Great Feats of Recitation: Cosmopolis (2012)

Robert Pattinson in Cosmopolis (2012).

Fresh off filming the final Twilight film (2012), Robert Pattinson jumped straight into portraying yet another nearly affectless, pale leading man with stylish hair in Cosmopolis (2012), adapted by director David Cronenberg from the Don DeLillo novel. Rarely have I encountered a film with such single-minded focus: everything here, from production design to camera angles to score, is in service to the dialogue. As it should be.

No Fate: David Michôd’s The Rover

Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson in The Rover.

“You do a thing like I did, it should really mean something. But it just doesn’t matter anymore.” 

The hostility of the Australian outback lends itself nicely to tales of the apocalypse, and its barren wastes look wonderfully alien and foreboding on film. There’s a sense that the wilderness is encroaching on civilization, slowly and inexorably reclaiming what we fragile beings have taken. It's no wonder that everyone’s gone insane in the world of Mad Max (1979). If all that’s left to live for is water and fuel – or, excuse me, petrol – then society’s laws aren’t worth a damn. So has it always been for these stories, and so it is for The Rover, a film with less than half the fun – but more than twice the heat – of its pulpier kin.

White Knight: The Batman

Zoë Kravitz as Catwoman and Robert Pattinson as Batman in The Batman. (Photo: Jonathan Olley/Warner Bros.)

In his 1957 architectonic study Anatomy of Criticism, structuralist Northrop Frye sketches a taxonomy of literary heroes. Those of the Mythic mode, he argues, are gods: they’re superior in kind to other characters and to their environment. They defy the laws of nature and possess divine gifts. Examples include Zeus, Bacchus, and Shiva. In a tragic narrative, they die. In a comic one, they rejoin the heavenly realm. (The Christian narrative is neither tragic, nor comic, but ironic: Christ is crucified, yet raised to the Father on the third day.)

The heroes of the Romantic mode are superior to others and their environment only by degree. Their actions are marvelous, but they themselves are human beings. In tragedy, their deaths are elegiac and tied to the decay of the created order (think Beowulf). In comedy, they ride off into a pastoral setting (e.g., the cowboy in a Western).

Following this schema, contemporary superheroes dwell in a gray area between the Mythic and Romantic modes. Some, like Superman, are gods – different from us in kind. Others, like the X-Men, are mortals but possess mutations that give them supernatural powers. And still more, like Iron Man, don’t have genetic enhancements so much as advanced technology, making them more Romantic than Mythic.

Stabbed in the Heart: The Twilight Saga (2008-2012)

Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart in Twilight (2008).

I confess: I too used to shit freely on Twilight (2008). What started changing my mind is the excellent work of its two leads, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, in their work after Twilight, though never again together after their breakup. This, and not my internalized misogyny against media embraced by teenage girls, is the angle from which I have approached these films, based on the four novels by Stephenie Meyer. And they're fascinating.

Small Delights Along the Mainstream

A scene from Disney's John Carter, starring Taylor Kitsch

Back in the heyday of the big Hollywood studios, when every major company prepared an A picture and a low-budget B picture for each week of the year, no one expected that every movie would be a major event.  Movies provided a variety of pleasures, and it wasn’t a big deal if you caught some of them on the fly – a lightweight vehicle tailor-made for a beloved star, a disposal musical showcasing a few terrific dancers or a handful of inventive production numbers, an ingeniously plotted murder mystery or film noir, a romantic comedy or an action picture with a smart, wisecracking screenplay. And though there are far fewer choices now and the vast majority of releases aren’t worth any intelligent viewer’s time or money, movies still provide a spectrum of pleasures.  The problem is that the economics of filmmaking has taken many of them off the radar. Studios put the weight of their publicity machines behind only a selected few of the movies they bankroll, theatre owners play along, and, good or bad, a media event like Marvel’s The Avengers literally crowds other, smaller pictures out of the megaplexes.  If you don’t live in a big, art-house-friendly city like New York or Boston or Toronto, you don’t get a chance to see anything that isn’t given a wide release, i.e., anything that isn’t groomed to be a hit.  The only chance that a terrific little movie like Of Gods and Men or 50/50 or Margaret has of finding an audience is by word of mouth once an adventurous or lucky viewer stumbles across it on DVD.  (Margaret, which was cheated of any chance at awards from critics’ groups by a studio that stubbornly refused to send out screeners of it at the end of last year, is finally coming out on DVD in July.)

But even mainstream pictures that might offer audiences some entertainment – movies that moviegoers in most locations can actually get to – often fall by the wayside.  When so much emphasis is placed on box office receipts, the stink of failure comes off movies that don’t make an immediate mark.  And even movie reviewers, whose job is supposed to be to guide the public around the distractions, to persuade readers of viewers or listeners that the movie with the loudest media coverage or the biggest numbers isn’t necessarily the one worth putting down twelve or fifteen bucks for, aren’t immune to the smell. Critics don’t generally reserve their nastiest barbs for a loathsome hit like The Hunger Games. They save them up for modest programmers like Man on a Ledge or expensive box-office bombs like John Carter.

Sins of the Children: David Cronenberg and Bruce Wagner's Maps to the Stars

Julianne Moore in Maps to the Stars.

“Everything is research, in a sense,” says Robert Pattinson in David Cronenberg’s new inside-Hollywood movie, Maps to the Stars. Pattinson’s character, a struggling actor and aspiring screenwriter who supports himself by working as a limo driver, is the resident Tod Hackett figure in this Day of the Locust set-up: he doesn’t represent a central consciousness for the film, but he’s the only character in it who could pass for sane. He’s also the only character on view who seems to be essentially decent, up to the point when, in the name of “research,” he agrees to screw his client, a movie actress and sex symbol (Julianne Moore), in the back seat of the car while it’s parked outside a house where they can be seen by the young woman (Mia Wasikowska) he has been dating.

Maps to the Stars has been in the planning stages for so long that Bruce Wagner, who wrote the script, turned the material into a novel when it looked as if he and Cronenberg would never be able to make the movie. But whenever the scene was first written, with Pattinson in the role, it gets what dirty charge it has from the audience’s knowledge that Pattinson endured his own public humiliation a few years ago when his Twilight co-star and real-life girlfriend, Kristen Stewart, was reported to have had an affair with her director on Snow White and the Huntsman. When Billy Wilder made Sunset Boulevard sixty-five years ago, a Gothic horror satire about Hollywood, with a bitchy, acidic tone and in-jokes, he had the advantage of giving audiences a close-up look at an unfamiliar world. Today, with a twenty-four news cycle that devotes a disproportionate amount of its attention to show-business “news,” most of it shaped to make everyone feel like an insider, it’s like everyone is spending part of their day doing the research to appreciate a movie like this.

Fear and Loathing in Outer Space: High Life

Robert Pattinson in High Life.

Despite having seen Trouble Every Day (2001), nothing could’ve prepared me for the savage nihilism of Claire Denis’s High Life (2018). Set in a future when humanity sends its death-row convicts into space for science, the film centers on the crew of ship #7, headed by de facto leader Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche) and ostensible moral leader Monte (Robert Pattinson). Their primary mission is to explore the possible use of black holes as an energy source, making it for all intents and purposes a suicide mission; a secondary objective is revealed when Dibs forcibly impregnates the women via artificial insemination with sperm donated by every man but Monte: to answer the question, "Can human life be created in space?" The answer is always no, because of irradiation – almost always.

The Usual Mixed Bag: Summer Movie Roundup

Over the years, the meaning of summer movies has changed. As a teen, I remember that about the only films released in hot weather were the blockbusters, the James Bonds, the Star Wars etc. Then things began to change and serious, foreign language, subtitled movies also were sent out to the populace. Nowadays, it’s a veritable smorgasbord of movies on view, though the biggest box office and attendant media coverage still accrues to tent-pole films like The Amazing Spider-Man, The Dark Knight Rises and The Avengers. And while it seems like the kids rule the roost because of all the publicity given to the younger skewing  movies (though many adults go to them, too), there really is a choice for all film tastes. Here is a look at some recent summer releases in Toronto, most still in our theatres and probably in yours, as well. It’s the usual mixed bag when it comes to quality.

The King: Get Me Rewrite!

Timothée Chalamet in The King (2019).

This review contains spoilers.
 
In a capsule review of a 1932 straight-dramatic movie of Madame Butterfly, the critic Pauline Kael wrote, “Is there someone out there who has always wanted to know what the opera was about, without being distracted from the plot by the music?” The new film The King (which was in some theatres in October and is currently streaming on Netflix) sets out on an equally dunderheaded mission: rewriting Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V without the distractions of, you know, the verse and the humor and the greatest coming-of-age narrative ever written and the most complex treatment of war ever put on a stage.

Year-End Movies III: The Boy and the Heron and The Boys in the Boat

The heron in Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron.

One of the cinematic high points of 2023 was surely the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s return from retirement with The Boy and the Heron. (His last feature was The Wind Rises in 2013, though imdb.com lists a 2018 short, unknown to me, called Boro the Caterpillar.) Conceived and written by Miyazaki, The Boy and the Heron is a gorgeous fairy tale set, like The Wind Rises, during the Second World War. The young hero, Mahito (voiced in the dubbed version by Luca Padovan), loses his mother during the bombing of Tokyo; a year later his father, Shoichi (Christian Bale), moves them into the countryside, where he has opened a new factory. He is now romantically involved with Natsuko (Gemma Chan), who is carrying his child. This will be Mahito’s new home, but it’s alienating to him. Aside from the sudden news that a woman he has never met before, whom he addresses politely as “ma’am,” is about to become his new stepmother, there’s little actual education going on in his new school. The children spend more time working the land for the war effort than in the classroom, and as soon as he arrives he’s bullied by his classmates; his response is to bash himself in the head with a rock, claiming a fall, so he doesn’t have to go back the next day. Yet in unexpected ways this unfamiliar environment links up with the boy’s identity. Natsuko, it turns out, is his aunt and looks eerily like her, and this is the place where the two sisters grew up; the strange, Medieval tower that is the most striking landmark was created by their great-uncle. And a talking grey heron (Robert Pattinson) who gloms onto Mahito insists that he’s an emissary sent to take him to his mother, who isn’t dead at all. The boy’s adventures begin when Natsuko, whom he has seen, from his bedroom window, entering the woods, vanishes, and his quest, at the heron’s invitation, to find his mother becomes, in the mysterious transformative manner of a dream, a search for Natsuko. It takes him into the tower and out again into an island world where pelicans and parakeets are omnivorous creatures the size of human adults (the main pelican is voiced by Willem Dafoe, the main parakeet by Dan Stevens) and where the bent-backed, protective domestics from Mahito’s world are echoed by small wooden dolls that reside on shelves and around beds and operate as totems.