Seberg is part celebrity biopic, part paranoid thriller, and part message movie. Unfortunately, all these parts add up to not much at all.
The script, by Anna Waterhouse and Joe Shrapnel, is based on a true story that already sounds like a movie plot: It's the late 1960s, and movie star Jean Seberg has become involved with the civil rights movement — drawing the attention of the FBI, which sets out to watch and destroy her.
To this already arresting premise, Seberg adds an interlocking storyline about a fictional FBI agent, Jack, who is part of the team surveilling Jean, but feels increasingly uneasy about the agency's campaign of sabotage against her.
Seberg never quite coheres into anything interesting or meaningful.
The cast, including Kristen Stewart as Jean, Jack O'Connell as Jack, Margaret Qualley as Jack's wife, Vince Vaughn as Jack's colleague, and Anthony Mackie as civil rights activist (and Seberg's lover) Hakim Abdullah Jamal, is solid. The themes feel relevant in our turbulent times. And director Benedict Andrews knows how to compose a pretty picture. Yet Seberg never quite coheres into anything interesting or meaningful.
The first act feels like a staid biopic, following a linear path of cause and effect and employing all the usual shortcuts of character development. Here is Jean saying she'd like to do something that matters. Here, immediately afterward, is that something falling directly into Jean's lap, in the form of a chance encounter with Hakim. Here, a few scenes later, is Jean drinking alone in an empty house, so that you can understand she is tragically lonely and definitely doomed. Gee, I wonder what's going to happen once she shows up at Hakim's house in the middle of the night.
Jack's half of the story isn't a biopic, but its telling is similarly heavy-handed. The very first time we meet him, he's explaining Captain America's origin story to his wife, after which he immediately bangs her on the kitchen counter. You can practically hear the screenwriters ticking checkboxes: symbol of American heroism, check. Dialogue explaining his role, check. Love scene to establish him as a good guy, check. Never mind that there's no emotional connective tissue between these items. Seberg does not have time for such niceties.
Even when Seberg raises more complicated, nuanced ideas, it seems unsure what to do with them. Is Jean a bored white woman playing "tourist" in black activist spaces, as one character accuses her of, or is she making a genuine difference with her fat checks? What are the fractures within the Black Power movement, and where does that leave Hakim and his relationship with her?
The film barely tries to answer these questions. In truth, this part of the story is just setup. Hakim, the Black Panthers, and Jean's activism recede into the background to make room for the real narrative, which is about the battle between Jean Seberg and the FBI. As the government ramps up its efforts, Jean spirals further and further down into paranoia, certain that she's being watched but unable to get even her own husband to believe her.
Seberg is too baseline competent to be declared a disaster, but it's unremarkable in every way.
These scenes are some of Seberg's most riveting, as Stewart trades Jean's low-key melancholy for high-key panic. She ramps up Jean's anxiety gradually at first, but by the time Jean's in full-blown freakout mode, tearing apart her own house to look for bugs, it feels earned. (Though I could have done with slightly fewer shots of her nervously throwing back a drink. And Jean's inability to prove her suspicions would be more believable if the FBI agents weren't hiding bugs basically in plain sight.)
Meanwhile, we're subjected to long scenes chronicling how Jack feels about all of this, which would be more compelling if the film had figured out how to make him an actual character instead of a plot device laden with symbolism. Alas, not even O'Connell's fiercest glares and saddest sighs can turn Jack into a real boy.
There is surely an interesting character study in the deteriorating mental state of a woman subjected to a deliberate campaign of gaslighting by her own government over the course of several years, or even of a man who has a crisis of conscience upon witnessing the damage his work has wrought. Another storyteller could have run with the juicy details dropped here, like the FBI's manipulation of a greedy press, or played up the parallels between Jean's predicament then and the state of our world now.
This film tries to do it all, with subpar results. Seberg is too baseline competent to be declared a disaster. It tells the story it sets out to, in that you come away with a clear understanding of what happened and why. But it's unremarkable in every way. What a waste of a remarkable tale.
