Behemoth!

Don't be fooled by the jaunty punctuation: Behemoth! is a serious drama, a character study from Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) that offers us not one, but two main characters: orchestral musician Alex Serian (Pedro Pascal), and the extraordinary score that follows wherever he goes.

Alex is a cellist with deep, if increasingly rotted, roots in music. His embittered father (Hank Azaria) was a virtuoso horn player who wound up creating compositions for cartoons, his mother (JoBeth Williams) hasn’t seen her beloved harp since she declined into dementia, and his flaky brother (Will Arnett) is decades past a brief foray into rock stardom.

Alex himself was once an acclaimed prodigy, appearing on Johnny Carson at the age of six before rising to principal positions at a range of prestigious orchestras. But he's still so unsettled in middle age that he almost appears to be a dispassionate observer of his own life. He wanders from one city, job, and accompanying affair to another, always searching for something he can't even name, let alone locate. After infuriating a wealthy patron (Olivia Wilde) in Chicago and a soulful violinist (Eva Victor) in Dallas, he retreats to a movie offer in LA. Once ensconced in Hollywood's legendary Barbra Streisand Scoring Stage, he begins work as the cellist on a top-secret project codenamed ‘Behemoth!’.

The promise is right there in the title, but the effect is up to Alex: will this job wind up having an outsized impact on his life, or will he continue to drift? Will he, ultimately, ignore, exploit, or embrace his potential?

Either way, Pascal's nuanced performance is likely to further enhance his own career. It's not easy to create a memorable impression by playing such a passive man, particularly since Gilroy's script often feels frustratingly unfocused. Most of the supporting characters are underwritten props who exist purely to move the story along. (Wilde and Victor, in particular, deserved far better.) And because Alex himself is so amorphous, Pascal has to create him from within. He does this with impressive subtlety, allowing us to recognize a range of emotions that are never actually expressed.

It’s hard to imagine a more gorgeous score

But if we can see the areas that Gilroy's neglected, we have no doubts about his inspiration. He was a musician before he became a filmmaker, and it's hard to imagine a more gorgeous score for a movie that is, in great part, about scoring movies. He hired nine different composers to create nine separate compositions, and the film's immersive soundscape never falters. 

So while there are stretches where the plot feels thin, there are also passages when Pascal's performance, the multilayered music, and cinematographer Damián García's fluid camerawork blend into an exhilarating experience. Anyone who has ever been part of an ensemble – or, for that matter, an audience – knows the feeling Gilroy is chasing: that thrilling moment when all the elements are working together, in search of art that's bigger than us all.

Behemoth! Premiered at the New York Film Festival. In cinemas worldwide Dec 4.