Crouching Vampire, Hidden Boyfriend
Let’s just stipulate up front: It’s hard to mess up the vampire story. Attractive people, baroque settings and outfits, a hint of danger and the forbidden… the thing
really sells itself. When you mess it up - Francis Ford Coppola’s overwrought Bram Stoker’s Dracula comes to mind - it’s usually by overdoing it, not under.
In that vein (erp - that was unintentional, I swear), Twilight, the new film based on the highly successful set of teen novels, is pretty much bulletproof; and the hook - re-envisioning the vampire tale as a teen romance of forbidden desire - is undeniably effective. But for all its advantages, the film is something of a muddle: lightweight and overwrought, busy and boring all at once. Fans may well overlook the flaws, and the studio probably has just the hit it wants. But is that enough?
For me, it wasn’t.
Twilight’s success, undeniably, lies in the perfectly chaste notion of teen love it evokes - romance here is an idealized form of platonic love, all long looks and passionate words, playing into the popular notions sold to young girls as what love’s supposed to be. Though couched in modern dress, the real heart of twlight is the old, familiar stuff of gothic romance novels all along: a perfect, doomed love full of obstacles and longing, never quite fulfilled, never quite ended.
Our heroine, Bella, is transplanted at the start from her Mom’s in Phoenix to a dismal, rainy small town in Washington, where her Dad has taken residence as the Police Chief. Bella’s history is shuttling back and forth between parents, but this permanent move is a big step, and Bella’s uncertainty with making a home and finding a place in her new high school community gives her teen angst a familiar feel.
That changes when she observes the Cullens - five glamorous youngsters with pale faces, dramatic wardrobes and a certain mysterious separateness from the rest of the
high school crowd. Of particular immediate interest to Bella is Edward, the moody loner with whom she gets paired as a biology lab partner.
I’m not going to drag this out, and it’s no spoiler to point out that Edward - and the other Cullens - are vampires. And in short order, Bella and Edward are deeply in a romance which seems fully doomed, as she would have to, you know, die, to really join him. Vampirism gives their romance a marvelous secret, though, and it’s their dilemmas of being both public and private about the real nature of their relationship that drives much of what drama there is here. There’s not much element of danger or horror here - the vampires in the Cullen clan are “tamed” creatures feeding mainly on animals - and though there’s occasional tension, Bella’s never in much danger with them.
Eventually, other, more dangerous vampires are introduced, and the final battle is to stop one of them before he catches and eats Bella. Will she die? Or will she get to go to the prom?
Can you say… sequel?
As a film, Twilight’s biggest problem is that for all the moody looks, there’s just not much dramatic tension, and the movie can’t really hide from that or fix it. Though it’s a tight two hours, the movie feels, often, like a long slog where little really happens. And the ultimate introduction of the “dangerous” vampires feels little more than tacked on and simplistic, making the fear for Bella’s safety hardly more than perfunctory.
Then too, there’s a problem with Bella herself, a symptom of the whole “what passes for feminist empowerment” these days - though she’s meant to be a stereotype-breaking, independent young heroine (that the girls will see as a way to Stand Up For Themselves), at heart she’s as dewy as any bodice ripping heroine, more damsel in distress than, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s the reverse problem of the curious “feminism” in films like Legally Blonde and The House Bunny - where those films market a female “empowerment” in being girly, this is one of the fims pushing the just as odd reverse: Bella’s not at all girly…she’s just helpless.
It’s hard to blame Kristen Stewart for a performance as Bella that verges on pretty wooden; clearly she’s trying, and just as clearly the script is doing her no favors, since her character is defined by moody silences and a central passivity that’s impossible to shake. Things happen to her - she’s not exactly a doer. The same can’t be said for Robert Pattinson; as Edward, he’s easily the best thing here, and what works in the piece is largely because of him. It’s a career-making performance, made vivid because Pattinson conveys the exquisite torture of desire within Edward. It literally hurts him to be so close to the thing he loves… and the thing he could, and would, destroy. His final moment of rescuing Bella is the movie’s dramatic heart, and almost in spite of itself, because of Pattinson, the scene is as deeply moving as it could be.
It’s tempting to blame Catherine Hardwick, the film’s director, for what’s wrong here - her sense of pacing is terrible here (it wasn’t much better, frankly, in her much lauded debut, the indie Thirteen), and the film is a mish-mash of visual styles that never quite come together - gorgeous shots by themselves, but incoherent in total. I suspect, though, that Hardwick’s just facing the obvious weight of expectation: no film was as anticipated, in many ways, as this one, just now. And to Hardwick’s credit, I expect that hardcore fans of the books will get the experience they pretty much wanted.
Still, the ponderous narration, the deadly weight of its overly wise heroine’s thought, as well as the story’s curious messages of what constitutes healthy love for young women (and the implications of necessary helplessness) seem like issues too big to ignore. As a vampire genre film, Twilight respects the conventions enough to be serviceable (as opposed to, say, Moonlight, the muddled CBS series which had vampires walking in broad daylight)… but it lacks the real heft and impressiveness of Buffy or Ann Rice’s best work. Instead it harks back - way back - to the original notions of Bram Stoker’s Victorian moralism - that sexual desire, especially in women, is a dangerous “bloodlust” that must be feared, controlled, and possibly killed. There’s a market for that, cerainly; that doesn’t make it necessarily art.
Crossposted at NYCweboy.
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December 14, 2008 at 3:30 pm
[...] elsewhere, and On Demand) serves as the erotic dark side of Twilight’s romantic intentions. Twilight made me tired; True ...