Life as Robert Pattinson knows it
Life 15 Cert, 111 min
★★★★ ★ Dir Anton Corbijn
Starring Robert Pattinson, Dane DeHaan, Joel Edgerton, Ben Kingsley
The ubiquitous James Franco once remarked that rising star Dane DeHaan would appear to be obsessed with him. He has a point. Franco played Allen Ginsberg in Howl; DeHaan then showed up in another Ginsberg film, Kill Your Darlings. Both have starred as the Green Goblin. And now DeHaan tackles a role for which Franco won a Golden Globe in 2001: James Dean.
From the first scene of Anton Corbijn’s Life, DeHaan gives us very much his own Dean, and he’s immediately rather fascinating. The resemblance is marginal – if anything, he looks more like a young Brad Pitt. He’s smoking, aloofly, at a Hollywood party thrown by the director Nicholas Ray. Word has it that Ray might be casting him in Rebel Without a Cause, once the early reactions to Dean’s film debut, East of Eden, confirm him as the hottest new star of the moment.
But this Dean is letting nothing go to his head. Or nothing but loneliness and outsider angst and all that jazz. A photographer approaches him, more out of idle curiosity than paparazzo instinct. This is Dennis Stock (Robert Pattinson), a freelancer trying to make his name. He needs a scoop. Dean, sizing him up through the curled fingers from which his cigarette dangles, makes a spontaneous coffee date, the next day.
DeHaan is playing a sad, comically languid contradiction here – a Dean via Holden Caulfield, and one who’s also overtly gay in his mannerisms, but not allowed to be in any other way. “You’re an intelligent boy?” his new studio boss Jack Warner (Ben Kingsley) asks him with already unmistakable menace, before ramping it up a gear. He suddenly comes on all Don Logan in Sexy Beast. “If you’re not a good boy, I’m going to f--- you till it hurts very much.” Warners want a commodity, and aren’t sure about emphasising Jimmy’s rebel side.
But Stock, too, is playing the angles, sniffing out a meal ticket. Pattinson does a credible job getting inside Dennis’s aura of shifty desperation: he pesters Dean, pursues him to New York, hangs around his apartment.
Thoughtfully scripted by Luke Davies, this film understands Dean’s fame as the moment something changed – not just the birth of a new type of movie icon, but the idea of a reluctant celebrity willing to parade his vulnerabilities.
Stock captured some of the most legendary images of Dean we have: most famously, the one of him hunched in a raincoat on a rainy New York street, a cigarette clamped between his lips. But the film’s too smart to push this Weegee-like figure as a natural genius of his medium.
There are photographers whose camera is like an extra limb, but he’s not one of them. Every time Pattinson reaches for his, he seems sneaky about it, as if he’s stealing something, aware that the authenticity of the moment is under threat.
For Corbijn – himself a famously accomplished photographer before his film career started – it’s an interestingly personal picture about that moment when the shutter snaps, and how it changes the nature of any human interaction. “I’m disappointed in you,” Jimmy says to Dennis when he’s stage-managing a tractor shot, a hint of an ironic smile playing on his lips, but not enough of one to take the sting out of the line.
The film drops a lot of glamorous names, and gives us time in the company of Natalie Wood, Eartha Kitt, Raymond Massey and Lee Strasberg. But it’s a low-key vision of the Hollywood circus, a big top with the lights out. Somewhere inside, James Dean is sitting, unhappy and alone.
‘Dean is played as a sad contradiction – overtly gay in his mannerisms, but not allowed to be in any other way’