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‘Phoenix Rising’ Sundance Review: Evan Rachel Wood Doesn’t Hold Back
Having been within the highlight the overwhelming majority of her life, each onscreen as an actor and offscreen as a Hollywood cautionary story, Evan Rachel Wooden understands how media works. She sees the potential of its manipulation, and the way the implications can careen uncontrolled. And so Wooden made the acutely aware option to snatch her personal narrative for “Phoenix Rising,” the brand new documentary about her life that acts as a pointy corrective to how she’s seen her life unfold in entrance of the world, and as a file of how she understands it now. Even earlier than the documentary delves into Wooden’s accounts of struggling horrifying abuse by the hands of Marilyn Manson, the provocative rock star whom she dated as an adolescent, “Phoenix Rising” is a startlingly weak account of Wooden’s life as a toddler actor, a confused child processing trauma, and a younger lady pressured to mature far earlier than she was prepared. And once they do decide to unpacking the Manson allegations, neither Wooden nor “Phoenix Rising” holds again.
Directed by Amy Berg, “Phoenix Rising” will premiere later this 12 months on HBO in two components. The primary, which debuted Sunday on the Sundance Movie Pageant, begins with Wooden and her household detailing her upbringing, her account of changing into Hollywood’s go-to “troubled teen” actor, and the way she was primed to be swept up within the alluring internet of somebody like Manson. This episode then weaves between Wooden’s recollections of her previous with Manson as a frightened teen and her current as a girl sifting by way of her personal expertise, and the eerily related expertise of others, for clues. It additionally grapples with Manson’s purposefully hyperbolic persona and his personal background, although at all times from Wooden’s perspective.
“Phoenix Rising” started filming in 2019 as Wooden banded along with different survivors of home violence to push for altering the statute of limitations on instances like theirs in California and past. In interviews in 2020 with director Berg, a 12 months earlier than she would title Manson publicly as her alleged abuser, Wooden exorcises horror tales with a palpable combination of reduction, concern, and willpower. There are moments when she will get emotional, as when poring over diary entries and pictures from the 12 months through which she met Manson at 18, a indisputable fact that shocks her each time she’s confronted with laborious proof of simply how younger she was. As if to underline that side (to not point out the “Alice in Wonderland” connection she finally made with Manson), the documentary even consists of surreal animated renditions of Wooden as a toddler, which alternate between efficient and distracting relying on the scene and objective.
As a documentary topic and witness to her personal life, Wooden demonstrates a powerful dedication to and capability for analyzing her expertise as a part of an insidious complete. She remembers her father explaining to her when she was very younger that he and her mom “combat as a result of we love one another — that’s what folks in love do” with the grim gravitas of somebody who then internalized the road in all of the worst methods. She’s all too conscious that her ascendance in Hollywood, spurred on by performances in motion pictures like “13,” was tied to her ability at portraying a hardened Lolita kind of character. These insights play out alongside chosen clips from her filmography as much as the purpose she met Manson, together with her turns in “13,” “Operating With Scissors,” and “Down within the Valley” because the form of preternaturally mature woman that grownup males would possibly reap the benefits of. By the point the documentary addresses her filming Manson’s notorious “Coronary heart-Formed Glasses” music video at age 19, it’s already extensively documented the pervasive picture of Wooden as the kind of precocious Madonna determine she goes on to play for him. On this context, it’s terrible how simple it’s to think about the circumstances through which, as Wooden alleges in “Phoenix Rising,” she was fed absinthe on the “Coronary heart-Formed Glasses” set to the purpose that she was barely acutely aware to object when Manson had intercourse along with her on digital camera (which she has since come to grasp was “basically being raped on digital camera.”)
If this appears like a complete lot to get by way of in simply over an hour…properly, it’s. Some sections maintain collectively higher than others; amid every little thing else, the segments addressing Wooden’s half in passing the Phoenix Act in California get shorter shrift than they may have if the documentary had extra time to deal with every little thing it tackles in additional depth. However the mission driving Wooden, her household, and allies carries all through. “This isn’t about destroying a person,” Wooden insists at one level, already anticipating that possible response. That’s to not say, nevertheless, that she’s holding again as a result of she believes he deserves any mercy. “He’s already destroyed,” she goes on to say. “That man isn’t a person anymore — he’s gone.”
The episode ends with Wooden on the precipice of publicly naming Manson as her abuser for the primary time, which she did together with a number of others in February 2021. Although Manson subsequently grew to become the topic of investigations and was dropped by his brokers and file label, he’s since resurfaced to hang around with the likes of Kanye West and Madonna as just lately as final week. The story may be very a lot ongoing, and maybe, regardless of how a lot the second half of “Phoenix Rising” finally reveals, at all times shall be. Within the meantime, having ladies like Wooden open themselves up for scrutiny and never simply reclaim their voices, however grapple with how they misplaced them within the first place, stays a miserable, pressing necessityy.
