Chapter Two: Jon Favreau & Kristen Stewart
New Moon, Iron Man 2 and Zathura
By Brett Beach
January 20, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Alas, my 35th birthday a few weeks ago brought me to fully accept a crushing realization I had been loath to admit to myself: I can’t continue such viewing habits on the near-nightly basis I have sustained since my childhood. Close scientific observation by myself of myself suggests that two consecutive nights and/or no more than four in any weeklong period is the most my psyche will allow at this juncture.
The rest of the time, I will be plopped under the covers at a respectable hour, chortling my way through the latest installments in the five-volume annotated collection of every single Bloom County comic strip from 1980-1989 (all time favorite line: “This is like a bad made-for-TV movie starring Bert Convy and Mr. T”). The droll irony in this is that my girlfriend actually doesn’t mind me staying up late. The O. Henry twist ending is that the later I stay up and more tired I get, the worse my snoring gets. And then, she’s kept up, I am exiled to the far left eighth of the bed and nobody wins. But enough of my nocturnal woes and on to more filmic matters.
Not to pigeonhole their appeal to me, but Kristen Stewart is the once and future face of Hollywood androgyny and Jon Favreau has carved out a niche of unironic, defiantly uncynical fantasy-based projects as a director. In the last three years, Favreau has helmed two films that have grossed in excess of $300 million each (Iron Man and Iron Man 2) and Kristen Stewart has starred in one film that came within spitting distance of $300 million and another that hocked a loogie right into $300 million’s money-bagged puss (The Twilight Saga: New Moon, and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, with $296.5 and $300.5 million respectively).
Back at the start of the last decade, if you had asked the then 35-year-old Favreau (just stretching out into feature directing with the buddy-mobster comedy Made) and 11-year-old Stewart (making her credited acting debut in The Safety of Objects) if they could fathom being involved with two of the biggest film franchises of the next ten years, they probably would have rolled their eyes. And since one of those projects was still four years away from existing as a book series, it would have elicited a dumbstruck reaction nonetheless. (For good measure, you could have added that the two of them would collaborate on a sci-fi themed family adventure film that would be well received and yet flame out spectacularly at the box office.)
Not that anybody has asked but I can’t begin a discussion of New Moon without divulging on which side of the Team Edward/Team Jacob divide my loyalties rest. It’s actually a no-brainer from where I stand: Mopey shirtless pale and scrawny vs. mopey shirtless healthy and buff. To approach it from another angle (suggested to me by the fact that alternative rock icon Peter Murphy cameos in Eclipse), it is really a smack down between the point of view in TV on the Radio’s “Wolf Like Me” and that in Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi Is Dead.” At this point in my life, I am more interesting in banging along to the beat and singing
“Got a curse we cannot lift/shines when the sunset shifts/There’s a cure comes with a kiss/ The bite that binds the gift that gives”
than doing the gothic shuffle to
“The virginal brides file past his tomb/Strewn with time’s dead flowers/ Bereft in deathly bloom/Alone in a darkened room.”
Several years ago, I gave Twilight the time of day, much as I have for literary phenomena of the last two decades ranging from The Firm to The Bridges of Madison County to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil to The Notebook. At some point, the fact that millions and millions of people are setting aside hours of their day to read a book to such a degree that it becomes a pop culture event gets the better of me and I check it out. It wasn’t an unpleasant experience, at times I was moved as I was during Francine Pascal’s Fearless series, but for me the defining moment of being in possession of the book was reading it in public at a Burgerville restaurant, glancing over to a table a few feet away and seeing a young girl, out for dinner with her parents, lugging around her copy of Eclipse. I attempted the opening pages of New Moon a few days later, but there was no spark there.
I have not seen the film adaptation of Eclipse yet, but Chris Weitz’s handling of New Moon has made me both less excited to do so and more appreciative of Catherine Hardwicke’s grasp of the milieu in the first film. Both have backgrounds in tales with teen protagonists (Thirteen and the American Pie films), offbeat fare (Lords of Dogtown and About a Boy) and potentially volatile religious-themed material (The Nativity Story and The Golden Compass), all of which come to play in one manner or another in the series. Since both directors worked from adaptations of the novels by Melissa Rosenberg, it’s interesting to note their approach to the material.
I caught Twilight in the cheap seats a couple of months after it came out and then watched it again at home before checking out New Moon for the first time. Both films are founded upon pulpy, ridiculously melodramatic source novels. Hardwicke’s film flounders during the brief action scenes but plays up the overheated romance so adroitly I would swear that she set out to intentionally make a deadpan sex (less) comedy (which, given that Twilight has a “happy ending” with its “Edward and Bella dance at prom” climax, it satisfies at least one longstanding tenet of the rules of comedy).
Hardwicke understands how seriously teens take things, and without in any way sabotaging the romantic fatalism of Stephenie Meyer's vision, she allows the extent of that intensity to bleed through to an inherent humor. Just observe Edward’s attempts to avoid vomiting (or perhaps biting her) upon catching Bella’s scent for the first time as she sits next to him in science class and her reaction of smelling her hair and her shirt. It’s great silent comedy.
Hardwicke does temper the relative calm and peace of the concluding moments with her final image. Opaque waves of water lap quietly behind the closing credits and their nihilistic blackness creates an undercurrent of unease similar to the atmospheres in the end credit sequences of Van Sant’s Psycho remake (car being dredged) or the recent My Bloody Valentine remake (uninterrupted tracking shot through a mine shaft.) I think it is Hardwicke’s boldest directorial choice.
Under Weitz’s direction, New Moon comes off at times like the most morose American Pie sequel imaginable. There are no pastries in danger of being upended, just would-be suitors with no stomach for bloody action films, and immortal beloveds who disappear themselves to self-exile in Italy at the slightest paper cut. The plot transitions and flow are as clunky here as they were in Twilight, but from the standpoint of dramatic interest, the fatal error is the focus on Bella and Jacob to the exclusion of Edward, or more accurately, the focus on Bella solely to the exclusion of most every other character. The story sets up its hoped for parallels to Romeo and Juliet baldly and boldly in one of the early scenes, but what it mostly serves up is a heroine who remains passive and cipher-like even while engaging in self-destructive behavior, or flying off to Europe at a moment’s notice.
Stewart gets a lot of grief for having a limited acting range, but I think that what she is faced with in this series is the fact that Bella is the least interesting of all the characters. There is not a lot of depth to her, nor conflict in her decisions (would she be more interesting, or God forbid, more tortured, as a vampire?). This allows a (primarily) female reader or viewer to more easily insert herself into the action as Bella/in place of Bella.
While this role has brought Stewart an insane amount of fame and notoriety, I don’t think it plays to any of her strengths. With her masculine features, intense stare, and pre-possessed air about her in early roles like Panic Room, she never seemed cut out to be the next teen starlet-in-waiting all geared to implode with drugs and alcohol. And thank heavens for that. She avoided the Disney route to stardom and made only a handful of kids’ films. While she has done romantic comedies such as Adventureland or In the Land of Women, she never felt like the conventional “romantic lead” in either case. And as her awkwardness in the Twilight films demonstrates, I don’t think that archetype is at all a fit for her. Stewart gives Bella a pulse and some quirks, but there never seems to be enough to Bella to justify the disproportionate impact she has on bloodsucker-lycanthrope relations on a local level and the vampire hierarchy on the international scene.
New Moon feels like a placeholder film in the series more than anything. Nothing is resolved and there is no building towards a climax, just a steady progression of goofy plot incidents and an assortment of indie rock music on the soundtrack, which divides the film into a stream of would-be music videos. This results in the most hallucinatory sequence in the film, as the werewolf pack chases vampire Victoria and Bella prepares to cliff dive in order to fuel an adrenaline rush, all I kept thinking was “Why the fuck is Radiohead playing right now?” (Actually, it’s a Thom Yorke solo number.) The impact of its arrival via the sound of Yorke’s voice is jarring and unexpected, but the film springs to life for those five minutes and the payoff image of an unconscious Bella floating underwater and imagining Edward bobbing just out of reach past her swoons with Hardwickian intensity. For all his attempts to expand the world of the Swans, Cullens, and Blacks beyond Forks, Weitz’s only real accomplishment is to underscore exactly how small their universe really is.
Iron Man was Robert Downey Jr.’s ticket to the world of blockbuster success and I felt, as with Johnny Depp in the first Pirates of the Caribbean, that he did more for the film than it did for him and any lasting sense of enjoyment from a quirky performance in a big-budget spectacle would be categorically drowned through repeated attempts to go back to the well. It is with a small but pleasant satisfaction, then, that I found Iron Man 2 to be more enjoyable overall than its predecessor.
The two teams of writers from the first film have been replaced by Justin Theroux, who got his start acting in the mid-'90s just as Favreau did, has also segued into writing and directing, and is most likely the only actor currently alive who can list David Lynch films, Sex and the City episodes, and videogame voiceover work on his resume. His prior credit on Tropic Thunder led me to think this might be wackier or snarkier than Iron Man, but that proves not to be the case.
Even though it doggedly sticks to the same formula as Iron Man (not remarkable at all), Iron Man 2 makes no efforts to outdo and upstage its predecessor (quite remarkable for a first sequel). I credit Favreau with the restraint to avoid reaching for bigger and splashier simply because a jaw-dropping budget once again found its way into his lap ($200 million vs. $140 million on the first one). I also am amazed at how he has found a way to put CGI-laced sights and fights front and center in what seem to be natural environments (I am thinking of the outdoor battle royale against several waves of robot soldiers that caps the film).
And yet the film never overcomes some significant problems, the biggest of which is that the villains don’t make much of an impression. When Mickey Rourke and Sam Rockwell play your film’s villains, it takes some skill to allow them to slip into the wallpaper. It may seem like an uncommon complaint, but neither of them (even Rourke’s Ivan Vanko with his tattoos, fondness for rare birds, and Russian accent) makes the leap to become larger than life. Ivan wants revenge and Rockwell’s shady defense contractor just wants to make a fast buck.
I also didn’t care for all the side-plot setup for The Avengers movie. My heart should be thrilled that Joss Whedon is directing what is probably the most buzzed about film for next year, but I am suffering from comic book movie overload and the appearances of Nick Fury and Black Widow and Thor’s hammer and Captain America’s shield do nothing for me. Too often it seems as if they are competing for attention with Iron Man in his own movie.
Perhaps this is why Iron Man 2 performed at very similar levels to Iron Man both here and abroad, and didn’t add to the audience totals. There is a lot to like and take pleasure from individually, without the film ever coalescing into something greater than the sum of its parts. Downey’s fine work is not subsumed by the budget and neither is that of his co-stars. All are given at last one scene with which to shine (Rockwell’s dancing homage to James Brown as he takes the stage at a technology expo would be the shining example of this) and the film finds a way for Tony Stark to deal with life issues (looming death from the same device keeping him alive; unresolved father conflict) without becoming too self-serious.
While a lot of film fans may be eagerly awaiting Guillermo Del Toro’s take on The Haunted Mansion, I am more excited that Favreau has been handed the keys to The Magic Kingdom. If I understand it correctly from the interview I read, Disney has pegged him to make a Night at the Museum type adventure at the Happiest Place on Earth and are allowing him full access to any character, animated or live-action, from any Disney film ever, as well as any of the Lands at the Magic Kingdom itself. His joy over scoring such a gig was palpable and the reason I share that joy can be summed up in one word: Zathura.
I may feel that the Iron Man films are underwhelming, but what they do capture well is a sense of the fantastical mingling with the everyday and the notion that a big imagination is needed in order to deal with larger than life problems. Zathura echoes this vibe as well, with its key image of a suburban house being uprooted from its foundation and floating off into space. Based on a children’s book from the author of Jumanji and The Polar Express, Zathura (subtitled A Space Adventure) may not be a true sequel to Jumanji, but it follows the same outline. An innocent-looking board game propels two antagonistic siblings into a fight for survival and the only way out is to get along and play the game through to the end. But there the similarities end. Jumanji was a showcase for Robin Williams in full mid-'90s man-boy mode and it was entertaining in spots, but also loud, noisy, overwrought and quite terrifying.
Zathura has just as much adventure but it conveys it much more innocently, without the wholesale destruction of an entire town. Charged with staying home while their father has to run back to the office on a Saturday, the two brothers in fact never do leave their house, even if the house itself takes off for solar systems as yet undiscovered. Favreau mines this inconsistency of the comforts of home useless in the dark depths of space for humor for most of the running time. This visual juxtaposition reaches its logical conclusion when, for very specific (and worthy) reasons, the family couch is lit on fire and shoved out into the cosmos via a gaping hole in the living room wall. Touches like that keep Zathura firmly grounded in the quirky without crossing over to freneticness.
With only five main actors in the production, casting was crucial and Jonah Bobo and Josh Hutcherson ably anchor the film as the brothers. Not having grown up with a brother anywhere near my age, I speak not from experience but from observation when I say that the two work masterfully in capturing the exasperation and love (and exasperation!) that are a part of any sibling dynamic. The production design - in particular a giant malfunctioning robot - aims for a retro sci-fi of the kind that went out of fashion when the Space Race was just getting started, but Favreau mines it for more charm than he would have gotten from relying more on CGI.
I still consider it a shame that Zathura so quickly fell out of favor with the theater-going public. Its opening weekend actually bested Jumanji’s in raw dollars but in the different box-office world of 1995, Jumanji kept on trucking through December and well into spring 1996, concluding with a final multiplier of 9.0 and becoming a blockbuster by a few hundred thousand dollars. Opening in mid-November, Zathura made nearly half of its final $30 million take in its opening weekend and couldn’t even be saved with a boost from the Thanksgiving holiday.
And Stewart? She shows up in a small-ish supporting role as the older sister none too happy to be stuck at home keeping tabs on her brothers. She mostly has to react stunned when she realizes that they are indeed not on Planet Earth, but when roused before noon on a weekend, watch out! Her steely glare could send a shiver down even an undead Bella Swan’s spine.
Next time: I catch up with the film adaptation of another literary phenom, and check out Rooney Mara’s foreign counterpart in all her tattooed, fire-playing, hornet-nest kicking glory.