Seberg

I have a soft spot for Paint Your Wagon, the 1969 western musical flop that prominently features the vocal stylings of Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood and has over the years come to exemplify Hollywood excess.

My father loved it -- he took me to see it three times during its theatrical release. But it is a ridiculous movie, adapted by Paddy Chayefsky from Alan J. Lerner and Loewe's 1951 Broadway musical, that runs nearly three hours and was generally panned by critics at the time.

(While the film was a disaster, the soundtrack album was a chart success. Marvin's low-frequency growling version of "Wand'rin Star" became a huge hit in the U.K., reaching No. 1 on the charts over the Beatles' "Let It Be." A lot of Brits really like it. It was played at Joe Strummer's 2002 funeral and retains some cultural relevancy on that side of the pond today.)

But I had completely forgotten Jean Seberg was in that film until I watched Seberg, the curiously underpowered account of how, in the late 1960s, the FBI became interested in the politics and personal life of a pretty farm girl from Marshalltown, Iowa.

Unlike Marvin and Eastwood, her singing was dubbed by the professional Anita Gordon. There's a fascinating story that Lerner tells in his autobiography about how Gordon came to replace Seberg, who, he writes, had a very nice voice that was almost good enough to carry the one song, "A Million Miles Away Behind the Door," her character was required to sing in the film.

When they determined she wasn't quite good enough (though somehow Marvin and Eastwood were, go figure), André Previn, who had co-written the tune, thought of Gordon, with whom he had worked on previous projects. She sounded a lot like Seberg; she'd be perfect.

Only he didn't know how to get in touch with her. They checked with the Screen Actors Guild, who had an address for Gordon but no phone number. So they called Western Union, intending to send a telegram. The operator who took their call was Gordon herself, who, unable to support herself as a singer-actress, had taken a day job.

Gordon came in the next day and cut the song.

Seberg was reportedly unhappy she didn't get to sing in Paint Your Wagon, and if you've heard Eastwood's version of "I Talk to the Trees" you can understand why.

None of this material makes its way into Seberg, a film directed by Benedict Andrews from a script by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse. Despite the earnest strivings of completely credible Kristen Stewart, the inherent drama of Seberg's short and tragic life and the array of interesting characters who populated it lands as thuddingly dull and conventional. This is like the anti-Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood, while, like Tarantino, the filmmakers invent certain characters and events; they seem determined to deliver a movie devoid of glamour and mystery.

By the time we meet Seberg, in late 1968, she has been through a lot. Otto Preminger cast her in his Saint Joan (1957) straight out of high school, she was burned figuratively and literally by the experience. Jean Luc-Godard made her the face of the French Nouvelle Vague by casting her in Breathless, but she was reportedly abused by her first husband, a handsome French lawyer who escapes mention here.

It seems bizarre that the filmmakers gloss over so much rich material -- we understand that Preminger was an ogre, and with her career in need of revitalization Seberg is returning to Hollywood for the first time in a decade to make the western musical and, probably, Airport.

On the flight from Paris to Los Angeles, she has an apparently chance encounter with Malcolm X's cousin and celebrity Black Power activist Hakim Jamal (Anthony Mackie), who is accompanying Malcolm X's widow, Betty Shabazz, on the flight. When they land in Los Angeles, Jean, in what seems a playful gesture, poses for a picture with the disembarked black activists. This and her subsequent late-night visit to Jamal puts her on the FBI's radar.

And so commences a programmatically depressing account of how the FBI, under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, surveilled and gaslighted American citizens via its notorious counter intelligence program COINTELPRO. Seberg was one of the targets, and it's reasonable to suspect the program's actions contributed to the unraveling of her mental state that resulted in her death by suicide in 1979.

But the filmmakers hedge this bet by introducing a fictional would-be white savior in the form of guilt-ridden FBI agent Joe Solomon (Jack O'Connell, who was fine in the Netflix western series Godless but barely registers here) who risks his career to let Seberg know that, while she might be paranoid, the government really is out to get her.

I don't understand the purpose of this character; is he supposed to signal that not all FBI agents in the Hoover administration were soulless fascists like the character Vince Vaughn plays? Are we supposed to understand there were good people on both sides of COINTELPRO?

There are many wasted opportunities in Seberg, and a few interesting textures. Jean's motives are complicated. She's both genuinely committed to the cause (she'd joined the NAACP as a 14-year-old back in Iowa) and attracted to Jamal, and but also interested in trolling her public and her very Gallic second husband Romain Gary.

Gary and Jamal come off as stock characters, which is a shame. Gary was an author, film director and hero of the French Resistance -- one of the most interesting Frenchmen of the 20th century. And, some believe, he exploited and manipulated Jean. But here he's presented as a kind of off-the-shelf jerk. When Jean tells Jamal her husband would probably be "highly amused" by their dalliance, know that, in real life, Gary once challenged Eastwood to a duel because he believed the actor was having an affair with his wife.

Similarly, the real-life Jamal was a fascinating, morally ambiguous character. He may or may not have slept with Jean, who escaped the fate of one of his girlfriends, Gale Benson, murdered by self-styled black revolutionary Michael X in 1972.

And, it's a minor point, but the FBI concocted a rumor that Seberg was pregnant by Black Panther minister of information Raymond Hewitt, not Jamal. She probably never slept with Hewitt. In reality, the father of her baby girl -- who died when she was 2 days old -- was a Mexican student revolutionary named Carlos Navarra. She blamed the FBI for the child's death. Gary later said she attempted suicide every year on the anniversary of the baby's death.

There is a reason to see Seberg -- it's a nervous and tender performance from Kristen Stewart that's probably the best thing anyone's done for Seberg since Luc-Godard made her immortal. I just wish it had been in a better film.

MovieStyle on 02/28/2020