When I heard Dan Gilroy was teaming up with Jake Gyllenhaal again after their 2014 masterpiece Nightcrawler I was more than excited. Once it was revealed to be a horror-comedy involving evil paintings murdering people I knew it would be right up my alley. What I didn’t expect though, was for their new collaboration Velvet Buzzsaw to be as brilliantly and brutally satirical as it is.
A down on her luck art gallery assistant Josephina (Zawe Ashton) discovers the corpse of an old man by the name of Vetril Dease in her apartment complex, and lucky for her he just so happens to have been a prolific artist who left behind countless paintings. Despite his dying wish being for his art to be destroyed, she decides to take it all and run. After her boss Rhodora (Rene Russo) finds out she gives Josephina the choice to either suffer at the hands of poverty or work together to make a profit, which she reluctantly agrees to realizing that the benefit greatly outweighs the cost. Caught in the middle of everything is Morph (Jack Gyllenhaal) a reputable art critic who sees Dease art as an opportunity to write a book, and art curator Gretchen (Toni Collette) whose looking for a way to grow their career.
Every main character in Velvet Buzzsaw tries to in some way profit off a dead man without his permission. Dease used his art as a way to purge all of his pain, hurt and madness from his life into something outside of his own head. He painted for himself as almost a way of therapy. We never get an explanation into why his art becomes a living entity, but when taking a look at Dease and his life it’s pretty obvious. He poured his entire being into his work, and because of that he quite literally lived on through his art. Even though Josephina knew that his final wish was to have his art destroyed she let her greed get the best of her and took what wasn’t hers, angering him off and starting a chain of events leading to a lot of carnage.
What Velvet Buzzsaw really gets at is how studios, corporations and other powers-that-be are willing to exploit artists for the sake of making a buck. Even though they obviously loved Dease work and saw how special it was, no one, excluding maybe Morph, actually cared about the artistic value of it, only the money that could be made. Rhodora, Josephina and Gretchen all saw Dease as one big dollar sign. Even though Morph appreciated Dease work and seemed to respect him as an artist, he was still benefitting from it.
When it comes down to it, they were all making money off of something that wasn’t theirs. No one but Josephina knew about his final wish, but they still never took a second to even question the morality of what they were doing. They bastardized the very heart and soul of the life’s work of a man they didn’t even know, and turned his art into a commodity to be sold and passed around without a care in the world. Morph eventually realizes the ramifications of their actions, but by then it was too late because bodies had already started dropping. They all eventually pay for their greed with their blood in vicious act’s of supernatural justice.
At the heart of the movie is the irony found in Rhodora’s character. Long before becoming a titan in the art world she was in a punk band called, surprise, Velvet Buzzsaw. As a punk musician she made music for the sake of making music, art for the sake of art. Once her band-mate and best friend died of an overdose Velvet Buzzsaw was no more and somewhere over the years she lost her soul. There’s a moment where her previous self comes through in a scene where she gives famous struggling artist Piers (John Malkovich) advice to kick his creative juices back into gear. She tells him to stay at her beach house until he makes something for nobody else but himself. The young rebellious heart of a punk was still inside her somewhere, but her lust for money was so overwhelming that by the time she sees what’s she’d become, much like Morph, it was already too late.
Velvet Buzzsaw is a wonderfully violent and often times hilarious critique of the vapid soullessness that can too often be found in the entertainment industry. The characters live in a world much like our own where people willingly toss aside their humanity for the sake feeding their bank accounts without caring about the cost. Unlike reality though, their greed is met with punishment rather than reward, and I’m not going to lie, it was really satisfying to watch.
Johnny Wick Writes 