Zurich Film Festival - Life

Life (111 mins)
Director: Anton Corbijn
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

In 1955 Los Angeles, photographer Dennis Stock (Robert Pattinson) is trying to make a name for himself, working mostly on movie sets and at premieres when he’s introduced to a young actor named Jimmy Dean (Dane DeHaan).

This initially intriguing but largely dull drama takes place just before Dean hits the big time. He’s already shot East of Eden though it hasn’t been released yet, while Warner Bros are in the process of deciding whether to offer him the lead in Rebel Without a Cause.

A few months later he’d be dead, his persona immortalised forever by just three movies. But in the meantime he’s more or less unknown and Stock thinks he can help them both out. He sees the potential star in James Dean and, realising he won’t be unknown for long, wants the big photo-shoot break that will get an assignment with Life magazine.

They strike up a friendship but Dennis has a hard time getting him to commit, and they circle around each other for what must be a good half of the film. Will Dean let him take the pictures? Won’t he? It’s a long time to wait covering much of the same ground, yet they come across as reasonably compelling presences all the same.

Early moments look like we might be getting a real insight into a legendary figure. Dean wants to be a great actor, and comes across as cool upfront but insecure in private, and unsure how to play the showbiz game. The movie is correct to focus on a specific period of his life rather than go the full biopic route, but there needs to be more going on than this, and it becomes apparent after a while that this is a one scene film, with that scene played out over and over.

DeHaan doesn’t look especially like Dean, particularly once the film cuts to Stock’s actual photos of him, but he captures his laconic, mumbling manner in reasonably convincing style. Pattinson is unfortunately lumbered with trying to dredge up audience interest in a guy where there may not be any to be found. With Dean you can at least see the hook.

A lot of scenes pass without us getting any further forward, or offer any clear notion of why we’re watching it. And the longer it goes on, the less interesting it becomes. It does that thing you get in Hollywood biopics as characters offer awkward introductions to real people, but scores a few points in displaying the power of movie moguls back then. Ben Kingsley as Jack Warner wanting to control every aspect of Dean’s life, and the inanity of the publicity machine is revealed.

But while the film manages to avoid the clumsy early need of having to spoon-feed us who Dean is, it later negates that by filling in his details with on-screen text, the laziest device available to movie biographers.

Bel Ami review

Bel Ami (15/R, 102 mins)
Directors: Declan Donnellan, Nick Ormerod
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

In Paris in the 1890s, Robert Pattinson is a penniless ex-soldier who meets an old colleague and falls into a newspaper job writing about his army experiences, something he has no real aptitude for. But he soon manages to set himself up as a gigolo, servicing the wives of the most powerful men in the city (Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci, Kristin Scott Thomas), and there’s a soulless dark wit in the way in which he uses his looks and charm to help him get ahead using their talent, influence and money. This latest version of Guy de Maupassant’s oft-filmed novel is handsomely appointed and rigorous in its amorality, which quickly becomes the film’s greatest weapon. Pattinson is very good indeed as a smug git, cold-eyed and calculating but with none of the overwrought pouting that blights the Twilight films where he found his fame. If you can buy him as an out and out scumbag, and view this as the blackest of comedies, then it’s a deliciously depraved treat.

Eclipse review

Eclipse (12A, 124 mins)
Director: David Slade

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Given that it’s been about 15 minutes since the last film in the Twilight series, New Moon, was released, you could be forgiven for not being feverish with anticipation for this third instalment in the vampire romance saga.

But the mammoth popularity of both Stephenie Meyer’s novels and the movie adaptations means we’re going round once again, something entirely understandable to the underserved target audience and baffling to non-believers, given the ponderous and singularly humourless nature of the films to this point.

Here’s the story so far: late-teen Bella (Kristen Stewart) has moved to the Pacific Northwest to live with her small town-sheriff father. It’s there she meets Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), a vampire, and much overwrought brooding later, the pair are in love.

New Moon added Bella’s growing feelings for her friend Jacob (Taylor Lautner) who turns out to be a wolf in teen clothing, at least on the rare occasion he does actually get round to putting a shirt on. Bella worries about growing old and dying while Edward never ages, and she wants Edward to turn her into a vampire like him.

This made for movies that were interesting enough but held back by their stiflingly po-faced tone and anodyne leads. The main concern is that we’ve so far spent seven hours being fed what is surely just a one-film story padded out beyond endurance by Olympic-standard levels of moping.

But this seems finally to be paying off in the Bella/Edward/Jacob triangle, which though not immune to several bouts of petulance, at least provides a certain spark this time around. There’s also the preparations for the war that is brewing thanks to bad vampire Victoria, who has been creating an army of newborn vampires and is coming for Bella.

That allows Eclipse to lay off the sullenness for a while and concentrate on the uneasy truce between the vampires and the wolves, who have put aside their mutual distrust in order to protect Bella. This makes for a much needed deepening of the mythology and enables some of the other Cullens to exhibit a bit of personality.

It also heralds the welcome injection of small doses of humour that go a long way towards making this a good deal more tolerable than the first pair, although thematically it never really explores in any meaningful way the consequences, the loss of humanity, in Bella’s desire to become un-dead like Edward.

Variable special effects come into play for the big fight, which manages to be genuinely impressive and exciting in places. But what should have been a rousing action climax is unfortunately no such thing, and instead Eclipse dribbles on for another couple of reels, revisiting already well-trodden ground and leaving us in pretty much the same place we were at the end of the second film.

And so the Twi-hards will count the days until Breaking Dawn (Part 1 no less), leaving the rest of us to wonder, with three down and one and a half to go, is there a point in sight?