Behemoth! earns a trip to a theater with decent speakers, and the reason has less to do with plot than with who gets to carry the feeling. Tony Gilroy, directing his first feature since The Bourne Legacy in 2012, has built a film in which nine composers do more of the emotional heavy lifting than his own screenplay seems willing to attempt. The cellist at the center, Alex Sarian (Pedro Pascal), spends the film recording other people’s scores and getting thrown backward into his own memories by the music, and the trick works even when the man himself stays quiet about why.
That division of labor is not a gimmick, it is the whole design. Gilroy invented a backstory for every fake production Alex scores, so each session arrives with its own musical fingerprint: Henry Jackman’s percussive suite for the fictional action comedy Spies Don’t Run doubles as the music under a chase through Chicago that ends in a car crash, while Emily Bear’s slow waltz for a lush fictional romantic drama carries Alex back to his time in Dallas. Gilroy told Variety he “knew I had to have different voices, and once you’re going to open it up, you want to cast it like actors,” and the Behemoth! Collective, as the nine composers are billed, runs from Michael Giacchino and Alan Silvestri to James Newton Howard. The best single choice in the film is the handoff: Gilroy shoots the orchestra recording a cue, then lets that same music score Alex’s memory a few seconds later, so the recording session and the flashback become one continuous piece of film. The device recurs often enough to become the film’s real structure without wearing out its welcome, because it dramatizes the only real argument the movie makes, which is that a man can feel plenty through other people’s fiction and almost nowhere else. Howard, who scored Michael Clayton, Duplicity and The Bourne Legacy for Gilroy, writes the film’s restrained, piano-led finale, and it is the first stretch of the picture that lets itself grieve out loud rather than through someone else’s cue sheet.
The screenplay does withhold, deliberately, and that withholding is where critics have split. David Rooney at The Hollywood Reporter called the film “adagio when it needs to be agitato” and found Alex too thin a hero to hold the center. Nikki Baughan at Screen International wrote that the story “proves too fragmented to make a lasting emotional impact,” and Owen Myers at The Guardian went further, calling Pascal “a frustratingly insubstantial anchor.” Fair complaints, all three, but they circle a choice the film is actually built on. A man who has spent two decades as a hired hand in his own life is going to play, on screen, like a hired hand. That is not a failure of nerve. It is the premise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrMGdrCJ5Ck
Where the complaints do land cleanly is the middle stretch, where the music starts covering for pages that were never written. Alex’s chase through Chicago with Olivia Wilde’s Carol, the one that ends in the car crash, is scored vividly enough to sell the fear, but the script never explains what Carol means to him beyond the running, so the sequence lands as spectacle more than feeling. A mentorship with a young cellist played by Kaya Ralls is introduced warmly and then simply dropped, as if Gilroy ran out of film before he ran out of score. The rest of the family sits around the edges in the same half-sketched way: Will Arnett as Alex’s brother Andy, Eva Victor as Nadia, a violinist on the sessions, and Hank Azaria and JoBeth Williams as his parents, Peter and Ginnie. None of them get the score’s advantage, so none of them land the way Alex does. The handoff trick that makes the first half sing starts to feel, for a stretch, like a very good orchestra standing in for a scene that was never going to arrive on its own.
Pascal makes the gamble pay anyway. He learned the cello for the role and plays it on camera, and Variety’s Owen Gleiberman singled out the result as solving the oldest problem in classical-music movies, noting “everything about his motions looks real, from the vibrato to the bowing to the way he moves his head.” The performance stays reactive by design, built out of hesitation and small flares of charm rather than speeches, and Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri put it about as well as it can be put: “The whole movie feels like a symphony about Pascal’s face.” Anyone hoping for a plot that resolves rather than accumulates will get restless here, and anyone who needs a hero to announce his feelings out loud should look elsewhere.
Set against Gilroy’s own filmography, Michael Clayton is still the tighter piece of machinery, and nothing in Behemoth! grips quite like that script does. But the years he spent running Andor, a patient show about institutions slowly wearing people down, appear to have loosened something in him, and he told The Hollywood Reporter at the London Film Festival that “when you’re winning, you press your bets.” Searchlight pressed theirs, and the film premiered as the Centerpiece selection of the New York Film Festival in October, a fittingly unhurried stage for a movie that refuses to hurry itself.
The verdict holds with one qualification worth naming honestly. The fragments do add up to a life, and the ending earns its hush, but the film plays more affecting in memory than it does scene by scene while it is actually running. Behemoth! is a gifted session player of a movie: extraordinary on other people’s material, a little lost when it has to speak for itself.
