Behemoth!

Make Mine Salty

Writer and director Tony Gilroy has a cool idea here and it’s also an exciting way to start the movie, but after that, too much of Behemoth! feels like nothing more than an experiment that doesn’t quite gel.

The core is film music itself. Think about how it’s used to heighten emotional elements in dramatic scenes and add excitement to the action of car chases and explosions. Here, though the action is on a very small scale, the movie starts with an orchestra performing a new film score timed to the action on the recording studio’s screen. The camera cranes up to capture the orchestra in full, a move that matches the music’s sweeping tones. Then the music continues to follow the movement of the cellist as he exits the studio.

He’s alternately hiding and running as he’s being chased.

Chased by a vengeful woman.

As interspersed chatter indicates, she’s powerful. Intimidating. Wealthy. Really, really wealthy. And apparently the cellist had some sort of ill-advised romantic entanglement with the woman.

Maybe it should be mentioned she’s married. But the world of Behemoth! also seems to be a tribute to infidelity, so never mind. Who knew session musicians and their patrons – who seem so classy and trustworthy on the outside – could be so ridiculously reckless in almost all things sexual?

Well, that’s Alex Serian, the cellist, and Carol Spedding, the patron, for you.

Demonstrating the level of conflicted vibes here, Pedro Pascal is likable in his performance, but his character, Alex, is much less so. He’s not even an interesting guy, unless the tale of his losing his virginity to a 20-year-old blonde when he was 13 is a compelling source of interest. (Hint: It’s not. She also “cheated” on him with his own father.) Ever since, his relationships have all been throw-aways.

More about Alex in a few stanzas.

Vampire Ballet

As for Carol – wow! She’s something else. Every single time Olivia Wilde pops onto the screen as Carol, the movie comes alive. Energetically, vivaciously alive. It’s electric. Wilde is so very wild and wonderfully unhinged here as a total psychochick. Carol’s gorgeous. She’s rich beyond reason. She’s into the arts. And she has the most absolutely heinous taste in men.

(It’s a given she’d never, ever even consider pouncing on this writer like a heat-seeking missile. Dude is safe. Dude abides.)

Why? Why O why, dear Universe, would she so relentlessly pursue a musician who chronically has nothing? He has no money. He has no allegiance to anything beyond his shoe tips and cello bow. He’s commitment averse in extremis.

It calls to mind a classic dirty joke from The Big Bang Theory. One of the lead characters, Leonard Hofstadter (played by Johnny Galecki), has a very brief affair with Leslie Winkle (Sara Gilbert). Both are experimental physicists, so, stereotypically, they’re both tragically socially inept. Both play stringed instruments. She: violin. He: cello. At one point, the nerdy Leslie makes a double entendre for the ages as she begins their awkward romantic dance and comments on how she’s admiring the magnificent piece of wood between Leonard’s legs.

So. Yeah.

That. Must. Be. It.

Carol terrorizes Alex like a relentless, unstoppable terminator endoskeleton emerging from a wall of fire.

That is great stuff.

If only Behemoth! had more Olivia and less Pedro, it might be a movie worthy of a standing “O.”

(C’mon now. “O” for ovation. Not that other “O.”)

Prodigy Camp

It seems Gilroy wants to say a lot about a lot of things, but he ends up saying very little.

Behemoth! is trumpeted as a tribute to film scores and the musicians who make them. But, really, Behemoth! is more a tribute to one accidental lothario who isn’t entirely likeable, far too self-serving and much too detached from the world around him.

Almost everybody surrounding Alex is struggling. His brother, David (Will Arnett), sold off the family’s two antique harps for $120,000 to (he says sorta jokingly) fund his addictions to Thai food and tequila. But, seriously, he’s struggling to make ends meet. A moment of tension? Well, muted tension. It goes nowhere. Oftentimes, Pascal responds with the same measured, unemotional tones of Din Djarin.

Gilroy touches on the impact of the pandemic. But it’s not clear what effect it had on Alex’s mother, Ginnie (JoBeth Williams), who apparently had memory issues in her waning years. And one of Alex’s many lovers dies young, at the age of 32, but in 2016 – years before the pandemic. Cause undisclosed.

Behemoth! moves at a decent pace, but midway through, there’s still a question as to where it’s all going. The movie seems to follow no logical path as the story movies through sundry flashbacks. That includes showing a 6-year-old Alex playing a cello on The Tonight Show. His father, Peter (Hanka Azaria), a film score legend with 600+ credits on his IMDB profile and who played tennis with Johnny Carson, at one point pulled Alex from a “prodigy camp” so he could more definitively define Alex’s musical focus. Peter sent David, instead. Of course, David flunked out. Alex, ever the lucky one, got to play with the blonde in exercises extending far beyond the intended vocal training.

Then a hint – while Alex watches a video – finally suggests the movie’s intent and within moments it also gives it all away; the big surprise twist is spoiled even as it emerges.

Lesson learned: Avoid the prodigious use of the word “prodigy.”

Late in the game, Gilroy also tries to throw another wrench into the works by suggesting Alex might’ve lost his mind following a severe early-scene car accident. Out of the blue, he recalls a memory and speech test a doctor had him perform. It, too, goes nowhere.

The Behemoth! Collective

It’s not that Gilroy should’ve simply “cut a few notes,” as it were. It’s that he should’ve shifted the focus and held it tightly.

Behemoth! struggles mightily with all things dramatic. It’s like Gilroy so thoroughly invested in Alex’s lack of everything (including core values) it extended out to the movie’s own soul. It’s restless. It’s undefined. And that makes for a less-than-great movie experience.

But there were some obvious threads that should’ve been explored much more deeply to make a far more rewarding movie.

It’s established Alex is a session player. Have Grancino, will travel. Even if it is a fake. Alex has played in symphonies and orchestras in Chicago, Dallas and Boston. He joins in and learns new music on the spot as a session player for film scores. And when he’s advised he should move to London or Prague, where “all” the work is these days, he, naturally, moves to Vienna. Apparently because he simply doesn’t want to listen to or take advice from anybody.

The film score session player angle is a fun idea in itself. There’s an insider’s view here that’s cool as movies watermarked as “Fox scoring” or “Sony Pictures scoring” play in the background while the accompanying music is performed. Musicians balk at having to sign another NDA before seeing the score for a secretive project given the working title of Behemoth!

There’s also a great scene of levity as Alex listens to a podcast produced by David while parked outside his brother’s house. Through the window, he can see David’s in a heated argument with his wife. The music being played and discussed in the podcast – which David pulled from a library of music scored in the 1950s for classic cartoon mayhem – perfectly matches the motions and collisions of the fight. Too surreal even for Alex, he stops the podcast.

Adding to the fun, the score to the movie Behemoth! (not the working title project, but the Tony Gilroy movie) is phenomenally unique. It’s by the “Behemoth! Collective,” a group of nine established film score composers, including James Newton Howard, Michael Giacchino, Alan Silvestri and Henry Jackman.

That’s fantastic.

But there’s something else here, too.

Season of Glass

On occasion, Alex, the musician whose performances move women to behave so unreasonably removed from common sense and drop their panties so quickly (we’re talking whiplash speed), also serves as a tutor. Therein are the movie’s warmest, most sincere moments.

More Olivia. More tutor. More heart. More credibility. Better movie.

One student and fellow performer, Bronte (Kaya Ralls), is central to moving the story forward as the two share their fandom for a 15-year-old prodigy named Viviana (Alexa Swinton). Somehow, she’s already a billionaire.

That leads – through some narrative manipulation – to Alex finding himself working one-on-one with the girl. She turns out to not only be a stunning talent, she’s a truly, deeply good person who treats everybody around her with dignity. That’s in stark contrast to others seen waving the Behemoth! baton. And, to a certain extent, in contrast to Alex as well.

His advice to the trance music phenom branching out to classic film scoring is spot-on: “Find a simple theme and blow it up.”

That logic transcends all music styles. Dial it all down to its acoustic core, find the music’s soul, then embellish it with your own personality and amp it up further to meet the action and the drama on the screen.

If only Gilroy took his own advice.

There could’ve been a whole lot more power to Behemoth! if Viv had been a larger focal point in the story. Instead, Gilroy clumsily tries to turn her into a plot twist.

There’s a truly great movie in here somewhere. A truly remarkable salute to film scores, their composers, their performers.

But too many times Gilroy hits the wrong notes.