Seberg, the biopic starring Kristen Stewart is finally being released tomorrow on Amazon after an almost year long slog through film festivals, award season and a theatrical release. This might instead be a film that benefits from a small screen treatment, an all-too-believable dark and twisted melodrama of J Edgar Hoover's overreach during a second wave of blacklisting and torment after McCarthyism. Seberg begins with Otto Preminger's cropped Joan of Arc in flames but leaves out the seminal Godard/Paris years and jumps instead to her waning marriage with her second husband Romain Gary who was himself a notorious French hero and literary figure. Her abrupt awakening as a champion and patron of civil rights and (alleged) affair with black activist stretch credulity yet Seberg was naive. Her subsequent downfall into pills, depression and abject fear as the FBI spies on her during Cointelpro--their effort to discredit and bring down Communists and other dissidents-- is supported by documents that have come to light. Seberg became pregnant while filming in Mexico and the child-whose parentage became added fodder for FBI harassment-- died shortly after birth. Director Benedict Andrews adds a guilt-stricken FBI agent who eventually confesses as he hands over her purloined files. Seberg became increasingly unstable, far from the Breathless gamine, and though she worked in Europe, she eventually died of an overdose in a parked car in Paris-never definitively proved as a suicide. She is here inhabited, very skillfully and movingly, by Stewart and the hyperbolic invented parts fall away if you keep your eye on her, and the superior production design and costumes.
Image courtesy Amazon Studios.
