicated beyond the fact that he’s reasonably friendly and revered by his peers. For Alex, the lights are on, and someone is certainly home, but the curtains are drawn; you can see shadows moving about, but much is left to the imagination.
This is the aura of a calculated man, not in a menacing sense, but in the way that certain people mold themselves to operate on the defensive. One might say, as Pascal himself did when describing the main character of Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth! during a press conference following the film’s first “public” unveiling, that Alex is a “passenger [in] his life.” Things happen to him, but he lacks the emotional understanding of himself that would be necessary to fully process them. When the woman he’s sleeping with (Olivia Wilde’s Carol, who also happens to be an Angel donor to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in which he is first chair) attempts to chase him down upon learning that he plans to leave his post, all he can think to do is run from her clicking heels. When he sees his brother (Will Arnett, hilariously playing a podcaster) having a fight with his wife through the windows of their home, Alex doesn’t address it; he merely waits for it to cool off before exiting his car and approaching the door. So it’s a shock when, having lost someone close to him sometime in the recent past, Alex chooses to venture down a path he knows nothing about: The path of self-discovery, where identities are forged long after we may have believed they first took shape, and feelings are prone to be felt. It’s terrifying, but in another way, it’s the most beautiful trek he’s ever taken.
World premiering on Oct. 2 as the Centerpiece selection at the 64th New York Film Festival, Gilroy’s brilliant, time-maneuvering drama is both an odyssey and a triumph in just how meticulously it travels down each road along our tour of Alex’s past and present, foregoing “CITY NAME, YEAR” title cards in favor of an audience’s trust instead. We’re flung into Alex’s psyche immediately following a booming title card (fitting, given the title-capping exclamation point) and find him contemplatively awaiting his first cue. He’s signed on to play in a full orchestra brought in to record film scores, all of which he plays beautifully despite the sheet music being a sight unseen. Alex is a prodigy, you see, albeit a reluctant one, a man whose entire existence has formed and broken him in ways he has yet to comprehend. Guilt has often been a tool used against him, primarily by his father (Hank Azaria), a musician in his own right who created a ripple effect of dysfunction that now follows his son to all locations and lingers in every memory. It’s a common characterization, but one rarely handled as deftly as Gilroy and a never-better Pascal collaborate to turn Alex into an idea of a person into a real human being with human being problems, the kind that can either make a movie or cause it to quickly become a series of tropes without consequence.
Fortunately, the crew here has its conductors in a row, the cast and their director in perfect sync – a la players and their maestro – conjuring a symphony of a complicated life that routinely veers into organized chaos. Gilroy first conceived the idea while working on 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, when he observed the sheer size of the film’s band and choir and wondered, “Why is there not a movie here?” As he told the Friday press screening’s audience, despite having enjoyed his own specific history with playing and loving music, he would never call himself a musician, merely a creative with ears and a good producer. “So I researched the shit out of it,” he said of the composition of film scores, and found the hook: “A life. In pieces,” as the film’s tagline reads, though the execution is more synthesized and clever than that selling point lets on.
The writer/director noted that while the film was a difficult one to finance, he was deadset on bringing together a group that would come to be called “The Behemoth! Collective,” a cavalry of composers that just one film would be considered fortunate to have on board. Original music by nine symphonists – James Newton Howard, Alan Silvestri, Brandon Roberts, Michael Abels, Emily Bear, Lukas Frank, Michael Giacchino, Henry Jackman, and Nami Melumad – is heard throughout the film, and not just heard, but appropriately incorporated into the narrative. Not only do we see Alex and his fellow virtuosos playing the numbers on the pages before them, but better yet, the pieces accompany the Behemoth!’s action as well. Scenes of Alex running – and there are a few – are soundtracked by dramatic, violent violins and intense horns hitting the highest notes. Giacchino crafts an antic cartoon theme for a moment; Silvestri delivers a suite late in the film that lingers long after the baton is lowered. When the film we’re watching takes its most drastic turn, the faux film being scored tags along. It’s unlike anything you’ve heard before, and in some cases seen before. That it is pulled off with few distractions away from the narrative Gilroy has constructed is an even broader feat.
And still, Behemoth!’s most striking achievement is its structure, one that bounces back and forth in an effort to keep us on our toes without ever totally wrong-footing the onlooker, a savvy trick that Gilroy seems to have been toying with for years yet never quite executed to this magnitude. That doesn’t mean that his new work is on par with Michael Clayton nor in dialogue with Andor. (Though it is a more outwardly joyous tonal exercise than both.) What it represents is a new kind of character study for Gilroy, a tremendous writer whose heroes are always complex but tend to strive for control, if not achieving it outright. Is Alex pursuing that? Not in simple terms. Like music, his lived experience is one of fits and starts, a prominent professional career that leaves plenty to be desired on the personal side. Eva Victor as Nadia is his most compelling scene partner in that their character challenges him more than others are willing to, asking for more than he is willing to give in terms of reason and intentions, while Wilde plays a maniacal lover whose furious lack of self control is testing, but more on our protagonist’s patience than the mind.
“The trick is to put him on the train without getting run over by it,” Gilroy said of Alex, who he and Victor would not describe as passive but active in an alternative fashion to what we’ve come to expect from the very idea of “action.” Active self-sabotage is still active, just as the task of picking up the pieces of one’s life can only be resoundingly successful if done by the soul living it. But like many of us, the thing about living is that it cannot be done in isolation, neither physical nor emotional, and that a life is never just touched by one being. Behemoth! is Alex’s story, but “Lives in pieces” works as a tagline for it, too. Everyone is playing their own song just by breathing. Whether or not they can hear it is the difference between rejecting the music and facing it.
Behemoth! world premiered at the 64th New York Film Festival. Searchlight Pictures will release the film on Dec. 4..
