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I was a classical musician growing up, so I’m probably more disposed than most to like a movie set in the classical-music world. Then again, that could mean that I set a higher bar for authenticity when it comes to depicting
it. There’s no doubt that the cinema’s reigning masterpiece of classical-music drama is “Tár” — a great movie in so many other ways that that remains only one dimension of it. But Todd Field inhabited that world, and allowed the audience to do so, in a way that no previous director had. Two other films leap to mind that have the ring of deep-dish classical-music reality: “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” which beautifully caught the experience of studying music in high school, and “Maestro,” a movie I may have enjoyed more than others, even though it left out a ton of stuff about Leonard Bernstein (like, for instance, the heart of his conducting career in the ’50s and ’60s!), because I instinctively filled all of that in.
Viewed on that scale, “Behemoth!,” Tony Gilroy’s drama about a professional cellist, played with perky mystery by Pedro Pascal, scores on the level of authenticity. Pascal’s character, a renowned musician named Alex Serian, has been a member of various world-class symphony orchestras, notably in Chicago, but the film presents us with a more plugged-in contempo angle on this kind of career. In the new era, orchestras are foundering, the pay isn’t what it used to be, and even a virtuoso string musician might need a side gig or two. For Alex, that has meant playing in orchestras that are assembled to record movie scores — a major industry, and one that “Behemoth!” depicts as being nearly as high maintenance as the prestige symphony circuit.
The conductors who oversee the recording of the movie scores are portrayed as hyper-demanding corporate perfectionists. (One of them, a prima donna played by Thomas Kretschmann, makes it feel like you’re seeing Klaus Kinski going to work for Skydance.) And from the film’s opening scene, which immerses us in the lingo of rehearsal, which is a mixture of old-school classical Euro directives (“pianissimo”) and Hollywood jargon (“new ink”), we’re right there in the cavernous recording studio, feeling the heat and the nuance.
My all-time pet peeve in classical-music films is that characters who are supposed to be playing the violin or cello almost never look real — you can see from a mile away that they’re faking it, imitating the finger and bow movements like crude mimes. Tony Gilroy has solved this problem in the most committed way possible: He had Pedro Pascal learn to play the cello. That’s really Pascal doing it, which is why everything about his motions looks real, from the vibrato to the bowing to the way he moves his head. That devotion works for the film. It allows us to feel that Alex is as genuine in his talent as a professional athlete or a star chef. Virtuosity is the air he breathes. Not every orchestra player is a virtuoso, of course, but Alex, we learn, was a child prodigy who came from a high-powered musical family (we see a clip of him playing Bach as a 6-year-old on “The Tonight Show”). That’s his pedigree, and it’s also his problem, since the family craziness has messed him up.
In addition to presenting its musical demimonde with reverent accuracy, “Behemoth!” has another quality going for it: The film is playful. It’s not a symphony — it’s a scherzo. This is only the fourth feature Gilroy has directed (it’s his first since “The Bourne Legacy” in 2012), but coming off the “Star Wars” television series “Andor,” which he created and was the showrunner for, he makes his enthusiasm for the filmmaking process palpable. For most of the film, Alex is doing movie-score session work, and Gilroy introduces an impish device: We see and hear the orchestra recording a score (the music might be suspenseful, romantic, pensive), until seconds later it becomes the score of “Behemoth!” itself. I’m not honestly sure I can say what this slightly meta gambit accomplishes, but it’s clever and fun. Gilroy got no less than nine acclaimed film composers to contribute their talents to the movie (they include James Newton Howard and Alan Silvestri and are billed as the Behemoth! Collective). But he could easily have executed the exact same trick with just one composer.
Leaping around in time, Gilroy draws us into Alex’s world with an effervescent wink at the badness of his behavior. Alex is wriggling out of a fling with Carol, the wife of one of the Chicago orchestra’s wealthy patrons — she’s played by Olivia Wilde, who radiates such intense stalker energy here that we’re not quite sure how to react. Alex just keeps calm, and that’s what Pascal does, more or less, throughout the movie. Alex’s life is falling apart, yet somehow he’s the eye of the storm; everyone around him is screwier than he is. With an elegant mustache and perfect gelled hair that dips down onto his forehead, Pedro Pascal has never looked more dashing — he’s like a refined Burt Reynolds, or maybe a passive Brando. Between his classical chops and his glamorous looks, women drop for Alex, but he’s an artist who has drifted through life, drinking and having flings, always ready to move on to the next woman and the next city and the next gig. It’s a frictionless life he revels in. But something’s got to give.
Gilroy seems to have been influenced by the elliptical quality of “Tár,” though not always to good effect. I enjoyed, to a point, the cut-and-paste chronology of “Behemoth!,” but there’s a flaw in: The actors look identical in every scene, so some of it is confusing — like the episode in Dallas where Alex meets Nadia (Eva Victor), a star violinist who seems his match. They sleep together. But then, after a fraught phone conversation with the billionaire who wants to marry her, she lashes out at Alex (who has done nothing wrong), and we’re not sure where this is going or why. A few scenes later, tragedy has struck. But did all these events happen one after another or years apart? We figure it out, but Gilroy should have made it easier to read.
Alex, after the debacle of his break-up with Wilde’s clingy diva in Chicago, returns to Los Angeles, where he grew up. He can get session work there, and does. He still seems mellow, but he’s bestirred by a pet obsession: listening to the original avant-pop compositions posted online by Viviana (Alexa Swinton), a 15-year-old girl who has become a local celebrity. It turns out that he’s got a connection to her; she’s Nadia’s daughter. But why is he so interested? He’s just got…a feeling.
Alex’s brother, a talented but scruffy podcast host, is played by Will Arnett with a lived-in self-doubt more interesting than anything about his character in “Is This Thing On?” It’s through their conversations that we start to piece together Alex’s troubled family life — but here, once again, Pascal suffers in such a placid way that we keep wanting more. The movie finally comes to a head in an expertly staged suspense sequence where Alex, pretending to be a caterer’s assistant, sneaks into Nadia’s stone mansion, finds what he was looking for, and then has to sneak out. Naturally, the music playing under all this is “movie music.”
What, in the end, is “Behemoth!,” apart from a movie with a dismally bad title? (You can’t remember it. You can’t pronounce it. And it’s hard to say what, exactly, it means or why it carries an exclamation point — though it is, of course, the title of one of the films that Alex is helping to record the score for.) “Behemoth!” is a midlife-crisis movie. It’s a classical-musician movie. It’s a mild romantic mystery. It’s Tony Gilroy fiddling around with pure movie form. (He’s a sly orchestrator of big-screen storytelling.) But 19 years after “Michael Clayton,” he’s still looking for a subject that will allow him to do what he did so masterfully in that movie: heighten our perceptions of the world along with our emotions, until they become one.
