![]() ![]() His leading role as a frenzied, worn-to-the-bone lighthouse keeper’s apprentice in Robert Eggers’ marvellous maritime nightmare The Lighthouse is a perfect example. ![]() Rather like his Twilight co-star and ex-girlfriend Kristen Stewart – herself the brunt of insistent, tedious “can’t act” criticism as punishment for the franchise – Pattinson thus took the arthouse route to elevating his reputation, picking ever more challenging roles in ever more idiosyncratic auteur projects: from the aforementioned The Rover to James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, from Brady Corbet’s The Childhood of a Leader to the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time. This wasn’t a revelation to those who had noticed his subtly self-mocking, script-defying intensity in the Twilight, or even his game matinee-idol flexing in Water for Elephants the context was just a little more acceptable. Sure enough, it was only when Pattinson started playing the latter game that he started getting some respect: in 2012, when he scowled and suited up for David Cronenberg’s terse, chilly adaptation of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, the “R-Pattz can act!” headlines duly followed. This is an old Hollywood chorus, of course: female-targeted genres, and those who trade in them, routinely come in for more scorn than rugged action exercises or male-led auteur pieces. Photograph: Allstar/ASCOT ELITE ENTERTAINMENT GROUP/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar Water for Elephants, Bel Ami and Remember Me were hardly great films, yet critics laid into their lush, feminine romanticism with unseemly glee. The coarsest version of this teasing, of course, was confined to sweaty incel-net forums, yet it trickled into film criticism too – egged on, at the zenith of Cullenmania, by non-Twilight script choices that played unabashedly to his besotted fans. In certain male-led quarters of the internet, hating Twilight and its fangirl following was a fixation for several years: the common line on Pattinson became that he was a wan, ineffectual pretty-boy who couldn’t act. ![]() The original millennial softboy before the next generation took up that phrase in earnest, Pattinson’s dreamboat allure was defined by a degree of embedded femininity, a vulnerable beauty – and indeed, pace Hilson, some did hate him for it. But it also acknowledges his unusual, anti-macho star image: Pattinson is beautiful, in a willowy, alabaster, slightly aloof way that Hollywood doesn’t tend to seek in leading men, though it couldn’t have been more perfect for the goth androgyny of vampire romantic Edward Cullen. ![]() In an otherwise strenuously masculine film, this small moment of unabashed camp is delicious, winking as it does at the young, predominantly female fanbase that followed Pattinson from the Twilight films into artier, more eccentric realms. ![]()
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January 2023
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