Dan Gilroy may not be the year's premier horror filmmaker, but no one can say he doesn't try daring new things with each project. Here he turns his attention away from seedy bottom-feeders in the news as well as shady lawyers in a morality play and turns his considerable insight and wit to the world of contemporary art. In doing so, he captures a dazzling, damning, and deeply disturbing look at the ways we treat art nowadays.
When she stumbles across a dead man in her apartment building, Josephina (Zawe Ashton) sneaks into his unit and discovers tons of beautiful paintings. She steals them and soon the L.A. contemporary art world clamors for the work. But the dead artist, Vetril Dease, had poured some of his inner demons into his paintings, stemming from his abused childhood that culminated in murdering his father and subsequent debilitating mental illness. Having violated his specific instructions to destroy his art, the greedy art dealers and critics become prey for the vengeful art they've profited from.
Sound brilliant? It is. Think The Picture of Dorian Gray meets It Follows, and you've about got the entire horror aspect of this movie. But what makes Velvet Buzzsaw a really amazing movie is that, in terms of its structure, it's not even a horror flick.
We begin not with the crazed artist painting his masterpiece nor do we even know about his death for the first several scenes. Instead, we start in an art exhibition in Miami Beach with an art critic named Morf Vandewalt (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose caustic wit and transcendent taste seem to have earned him a prestigious place in contemporary artistic circles. He passes through the gallery attentive more to the guests than the art, fleetingly trading gossip and insider info on the biz. His date is Josephina, who works for famed gallery owner Rhodora Haze (Rene Russo), and they quickly begin a sexual relationship when Morf reveals unhappiness with his boyfriend. But this, too, is fleeting. Morf is not the relationship guy, he's the social status guy.
With this inciting incident, the film is immediately established as a razor-sharp satire. Rapid-fire dialogue reveals characters' infinite disdain, avarice, and no small amount of personal loathing. You can never quite shake the feeling that these people know their entire sense of identity is based on being unable to create anything; they merely feed off what others make, hoping to grab whatever social and financial power they can by cheating the artists and making what should be experiential consumptive.
Leave it to Dan Gilroy to not only lampoon an entire institution but to make a complex and sophisticated piece of art in doing so. Everybody has ulterior motives, and all are impossibly selfish. Gilroy has a knack for these utterly unwholesome characters, and here he adds campy flamboyance to them. Perhaps best in this vein are Toni Collette and Rene Russo, vying for Morf's favor and the hottest pieces on the market, with their bizarre costumes, striking hair, and deliciously affected speech patterns. The film's color palette and cinematography paint a highly stylized world for our endless pleasure, the kind of cinematic candy that makes your mouth water and pucker up at the same time. What else would you expect from the production designer Jim Bissell (Suburbicon, Juamnji, 300) and cinematographer extraordinaire Robert Elswit?
With its large cast, short running time, and lots on its mind, Velvet Buzzsaw could have derailed into a sordid mess of half-baked ideas. Instead, thanks to precise writing, focused direction, and stellar work from cast and crew, it cuts deep into the state of art in a postmodern capitalist world of ownership and validity and subjectivity.
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