Seberg (2020) - Movie Review

I don’t think there’s a single actress working today who could take this role other than Kristen Stewart. As much as the white liberal populace could quite easily take a shine to stories like that of the real-life philanthropist and actress Jean Seberg, the narrative of a white woman implanting herself into the protests and struggles of the Black Panther Party isn’t something just anyone could pull off. With how high-profile Stewart has grown of late, and how endearingly riot grrl her public persona has become, her status as one of the mainstream's favourite social subversives makes her ripe for this kind of story. And thankfully, through thick and thin, she manages to pull it off.

While there’s all kinds of credit deserved for the production design and the costuming, all of which exude 60’s aesthetic to help couch the period details of the story, it really is Stewart’s performance that holds everything together. Her past collaborations with Olivier Assayas seem to have given her a good idea on how to pull off French chic, which gives her character’s cultural status some healthy build-up, and as she grows more and more noided in the face of federal harassment, it can get downright heart-breaking.

It is in these moments that not only her casting but the choice in director ends up reaching that ‘Ah ha!’ moment, as Benedict Andrews has shown scary efficiency in telling the stories of women being broken at the hands of men from back with Una.

However, that aspect of the character, and even this film’s place as a biographical work, only starts to take root during the second half. During the first, the script’s attempts at setting up what is to come feel both vague and forced. The script is handled by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, the same team behind last year’s The Aftermath; you know, that post-WWII romantic drama that kept veering into Hallmark Movie Of The Week territory for no bloody reason?

Well, while there’s nothing here as tonally fucked as that to be found here, their weakness with historic material still shows through. For as good a look as we get at the results of Seberg’s activism, we get far less insight into why she got involved in the first place. When a character calls her out as a ‘tourist’, taking one someone else’s cause for self-serving reasons, there isn’t much that happens beforehand to refute it as such. She donates money, both figuratively and literally gets in the bed with Black Panther member Hakim Jamal (played with reasonable power by Anthony Mackie), and shows some level of concern about civil rights, but the impetus for any of it feels like an afterthought.

That’s more a side effect of the writing’s biggest problem, though, and it all comes down to who the film is supposedly framed around. For the bulk of the film, the character who ends up getting the most development isn’t Seberg, Jamal or even Jamal’s wife who ends up making the ‘tourist’ declaration. Instead, it’s FBI agent Jack Solomon, played by Jack O’Connell, who we get the best portrait of.

His introduction, showing him getting hot and heavy with his wife over the origins of Captain America, is a good initial indicator of who is getting the best writing treatment, and his character arc is the one with the most change attached to it. He embodies the film’s coda of how changing the mind of one person can change the entire world, but that knowledge ends up being at the expense of the more central characters in this story, including the one in the frickin’ title.

And yet, even with that in mind, the film’s high points remain quite enthralling, and while it may fumble with the initial bits of political setup, the resulting reactions to that setup still ring through. It makes for a quite unsettling look at government surveillance and dirt-digging, highlighting the all-too-common mentality of ends justifying the means, and how even if people get hurt through the bullshit they kept feeding into the media and tabloids, it’s all gravy so long as they get what they want.

It’s a pretty ugly indictment of federal interference, and because Benedict Andrews treats it the same way he did sexual abuse in Una, it still manages to resonate even with how thin the writing around it can be. There's still something a bit dicey about this film doing better at showing Jean Seberg as a victim than as an activist, but knowing how much hardcore cynicism goes into the public perception of activism from movie stars (take Joaquin Phoenix’s speech at the BAFTAs, for instance), it still makes for a feature that at least makes sense as to why we’re getting it right now. That and, unlike Underwater, watching this purely to see K-Stew be her usual amazing self is incredibly easy to recommend.