This is going to be a long one.
Kristen Stewart is great. The movie around her is flat and generic, moving her living, nuanced performance along a familiar path.
While it is watchable, there is something so generic and familiar about the presentation, with a frustrating lack of depth to the presentation of Seberg's life.
The movie starts with Stewart recreating the death of Joan of Arc from her first movie. This image continues to be referenced throughout the movie, framing Jean as a person searching for a cause to sacrifice herself for.
The movie is filled with obvious metaphors and allusions, even down to the choice of source music (the use of Scott Walker's 'It's Raining Today' is hilarious if you pay attention to the lyrics).
Thankfully, the film is so visually restrained that it means Stewart's performance is front and centre, giving this woman and her story the soul and depth of feeling it deserves.
Seberg's revolution as an actress was more public than most - the earliest thing I have seen her in was Bonjour Triestesse, her second film and her final collaboration with Otto Preminger. There is something exposed and real about Seberg in that film. Her delivery and body language are all over the place, often within the same shot. You can see why she was dismissed early on, but I remember finding moments - especially the ending - where you can see why Truffaut and Godard lauded her talents. There is something exposed and real about Seberg that goes beyond lack of technique and made her perfect for the camera.
From early on, Stewart has had an understated intensity that is highly watchable. This intensity is juxtaposed with a sense of vulnerability and awkwardness that works for the camera. This quality helped make even a role like her protagonist in Water, a character who could have come off as an obvious final girl.
While different in bearing, Stewart's mixture of steel and rawness is the right match for Seberg. The recreations of Seberg's work are a mistake - there is something distinct and otherworldly about Seberg that Stewart cannot reach - but as the woman off-screen, trying to find herself in the fast-moving 60s, while struggling with self-doubt, she is terrific.
With this movie's version of Seberg, Stewart has a character who is trying to find her place in the world. Despite her success and wealth, Seberg is filled with doubts.
The script sketches Seberg in the broadest of strokes, without ever diving into her motivations or personal demons. Jean comes across as an innocent looking for a cause, yet at one point the movie undercuts this by having a character points out that she had been a member of the NAACP since she was 14. It is left to Stewart to give a sense of that person, someone who might have doubted herself, but who maintained her convictions to the end.
The movie attempts to humanise the COINTELPRO operation by inter-cutting Seberg's story with that of a young surveillance expert (Jack O'Connell) who is assigned to handle the assignment, and gradually realises the effect it is having on Seberg.
Throughout the movie, their stories intersect as Jack moves from amoral spook to guilty perpetrator. It is a decent idea, enlivened by the callousness of his colleagues, who take a racist sadistic glee in taking Seberg down.
But there is something unfinished about this story, a lack of specificity to it that makes it feel less like a character study of two people cracking under pressure and more like a docu-drama without the talking heads. There is something so predictable about the way the character is positioned that feels like a contrivance. In order to highlight how bad the scenario is, he is presented as a 'good' guy who happens to be a whiz at surveillance.
For a movie about surveillance and gas-lighting on a state-level scale, Seberg never really gets into the paranoia of the situation. And for how it tries to highlight how abject COINTELPRO was through Jack's character, that story-line feels unfinished.
Jack's final realization follows two scenes in which he is confronted with the morality of what he is doing - one involving his wife discovering what he has been working on; the other a botched attempt to bug Seberg's hotel that ends in the death of her dog. These scenes work because of O'Connell's performance yet, like Seberg, the character lacks depth. We get a vague sense of his relationship with his wife, but their confrontation lacks bite because we do not know who these people are.
This goes for Jack and Jean's final confrontation at the end of the film.
Following his epiphany, Jack becomes a - minor - helper to Jean, warning her in an anonymous phone call, and then going to the length of stealing her file and presenting it to her at a bar. At this point, the movie really feels constrained by its source material. When Jack says he wished he could go back and do it differently, Jean points out that this is a lie; he stayed with the operation long after he knew it was wrong. And pointing out the thesis of his subplot, Jack drifts off, chastened.
For such an important sequence, the lack of impact in this scene is really disturbing. Particularly when it is followed by a superimposed summary of the sorry last chapter of Seberg's life while Stewart stares out of frame at O'Connell's back as he leaves the bar. Juxtaposing real-life tragedy with the performance of the person involved, this finale comes across as awkward and contrived, an arbitrary button on an acting showcase rather than the culmination of a story (Jean's or Jack's).
As with his epiphany, if the movie had been more focused on his character's arc from all-American goody-two shoes to disillusioned government robot, this sequence would have bite.
That is ultimately the big problem with Seberg the movie. It covers major events, and includes enough detail to make for a watchable narrative - but at the end of it all, there is no sense of the people at its heart. Though the time scale is not huge, the movie feels like a straight biopic - it covers the big signposts of the protagonist's life, but ends up feeling like an audio-visual version of a Wikipedia entry.
Stewart's committed, empathetic performance gives the movie a centre, but Seberg still feels less than the sum of its parts.
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