Seberg – Review

Seberg

Directed by: Benedict Andrews

Runtime: 102 minutes

I knew very little about actress Jean Seberg going into this film, having only seen her famous role in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and a few other appearances. I lead with this because, I think, the success of Seberg hinges somewhat on one’s expectation about the kind of film that Jean Seberg’s life deserves. A fair amount of the early reviews for this film express disappointment in its distanced portrayal the actress: Clarisse Loughrey for the Independent laments that “By the end, it feels as if the real Seberg has been edged out of her own biopic,” while Slant’s Pat Brown argues that “Throughout, the filmmakers occlude the most fascinating and potentially powerful elements of Jean Seberg’s history.” The assumption here, of course, is that Seberg is a biopic meant to shed light on the actress’s life, which—despite any marketing efforts to convince the public otherwise—is not the impression I got from the film.

At the very least, Seberg shouldn’t be judged in the same way we’d judge, say, a Judy or a Bohemian Rhapsody. The latter films’ titles foreground their artistic pursuit (successful or not) of revealing the stars’ intimate lives or articulating their major successes. Seberg, on the other hand, distances us from the actress and her craft at every turn. The film introduces us to Seberg at one of her lowest points as an actor—a famous scene from the critically panned Saint Joan, in which faulty effects behind a stake burning leaves Seberg with real burns. We don’t see her break into stardom or dazzle cameras and audiences with her craft. She is already a star, already married and a mother, and already sick of the Hollywood system.

Rather, the film picks up after a chance meeting on an airplane between Seberg (Kristen Stewart) and Black Panther activist Hakim Abdullah Jamal (Anthony Mackie), leading to Seberg’s unequivocal public support of the Black Panther movement. The film orients us to Seberg’s unfolding entanglement with Jamar and the Black Panthers through the lens of FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), a controversial FBI operation with the intent to discredit “subversive” movements and tarnish the public images of those who support them publicly. Jean Seberg becomes FBI target “Seberg”, reduced to a name that is too easily abstracted from the life it is attached to.

The film’s Seberg is a shadow of the real actress, but Kristen Stewart is mesmerising in the role. She does, in a way distract from the real Seberg; it is the compelling presence of Stewart that inhabits the detailed wardrobe of yellows meant to evoke Seberg. But this doesn’t feel particularly unwarranted since the film feels more than anything a repudiation of the FBI’s tactics and motives in the COINTELPRO operation, highlighting the lack of empathy behind the blatantly dystopic practices that the FBI still engages in today. Stewart’s portrayal of Seberg’s mental decline and increasing paranoia is gripping, and it feels like the film wants us to appreciate Stewart’s stardom and vibrancy while we still can as she wrestles against the forces that extinguished Seberg’s.

Accordingly, we end up spending a great deal of time with fictional FBI surveillance operatives Jack Solomon (Jack O’Connell) and Carl Kowalski (Vince Vaughn), who represent two sides of a government agency where the balance between ethics and results is increasingly shifting in the wrong direction. It does feel like Solomon is the film’s attempt to throw the FBI a bone while it eviscerates the morality of their actions, giving him an ethical streak and a redemptive arc to offset their flagrant injustices. In doing so, the film is historically hamstrung into muddying the potential consequences of Solomon’s choices, opting instead to have them inflect one of the film’s most positive notes: Hakim Jamal’s conviction that “If you can change one mind, you can change the world.”

It does, however, remain to be said that the film somewhat elides its black characters in its portrayal of the civil rights movement. The film wrestles with the idea of Seberg being a “tourist” to the movement and argues that she is not a victim nor a martyr, but a tragic case nonetheless. It’s a tough tightrope to walk, and it does at times come at the expense of exploring how the film’s events, especially towards the third act, affect its black characters.

I found myself thinking initially that Anthony Mackie was struggling to portray the radicalism of a Black Panther, coming across gentle and scholarly in some scenes and brash and powerful in others, but ultimately this is a result of the awkward amalgam of low-level Black Panthers that he is tasked to embody. Mackie’s named role is Hakim Abdullah Jamal, who was historically an author with violence and mental illness in his past, who the real Seberg had an affair with. However, Mackie’s character seems modelled more on Raymond Hewitt, a former schoolteacher and non-violent socialist activist. The film follows Jamal’s life story for the most part but transfers all of Hewitt’s historical involvement with Seberg to Jamal in its final act.

This signals a slight rhetorical misfire on the part of the film, showing the FBI doggedly pursuing the silence of Jamal, a seemingly non-radical activist, and poisoning Seberg’s public image for donating money to fund schooling for black children. I don’t want to say that it undercuts the message of the film entirely, because the FBI’s tactics here are reprehensible no matter which way you slice them, but it does misconstrue the cause-and-effect of the events that ultimately lead to Seberg’s downfall—the radicalness of the Black Panther party is undoubtedly a part of the history here, and one that could have been leveraged to shed insight on the real-life situation. One wonders if the film could have cast Mackie’s characters separately to achieve a more nuanced criticism of the FBI’s actions, but alas.

And yet, though it is a flawed film, Seberg is undeniably compelling. It is an evocative thriller about unethical government tactics and the ruination of a vibrant life filled with immense potential. It is not the biopic that Jean Seberg deserves, that much I agree with. Still, Stewart’s inhabitation of this small part of Seberg’s life is valuable in its own right.