Mark Reviews Movies: SEBERG

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 27, 2020

The movie is called Seberg, but Jean Seberg, who became famous nearly overnight for her work in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, is almost exclusively a hollow figure in Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse's screenplay. The idea is an intriguing one. How much do we really know about the personal lives and internal worlds of the people we watch, admire, and sometimes idolize on the screen? Their presence is what matters, and upon that, we can reflect whatever we feel about them and what we think they could, would, or should be like. The person behind the image, the performance, or the persona he or she presents to the public doesn't matter as much as the qualities we perceive in them.

This movie, directed by Benedict Andrews, makes us consider this concept, as the idea of Seberg becomes important to an assortment of people for a variety of reasons. She's a wife to a husband who has certain expectations for the kind of woman a wife and mother should be (This is a vague assessment, but the movie is pretty vague about this relationship, anyway). She's a wealthy, famous woman with certain political leanings and sympathies, and that money and fame could do a lot of good for people and groups fighting for civil rights in the United States during the 1960s.

She's a threat to the status quo, then, in the eyes of the FBI and its higher-ups, who use her politics and her personal relationships as a way to damage that public image. For one FBI agent, who watches her audition for and nearly die while playing the role of Joan of Arc, she's a woman devoted to a most-common dream—the girl from the Midwest who came to Hollywood to become famous and then did.

The filmmakers have their own assumptions about Seberg in this movie, in which she's played by Kristen Stewart, who puts more into the performance than the screenplay affords her. This Jean is a tragic figure, fulfilling her dream and standing up for the just cause, yes, but falling prey to a system that sees her only as some actress and is repulsed by the mere idea of societal change. None of these qualities, by the way, has anything to do with Jean as a person. Her entire experience in this period of her life, as portrayed by the movie, is framed within the confines of what Hollywood expects from her, what activists want from her, and to what lengths the people within the FBI go to ensure her downfall.

Andrews' movie is about a lot of things, but its eponymous subject isn't really one of them. The real Seberg—or even just the presentation of this movie's Jean—never comes to the forefront.

Following a brief prologue (showing Jean almost dying while filming the execution of Joan of Arc, which immediately establishes her as a martyr-to-be), the main story takes place in the late 1960s, as Jean is coming back to Los Angeles from her home and family in Paris. On the plane, she encounters Hakim Jamal (Anthony Mackie), a civil rights activist, and on the tarmac, Jean joins him and others in raising their fists for the gathered press. Jean and Hakim begin an affair, and she starts donating money to assorted causes and groups—including the Black Panthers.

Meanwhile, Jack Solomon (Jack O'Connell), a sound expert who's new to the L.A. division of the FBI, is tasked to bug Jean's home and to keep an eye on her activities. The feds, especially J. Edgar Hoover, don't like what her donations, statements, and activism might say to anyone who looks up to Jean.

There are two narrative threads proceeding through the story. The first is Jean's mounting realization that she's being listened to and watched, while the aftermath of her affair with Hakim puts her family and her affiliations with civil rights groups in jeopardy. The second follows Jack, as he does his job, begins to see that the job is putting Jean in unnecessary and possibly dangerous distress, and has to decide if her life is more important than his mission.

Shrapnel and Waterhouse split these stories more or less equally in terms of actual screen time, but it's the emphasis, not the time, that actually matters in a story. Here, Jean remains a pawn, becoming more and more paranoid as her life falls apart in ways that it shouldn't, and Jack, who finds his colleagues inherent racism troubling and realizes that his marriage is in trouble (Margaret Qualley plays the thankless role of the wife who becomes suspicious for the wrong reasons), is the character who has an arc to complete. To be fair, Jean has one, too, but it's only toward the martyrdom that the filmmakers see as her sole, defining feature.

There's a promising story in Seberg's life (and especially this period of it), to be sure. In splitting its focus, though, Seberg is too invested in everything surrounding the character to tell that story, and it's too broadly sympathetic to present the character as she comes across—as a persona upon whom everyone else can attach meaning.

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