BEHEMOTH!
Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth! (stylized in all caps) gripped me from start to finish. A drama through and through, the film stars Pedro Pascal as renowned cellist and impish womaniser Alex Serian. As a fan of Gilroy’s work on the superb Star Wars spinoff Andor, I knew he would be capable of subverting and excelling in a genre stacked with expectations. The film’s score features no less than nine famous composers, including Alan Silvestri, James Newton Howard, and Andor collaborator Brandon Roberts. This fact has been picked up by almost every review of the film. Less reported is how powerful and varied this leaves the score feeling, particularly as the scoring work the characters diegetically play spill over into the Behemoth! score following Alex long after he leaves the studio. The nonlinear pacing is hard to read cause-and-effect from, events play out in what can feel like a completely arbitrary ordering of past and present and further past: on reflection it seems clear that Gilroy is using this sleight-of-hand to show Alex’s irresponsibility and dysfunction through the DNA of the text.
We learn but never unpack a good deal of trauma about Serian and his family, talented but long-suffering musicians filled with contempt for one another; past relationships that come back to haunt Alex, memories of a prodigious and troubled youth. The film’s focus on the inner life of a classical musician was undoubtedly to invite comparisons to another film: indeed, The Guardian’s unflattering review makes a passing remark alleging Behemoth! is “Tár for straight men”. But Gilroy’s structural storytelling presents, in all its flaws, Alex’s self-perception as a person to whom things just seem to happen: it makes the third act, with its compressed and linearized plot, with its thematic restraint and excellent mise-en-scène, actually feel like it’s earned the drama. We get to see Pascal against Alexa Swinton’s portrayal of fifteen-year-old prodigy Viviana, seeing different currents of his life linking back to her as the embedded midlife crisis and challenge of artistic maturity meet head-on. Gilroy has created a movie where everyone and everything looks and sounds incredible, a treat for the eyes and ears that occasionally stumbles before resolving into a funny, emotional, immersive experience.
