I'm not sure if there is actually an "age relativity rule" in cinema the way there is, for example, a "180-degree rule." But there should be.What do I mean by an "age relativity rule"?
Well let's get into that by way of the movie that prompted me to coin the phrase, if I am indeed coining it.
I watched Vox Lux on Thursday night, my first new viewing after all the 2019 viewings were done and dusted. As it turned out, it was also a landmark of sorts, my 5,500th movie watched of all time. I decided to spare you the pomp and circumstance of writing an entire post devoted to this minor milestone. But, as you will see, Vox Lux inspired me to write about it in another way.
In Vox Lux, Natalie Portman plays a trainwreck pop star, giving me flashbacks to a much better and also more recent film, Alex Ross Perry's Her Smell, which made my top ten of 2019. However, she only plays Celeste as a 31-year-old, which is already a small bit of a stretch as Portman was about 36 when she filmed it.
For the first half of the movie or thereabouts, we see Celeste from ages 13 to 15, when she is played by Raffey Cassidy, who you will know from such films as Tomorrowland and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. No offense to Portman, who can be quite a good actress, but having her technique contrasted so directly with that of Cassidy does her no favors. I'm not saying Cassidy is the better actress overall, but here she certainly is. Cassidy makes Celeste seem like a real person, while Portman makes her seem like an outsized caricature -- who for some reason has developed this weird, affected New York accent, or at least that's what it sounds like it's trying to be. Her character is supposed to go way downhill over the course of the narrative, but Portman utterly fails to honor anything about Cassidy's choices and thereby fails to convince us it's the same person.
This is not the biggest problem related to this character within the movie, though. The biggest problem is actress Stacy Martin, who plays Celeste's sister, Ellie.
At both ages.
You may know Martin from Nymphomaniac Vol. 1, in which she plays the young Jo. It's relevant to what I'm about to discuss that Lars von Trier saw the character aging out of Martin's ability to play her, because that's not the same choice Brady Corbet makes in Vox Lux.
Martin is 29 now, having just turned 29 on January 1st, which hey, is the same birthday as my younger son, who just turned six. That means she was about 27 when she made Vox Lux. She seemed a little old to play the older sister of the 13-year-old Celeste, but you never know how much older an older sibling may be. She could be 20 years older. But Martin is a pretty baby-faced actress, so if you told me she was playing only five years older than Celeste I would have believed it. I bought it and didn't question it.
Until we see Celeste at age 31 and Ellie is still being played by Martin. But now Celeste is being played by a woman who is nine years older than Martin. Yet Celeste is not only supposed to be Ellie's younger sister, she may be significantly younger.
When Martin first came on screen after I'd been sitting with the new Celeste for nearly ten minutes, I almost said out loud "What???"
It's a dilemma filmmakers certainly have to tackle. In movies where characters age, it would be very common to have a character graduate from childhood to adulthood and be played by different actors, but have a character who is an adult for the entire movie, their parent or someone like that, played by the same actor, only made to look a bit older through makeup or hairstyles or what have you. In fact, Jude Law is an example of this very thing in Vox Lux.
But Jude Law is 47 years old, making him the same amount older than Portman than Portman is older than Martin. So there's no disconnect and it seems perfectly normal in this case.
What doesn't seem normal is Portman leap-frogging over a baby-faced actress who is supposed to be playing her older sister but now looks much, much younger than she does. There is not even any apparent attempt to make Martin look older through makeup or another strategy. I mean, even with Law they give him different hair to account for the approximately 18 years that have elapsed since we first met him. (They allowed him to bald into his current look, which couldn't have particularly stroked Law's ego.)
The even stranger thing about the whole thing, which made me do a particular double take, is that when Martin comes back on screen again when she's in her 30s, she is flanked by none other than Raffey Cassidy.
Wha?
So Corbet made the weird choice to have had Celeste have a baby in her teens. This occurs off-screen. It's previewed in the narrative by the fact that Celeste has started to do drugs and be sexually active at age 15, so it doesn't come out of nowhere. But it's a bit difficult to imagine an approximately 17-year-old Celeste having a baby and also still becoming one of the biggest pop stars in the world. Maybe it's not totally unprecedented but it also doesn't strike a chord of realism.
So Cassidy is now playing Celeste's daughter at approximately the same age Celeste was when Cassidy was playing Celeste. What's more, she pretty much dresses the same and has the same hairstyle. So when this daughter (Albertine by name) comes on screen walking next to her aunt, appearing to have the exact same dynamic with Stacy Martin as when Cassidy was playing Martin's sister, it's just uncanny. Why did Corbet have to make such a distracting choice?
If it had something to do with some theme Corbet was trying to explore about life being cyclical or something of that nature, then that was lost on me. But then again, it wasn't the only thing about this film that was lost on me. My astute colleague John Roebuck pointed out in his review of Vox Lux that this movie doesn't know what it's about and may not be about anything, and I could not agree more.
Corbet sure does throw up some provocative subject matter (did I mention the movie also involves a school shooting and September 11th?), and he's got some great technique at times. But his actual ideas are frustratingly and fatally opaque.
So yeah, I guess my "age relativity rule" goes something like this: "Actors in a movie must always have the same relative ages as their characters, unless great pains are taken with makeup or digital aging technology to remove the awkwardness of an inversion of those relative ages."
Sound good?
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