“Annette,” Reviewed: Leos Carax Is Limited by Adam Driver’s Star Power

When Martin Scorsese says that superhero movies aren’t “cinema,” he’s referring not to their story lines but to their modes of production: the overmanaged, studio-controlled exploitation and protection of a franchise’s—wait for it—“intellectual property.” But artistic freedom isn’t only the absence of contractual constraint; equally important is inner freedom, a director’s readiness to make a film that risks running athwart the commercial conditions of its production. Even outside of studios, many filmmakers work as if something like a studio has got inside their heads. Leos Carax’s film “Annette,” a musical based on a story by the brothers Ron and Russell Mael, a.k.a. Sparks, who also wrote the songs (with additional lyrics by Carax), is in many ways a brilliant film and in many ways an astoundingly audacious one, yet it’s not entirely a satisfying one—it doesn’t reimagine the very possibilities of cinema as comprehensively as Carax’s best films, because the studio in Carax’s head is signified by its star, Adam Driver.

Over the opening credits, a voice that sounds like Carax’s asks viewers not to “sing, laugh, clap, cry, yawn, boo, or fart” while the movie’s playing, and reminds them that “breathing will not be tolerated during the show, so please take a deep last breath right now.” He’s the movie’s first onscreen presence, manipulating the board in a Santa Monica recording studio where Sparks is performing; Carax’s real-life teen-age daughter, Nastya Golubeva Carax, is in the background, and he calls her over when he’s about to prompt the musicians to start. They commence—with a song, “So May We Start,” echoing the director’s mild-mannered request—and leave the studio in an extended procession that the film’s trio of lead actors (Driver, Marion Cotillard, and Simon Helberg) join, along with a quartet of female backup singers and an entire entourage, trooping in loose rhythm through the streets. Driver and Cotillard are handed costumes and transform into their characters, who then head off to gigs—Henry to the Orpheum Theatre and Ann to Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall.

That’s the movie’s peak of exuberance and discovery, a riffy and joyful initiation into a dour tale of male vanity and arrogance, a story of downfall with its sense of tragedy foreclosed and turned into a blankly nihilistic tale of wanton destruction—along with a moralistic message of good riddance. The story is spare, and most of its drama, anchored in and around Los Angeles, is depicted along with the singing of songs, largely in lieu of dialogue, that evoke the characters’ states of mind. Henry McHenry (Driver), performing as “The Ape of God,” is (as the show’s unnamed host declares) a “mildly offensive” and “world-infamous” standup comedian who at the start of the action has met and fallen in love with Cotillard’s character, an opera singer named Ann Defrasnoux. (Helberg plays her accompanist.) Ann and Henry soon marry and have a child, a daughter named Annette, yet the relationship ruins him, personally and professionally. He feels unhappily domesticated, and he responds by becoming grossly offensive in his act. As a result, his career craters while Ann’s soars, and he lets loose with self-indulgent, reckless, wrathful fury, leading to an accident in which Ann dies. Annette, whom Henry raises, turns out to be a prodigy, a preternaturally gifted singer, whom Henry exploitatively turns into a public spectacle and an international star. But (avoiding spoilers) Henry’s unslaked rage, in his desperate need to keep Annette’s show going—and to feed his ego—veers to crime.

Henry is at the center of the film, but his position in it is strangely ambiguous. “Annette” is an anti-psychological depiction of a Dostoyevskian character. In that regard, the film both resembles and contends with one of the greatest of all movies, Robert Bresson’s “Pickpocket,” from 1959, in which a philosophical criminal’s willful defiance ultimately finds a purified and sublimated redemption, through love, in a final scene of historic power—which the last scene of “Annette” expressly echoes. Whereas Bresson’s protagonist offers glimpses of his motives in his dialogue, Henry hints only scantly at the tangle of his inner life in his onstage rants and in his clear and simple dramatic deeds. His songs or arias offer little inner portraiture, only the most apparent declarations of motives, with the sole exception of his references to “the abyss” and to his grave error of gazing into it—comments of a hand-waving vagueness that simultaneously glorify and trivialize the antihero.

Such dramatic nebulousness invites clarification in performance, which is to say in the essential collaboration of the director and the actor. That relationship is the very core of “Annette”; it’s also indicative of why this movie, for all its virtues, falls far short of Carax’s best. I recall reading, decades ago, an interview with Carax in which he said that the greatest privilege in making films is working with actors. He has made the careers of several great ones, giving Julie Delpy and Denis Lavant their first starring roles and propelling Juliette Binoche into the cinephile firmament; from the start and in repeat collaborations, they were incarnations of his artistic vision, and he filmed them with transfigurative freedom. In “Annette,” the equation is reversed: Driver (who is also one of the film’s producers) is a star, and not one of Carax’s making. The director has said that he cast Driver in “Annette” after seeing him in his breakthrough role in Lena Dunham’s “Girls.” But the shoot of the film was delayed until Driver could fulfill his “Star Wars” commitments—and, in the meantime, he had major roles in movies by Scorsese, the Coen brothers, and Noah Baumbach, among others. Driver has come to represent the myth and the power of mainstream Hollywood as well as the cinema’s enduring artistic tradition, and this double aura seems to have got in the director’s way. The character of Henry may be derisive, impious, cantankerous, even contemptuous, but Carax treats both the story and especially the actor reverently and deferentially. As a result, he gives the impression of showcasing Driver without transforming him.

Part of the problem lies with the nature of Driver’s strengths as a performer. Lavant, the star of several Carax films, including “Holy Motors,” from 2012, is a virtual chameleon whose transformations are, first and essentially, physical, like those of such silent-film actors as Lon Chaney and Emil Jannings. Lavant is also a literal acrobat; he’s in motion even when in repose. By contrast, the originality of Driver’s performance style is in its classic-Hollywood solidity: like Robert Mitchum or Robert Ryan, Driver is always relentlessly himself, reflecting the visions of directors he works with and, in turn, sending them back in the likeness of his own built-in form. Whereas the element of danger with Lavant is internalized and symbolized, coming through equally well through drastic makeup or none at all, with Driver it is externalized, dramatized, and literalized, a direct correlate of realistic acting. Driver himself has addressed the paradox of his performance in “Annette,” saying, “Even if it feels surreal, I can’t play surreal.” And that’s true—the transformation of Driver and the revelation of Henry’s inner life fall entirely on Carax’s shoulders, but Carax never gets close enough to Driver (both literally, with the camera, and figuratively, in the drama) to break through the familiar (albeit glorious) mannerisms and bend the actor with the director’s own gravitational field.

Carax approaches the Mael brothers’ songs with as much reverence as he does Driver, and this, too, proves limiting. In a way, a musical is the severest test of a director’s artistry, because the performance of music is resistant to directorial invention—musicians do so much of the artistic work that directors often yield to the temptation of neutrality, of mere documentary-like recording, lest their cinematic images be perceived as getting in the way of the musicians’ art. For most of “Annette,” Carax films the actors singing mainly in long travelling shots that hardly reveal much personality on the part of either actor or director. Carax doesn’t make the performers’ presences loom, or seem to burst through the screen; he doesn’t even get at the exertion of singing. For that matter, the backing instrumentalists’ sound comes onto the soundtrack as in classic Hollywood musicals, and the effect is neither radically documentary nor radically stylized. The filming of the songs has a compulsory feel, deferentially depersonalized. Instead, most of “Annette” can be summed up in that killer word that suggests the self-abnegating subordination of direction to screenwriting and to the dictates of a franchise or a literary source: illustrative.

Carax’s illustrations are nonetheless far more invigorating and alluring than those of almost any other filmmaker. Henry and Ann, in the early throes of their romance, sing a sentimental duet centered on the phrase “We love each other so much,” in a sun-drenched forest clearing where Henry’s red shirt and Ann’s yellow skirt pierce the wild with their confectionary artifice—and then, as Ann is seen from much closer, walking ahead of Henry, his two hands come menacingly into the frame behind her, before they rest tenderly on her shoulders. The movie’s great set piece, on the deck of the couple’s yacht, features a wild storm that Carax, working with the great cinematographer Caroline Champetier, films thrillingly, meshing the dramatic action with special effects that evoke the colossal scale and stark ingenuity of classic silent films. Several incidental images, showing Henry, Annette, and the accompanist on their world tour, have a candy-coated sparkle; several shots of Henry’s life as a criminal come at the viewer from disturbingly disorienting angles, and one very brief, joltingly oblique closeup of a stunned Henry mainly suggests all the similarly bold images that the movie is missing.

But, for the most part, Carax’s inspirations in “Annette” are in the realm of scenography, of décor and detail. A sex scene in which Henry lifts his head from between Ann’s parted legs to sing his part of a duet is a surprise but a distanced one, more quirky than rapturous or consuming. Baby Annette is portrayed by a series of puppets—with faces slightly reminiscent of Lavant himself—which provide a giddy jolt every time they appear onscreen, but Carax never puts their artifice and expressivity to spectacular use. Though Annette is the title character, the child’s inner life remains as opaque as those of the dolls, and Carax doesn’t get any closer to Ann, either. “Annette” is Henry’s movie. It’s through his arc that the literalism of the Mael brothers’ story meets Carax’s expressive urgency—but, rather than augment each other, the two prove mutually inhibiting.

Performing in a boxer’s hooded robe, Henry is at first an endearing presence onstage. He complains about the conventional business that surrounds him (“What is this fucking smoke supposed to mean, anyway?”) and self-referentially derides the very job that he’s supposed to be doing. He brandishes his contract as Lenny Bruce brandishes one of his trial transcripts, but unlike Bruce he never goes into detail and merely uses the document as a prop. (Henry later adopts another Bruce mannerism, waving his microphone at the audience like a priest sprinkling holy water.) “Annette” proves an implicit maxim of casting: never cast a non-comedian as a comedian, because being funny is the equivalent of being able to sing, except that, with funniness, when an actor hasn’t got it, it’s impossible to dub someone else’s sense of humor onto the soundtrack. Driver throws himself into the Henry performances with a game energy, but what he achieves, though impressive, isn’t comedy; instead, he merely signifies comedy.

As Henry’s career declines and his wrath rises, he frightens Ann, and he truly offends his audience in down-market Las Vegas by joking about killing her. The way that Henry ultimately explains his turn to actual violence is that he yielded to his “horrid urge”: “I cast my eyes toward the abyss.” Perhaps it takes the bravery of such an artist to tell the truth of what he (always he) sees in the “abyss.” Perhaps his Dostoyevskian gaze into the abyss onstage proves to be a danger in reality—the artist who trades in monstrous thoughts can’t help but put the monstrosity into action. Perhaps it’s the unjust sacrifice borne by society (and often, all the more unjustly, by women) for those abysmal truths to come to light. Perhaps this appalling circularity is the abyss itself, the truth of male vanity and male violence, which, ultimately (spoiler alert), Annette does her part to extirpate from society, becoming, in the process, transformed from a puppet serving her father’s exploitative needs into a flesh-and-blood child.

“Annette” is simultaneously an exaltation of a destructively egomaniacal male artist and a repudiation of him, an immorality play and a morality play at the same time, an allegory of personal redemption and civic purification through the strange metaphor of singing—both in the musical sense and in the slang sense of testifying against someone. Annette, not Henry, is the movie’s audacious truthteller; her preternatural gift, her melodic yet wordless singing, is no ethereal form of abstract beauty but a desperate effort to express the horrors that she hasn’t got language for yet—and to create the audience for it, the witnesses to it, when she finally becomes able to verbalize it. The idea is a powerful one, and the Maels and Carax express it sincerely. But in the absence of Carax’s typically uninhibited imagination and frank confrontation with his performers, “Annette” stops short of experience and remains an idea.