Twilight zone

Robert Pattinson is at peace with his hit movie franchise

Pattinson a lot of critical love here, if no awards.

Pattinson plays Constantine Nikas, aka Connie, a calamitously inept bad guy who, during one terrible New York adventure, leaves ruin and broken bodies in his wake. Directed by the brothers Josh and Benny Safdie, Good Time is thrillingly energetic and focused. It doesn’t peddle a message of redemption, but instead tethers you to an oblivious narcissist who pushes the story into an ever-deepening downward spiral.

As errors turn into catastrophes, Connie grows increasingly feral, becoming a character who is a biliously funny reproach to the American triumphalism that suffuses superhero flicks and indies alike and insists that success isn’t just inevitable but also a birthright.

Good Time is part of a fascinating course correction undertaken by Pattinson, who in recent years has appeared – and almost disappeared in – art cinema titles like The Childhood of a Leader and The Lost Cityofz.

Although he brushed against blockbuster fame playing a doomed character in the Harry Potter not have an earlier body of work that indicated he could do more than pout prettily, even if his turns in small movies like Remember Me (2010) showed promise.

It was, however, Cosmopolis ,the 2012 dystopian fantasy from David Cronenberg, based on the Don Delillo novel, that effectively set Pattinson’s career path. “I think it was the first time when I worked on something that was quite complex,” he says.

Cosmopolis was, he adds, essentially the first movie he made after he finished the final chapter of the Twilight series. “I especially love the fact that it came out really at the height of my popularity,” he says. Cast as a master of the universe who endures a spectacular, increasingly violent and humiliating fall, Pattinson sees the movie as “the big turning point for me – I just realised that was what I wanted to do.”

Cronenberg had made a movie without a mould, and his star became eager to follow suit. “I think it’s so rare for something to break a pattern,” Pattinson continues. “I feel like almost everything in the world is designed to be predictable.” their looks, pop on a fake nose and fright wig, of course; it’s less common for actors to wholly embrace the irredeemable and risk the audience’s love. “Anyone can look ugly,” Pattinson says. “It doesn’t take much.”

In Good Time, the ugliness he taps into goes beyond Connie’s greasy hair and torrents of flop sweat, and seems to exude from his very pores. Pattinson, who conveys a warmth and openness in person, concedes that it could be a problem when audiences confuse actor and character. But that hasn’t happened to him, which is why he is, he says, “pretty blasé about it.” If anything, he seems happy at all the “revolting parts” he has coming up.

Looking further ahead, he would love to work with the German director Maren Ade, whose Toni Erdmann played big at Cannes last year.

During this year’s festival, it was announced that Pattinson would star in The Souvenir, an ambitious movie from the British director Joanna luck, as well, to just have fallen into it with the group of people I worked with on it.” They were kids in it together, kids who rebelled or tried to, and felt emboldened to act out.

He even came close, he says, to being fired on the first movie, until his agents flew in to straighten him out. “I didn’t have to kiss anybody’s” rear end “the entire time,” he says. “I don’t think I did, anyway.”

Pattinson seems entirely at peace with Twilight and has clearly found a way to harness its legacy, which includes going dark and making the kinds of art films that find love at Cannes. He says he always thinks he’s terrible in every take.

“I can’t say that about anyone I work with,” he adds. “I’ve never seen anyone give themselves such a hard time. I’m beating myself up afterward. And I think there’s some weird perverted energy that comes out of when people criticise previous work or think you represent this certain thing; it gives you this energy.”

Maybe that sounds disingenuous, but I believe him. He is on a roll, though, and soon adds that he is “almost scared of anyone saying anything I do is good.” n © NYT 2017

“I’ve never seen anyone give themselves such a hard time. I’m beating myself up”