Manohla Dargis
Ihad an espresso with Robert Pattinson on a rooftop terrace overlooking the Mediterranean. That is the kind of preposterous sentence that a critic sometimes finds herself writing from the Cannes Film Festival, where Pattison’s new movie, Good Time ,wasin competition. The following morning, the movie shook up a largely listless event that had been stuffed with near-misses and entries that tended to preach at viewers or punish them, often both. Good Time, by contrast, is pure cinematic pleasure about an often funny, sometimes shocking rush into the abyss, one that earned franchise, he became a global name in the role of Edward Cullen, the pallid vampire heartthrob in the Twilight series.
That celebrity turned frenzied when Pattinson and his co-star Kristen Stewart began a long on-off relationship that quickly turned into fodder for the publicity grinder and was almost inevitably folded into the Twilight brand and saga.
During his Twilight years, Pattinson was not always treated kindly by critics who did not necessarily see beyond his beauty or his utility as one of that series’ cinematic objects of desire. Unlike Stewart, he also did
Movie stardom depends on charisma and that alchemical quality called presence, as well as a certain amount of predictability and patterns, genres and types.
But longevity means occasionally breaking patterns. Pattinson is clearly set on avoiding obviousness, and this may be why, instructively, he has gravitated toward roles that call for his characters to undergo punishing physical abuse – they’ve been beaten, throttled, shot and endured a proctologist’s probing – as if he were trying to expunge the last trace of Edward.
This at times seems to go beyond the showy, self-regarding transformations that stars like to take on, into a deeper transfiguration.
It’s common for stars to obscure