James Dean – the early years
YOU’VE got to be in love with the myth of James Dean to really enjoy this cool, beautifully shot but wispily insubstantial film.
It’s as well to know that the movie’s title, Life, refers to the famous American magazine, not what happens to you after you get out of bed in the morning.
Snapper Dennis Stock (Robert Pattinson) has a feeling about an obscure new actor, James Dean (Dane DeHaan), betting that he is going to be the “next big thing”.
He gets his reluctant boss at the Magnum Photos Agency to sanction a photo-shoot that appears to have little chance of success and even less chance of being accepted by the national magazine.
The film’s “action”, scant as it is, takes place during the break between Dean’s first major film, East of Eden, and his second, Rebel Without a Cause – both released in 1955 – which was to make him a symbol of teenage alienation and angst.
He made only one more film, Giant (1956), before he died in a car crash.
Much of the film rather wearyingly focuses on Stock trying to persuade the reluctant Dean to agree to the photo-shoot.
Meanwhile, we are given an insight into the studio politics of the period as producer Jack Warner (a chilling cameo from Ben Kingsley) is driven mental by Dean’s inability to play the publicity game.
It all comes together for Stock in the film’s climax when he manages to snap Dean walking through the winter slush, collar up, in Times Square, New York, before he accompanies him to Indiana, where he takes some intimate shots of Dean with his family and animals on the family farm.
Director Anton Corbijn, who previously directed the adaptation of John le Carre’s A Most Wanted Man (the final film of Oscar-winner Philip Seymour Hoffman), clearly has a thing about Dean.
DeHaan (so good in Kill Your Darlings) certainly bends over backwards to give the actor that affected, hip sense of introspection that he showed on screen.
There are some intense moments. In one of the most haunting, Dean reveals to Stock on a train trip just how much he had loved his mother and how affected he was by her early death when he was just 9.
The close-ups are beautifully shot by Charlotte Bruus Christensen, the great Danish cinematographer, who also gives us a gloomily romantic New York.
Of the two main actors, Pattinson comes off the worst because scriptwriter Luke Davis, despite his protestations to the contrary, isn’t really interested in the photographer, only his subject.
We get some sense of his life – a bitter ex-wife and an ignored young son – but Pattinson, star of the very popular Twilight movies, is unable to bring the character to sympathetic life.
As a result, Stock comes over as flat and unlikeable, a naggingly awkward photographer determined to nail down his prize.
Compton gives a 7/10 rating to Life, showing at Cinema Nouveau at Gateway, Umhlanga.