Purposefully unfolding like a piece of classical music that’s lost its melody among a maze of overlapping leitmotifs, Tony Gilroy’s “Behemoth!” is a much slippier and more elegant thing than the scale implied by its title — the deception of which is purposeful as well. Sure, there are car crashes, crane shots, and nine different composers to the film’s credit (with giants of the form like Alan Silvestri, Michael Giacchino, and James Newton Howard each contributing their own diegetic accompaniments), but all of those outsized flourishes have the strange effect of making the elusive film around them feel easier to slip through your fingers.At its most basic level, “Behemoth!” is a floaty little character study about a hot but avoidant cellist named Alex Sarian (Pedro Pascal) who returns to Los Angeles after 20 years of running away from it and immediately gets seduced back into his memories when he starts working as a session player on a variety of different film scores. Such is the singular effect of movie music — compositions that are inextricably bound to certain images from the moment they’re brought into the world, like a person to the family they never asked to have. Confronted with that strange alchemy for the first time since he abandoned the pictures for the philharmonic, and largely disinterested in the Hollywood slop he’s been hired to play over, Alex can’t help but map the arrangements onto the unresolved moments from his own life.Maybe, we think, the music will help make sense of the stray thoughts that kick around his head, or at least turn them into the stuff of a “Stardust Memories”-like funhouse to explore. It’s all too easy to imagine what a conventional filmmaker could do with that same concept. But Gilroy, so eager to zag against expectations that he leveraged a mega-budget “Star Wars” show into an uncompromising political thriller about the brick-by-brick sacrifice required to build a rebellion, soon reveals subtler and more ambivalently cinematic intentions than the premise of his latest feature might suggest. By the time “Behemoth!” arrives at its dolcissimo stunner of an ending, it’s all the more rewarding for that.~this review continues on IndieWire~
