In the Flesh: Opus

Listening to John Malkovich sing about holding his cowboy hat at the age of sixteen while his boyhood love drives away to chase her Hollywood dreams is a surreal pleasure, but it wouldn’t play as anything more than a curio without the genuine insight into pop entertainment and its attendant press organs that buttress director Mark Anthony Green’s seriously flawed but oddly compelling film. The influence of legendary songwriter The Dream, responsible for Rihanna’s ‘Umbrella’, Beyonce’s ‘All the Single Ladies’, and myriad other pop music touchstones, is everywhere in the in-film music of reclusive pop superstar Alfred Moretti (John Malkovich), simultaneously banal and irresistible. Moretti’s music is a cross-section of everyone from Bowie to Taylor Swift, slithering in serpentine fashion between the idiotic and the irresistible. ‘Dina, Simone’ feels like something to which fans would actually groove out, lending a feel of real authenticity to the slow-motion shots of dancers and music-lovers around the world savoring the anticipation of Moretti’s long-awaited global comeback. ‘Tomorrow’, meanwhile, is the kind of heartfelt but vapid glurge that has propelled Swift to billionaire status.

That’s pop in a nutshell, as Opus sees it. The music and showmanship exist not for any artistic reason but to enflesh the artist’s persona, which in turn gives rise to an ecosystem of press and hype and fandom, a cult of true believers and opportunists incentivized to keep the legend snowballing. When the critics and tastemakers Moretti invites to his desert compound fawn over his new work, dismiss his gross displays of sexual dominance as necessary tolls on the superhighway of his greatness, and otherwise twist themselves into knots to sustain the man’s image even at the cost of their own health and sanity, they’re demonstrating the unsustainable linkage between art and criticism in a capitalist economy. Moretti has to be great in order for their magazines to sell and for their websites to draw clicks, rendering their work a fait accompli. Junior journalist Ariel Ecton’s (Ayo Edibiri, occasionally great but too often lapsing into her default persona) determination to write a real story about Moretti’s compound is first suppressed by her boss, then twisted back on itself when she transforms the story of her survival into a bestselling book.

Moretti points this out gleefully when she visits him in prison. She’s become just another leech attached to his legend, monetizing her own traumatic experiences as the press accuses Billie Holiday (Rosario Dawson) of doing in the bizarre children’s puppet show staged at the compound, and that sacrificial investment makes her a part of the new world order he envisions, one in which his idea of artists take over from the so-called left brain lawyers and politicians. Malkovich plays his part with a kind of Kanye-esque petulant, impatient flair, dominating not just with his obvious charisma and erratic insights, but with the weight of his insecurity. Pop is not a medium about complete or mature human beings, and Moretti is neither, but it is a highly complex craft, and he is a consummate craftsman. The film may be lumpy, it may lean unnecessarily on shabby CGI wound makeup and gross-out murders, it may suffer from dull color grading like something out of a network TV series called Heartland that airs at 7pm on Fridays, but it understands the trivial, towering power of pop, and the hideous emotional economy which permits and feeds it.