Whether he likes it or not - and I suspect the latter - Robert Pattinson will always be synonymous with Edward Cullen, the sullen and handsome vampire with impressive hair from the Twilight series. He caught many people's attention with his brief appearance in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but Twilight turned him into a global star and the subject of much adoration from screaming teenage girls. It's an image few actors hoping to be taken seriously wishes to be lumped with throughout their entire career, and Pattinson has been making a noticeable effort to distant himself from the teen idol image ever since 2012's Breaking Dawn - Part 2 with the likes of Cosmopolis and The Rover. Yet despite Pattinson's commendable performances, neither were particularly brilliant films. However, his latest, Benny and Josh Safdie's Good Time, is very good indeed.
Taking inspiration from journey-into-night films like Martin Scorsese's After Hours and sharing the urgent pace of the techno-thrillers of the 1990s, Good Time is a huge explosion of energy. Taking place over the course of an eventful and increasingly weird 24 hours, we open not with Pattinson's petty criminal Connie Nikas, but his mentally handicapped brother Nick (co-director Benny Safdie). Nick is undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, but is quickly pulled out of it by Connie, who takes no time to convince his impressionable brother to help him rob a bank. In the grand tradition of movie heists, the robbery goes wrong when the bag of money explodes red dye all over the brothers. Nick is caught but Connie escapes, and the former is sent to Riker's Island. With a mixture of street-smarts and pure desperation, Connie sets out to raise the bail money, and later - after Nick is placed in hospital following a violent attack - to break his brother out.
Good Time is an experience best enjoyed by simply going with the flow. Like Connie, the film feels like it doesn't know where it's going, and that's part of the thrill. Connie proves himself skillful at talking his way out of the increasingly dangerous situations he finds himself in, but proves completely inept at decision-making. His journey takes him from borrowing money from his sort-of girlfriend (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh), to an encounter with a mother and daughter, and later to a fairground to retrieve a bottle of acid worth $10,000, where an honest security guard played by Barkhad Abdi awaits him. The story occasionally gets away from the Safdie brothers, but things are quickly helped back on track by some jet-black humour, impressive supporting performances from Buddy Duress and newcomer Taliah Webster, and, at its very centre, Robert Pattinson, who pulls you into wanting to see the night out with him despite his character's utter loathsomeness. The title is supposed to be ironic, but Good Time is one of the most enjoyable experiences I've had this year.
Australian director David Michod's follow-up to 2010's thrilling and operatic Animal Kingdom is set, as the opening titles inform us, 'ten years after the collapse'. Just what the 'collapse' is is unclear, whether it be social, economic or moral. But what the film does show us is an Australia sparse of population (though the Chinese seem to be doing well), and where the only currency of any real value is the American dollar. It's a hard land, not too dissimilar to Oz's current outback, and when we meet our (anti)hero, Eric (Guy Pearce), he is certainly distressed about something.
He wanders into a shack for a drink and supplies. The film then cuts to a speeding car where a bunch of criminals led by Henry (Scoot McNairy - quickly becoming cinema's most reliable supporting actor) are arguing over something gone awry. Tensions soon turn to violence and the squabble leads to the car crashing just outside the bar where Eric is. With their car damaged, they quickly steal Eric's. It soon becomes apparent that this was their biggest mistake, as Eric quickly pursues them demanding his car back. After he is forced away at gunpoint, Eric comes across the injured Rey (Robert Pattinson), who just so happens to be Henry's mentally retarded brother.
With the global economy locked in a seemingly endless yo-yo, and the unknown, lurking threats from the Middle East and North Korea always in the headlines, the global apocalypse seems a fitting setting for modern film-makers to comment on the current state of humanity. Cormac McCarthy's novel and John Hillcoat's subsequent 2009 film adaptation The Road comes immediately to mind, where the cold, eternally dark world is scoured by merciless cannibals. In The Rover, it's every man for himself. Even our supposed hero Eric thinks nothing of shooting a police officer in the back of the head when he threatens to get in the way of Eric recovering his car. Humanity no longer has any value.
But there's a whiff of seen-it-all-before with The Rover. As well as the aforementioned The Road, other films come to mind such as the Australian western The Proposition (2005), which told a story of man's primitive natural instinct for violence against a bleak and blood-stained backdrop in a far more gripping way. Pearce is as reliable as ever, but Pattinson - admirable in his desire to break free of his Twilight image - doesn't seem to trust his ability and over-acts. In his quieter, subtler moments, he proves to be a fine actor, but he needs to take Kirk Lazarus's advice from Tropic Thunder (2008) and never go full retard. At it's best, The Rover is hypnotic. At it's worst, it's plodding. Yet it remains unsettling throughout.
In the opening credits of David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis, the bottom half of the screen gets increasing doused with "action" art, the Jackson Pollack drippings of various coloured paints, an American artistic icon, whose paintings fetch millions of dollars at auction, are the symbols of opulence, and social status, to that one percent of the West's population who are inconceivably rich - those financial elite that the worlds ninety-nine percent aim their contemporary anger at. Whilst this topical subject matter could well have been wholly conceived after the 2008 economic crash, but it is in fact adapted (by Cronenberg himself) from the 2003 novel by Dom DeLillo. (But then, these suited elites have been targeted hate figures for some time, but with the crash came hard evidence of their financial greed - and crimes for that matter.) In Cosmopolis, the protagonist is Eric (Robert Pattinson), a billionaire asset manager, whose cold, detachment from reality, his alienation a product of his corporate exclusivity, operates his working life (and extra-curricula) from the inside of his technologically advanced limousine.
To the outside world, Eric is extraneous, but his interior world, the back of the limo, with its screens, curves and luminous sheen, reflect that consumerist fetishisation of technology - reminiscent of those chrome engines, erotically cleaned and poured over in Kenneth Anger's Kustom Kar Kommandos (1970). Eric occupies this space for much of the film, a hermetically sealed protector from the real world (customised so no sound can enter), where he lets in colleagues, friends, and a doctor for one-on-one conversation. It is this erotic space, where he communicates, fucks, and destroys lives, a space gleaming with technical-sexuality, is like a womb, the ultimate space of protection. In the few scenes exterior to the limo, - such as his encounters with his wife in eating establishments - the occupants are rarely heard, their insignificance obvious for the character.
But, like Joseph Conrad's Charles Marlow in 'Heart of Darkness', Eric is on an odyssey into the dark, and an apocalyptic journey into destruction and madness. But unlike Marlow, Eric's is a self inflicted destruction. This duality manifests itself symbolically, he is skewed, divided and unbalanced; his hair is only cut on one side, he shoots a hole in his left hand, and the visiting doctor advises Eric that his prostate is asymmetrical. The odyssey - his literal journey across Manhatten - is held up in traffic, a busy day that sees the President of the United States visiting the city, the funeral of a rap star, and an anti-capitalist "riot". Parallel to the increasing binary characteristics, Eric's detached wishes are often denied. In one scene he is informed of the death of his favourite rap star, but is disappointed that he died of natural causes, instead of a gun shot - a media-friendly representation. Juliette Binoche, Eric's art consultant, turns down a request (whilst copulating) to purchase an entire collection of Mark Rothko paintings, along with the space they occupy - an arrogance of ownership. Throughout the passage of Eric's car, he loses billions of dollars, his advisers philosophically, but dispassionately discussing these complex calculations and consequences.
In an early scene (and a quote from Zbigniew Herbert's poem 'Report from the Besieged City' at the start of the film), Eric proposes a fantasy future of finance where the rat becomes the worlds currency. In a restaurant, two anarchist protesters storm in holding rats by their tales, declaring "A spectre is haunting the world", before hurtling the rats at the patrons. That spectre is of course capitalism; the limo is grafittied by the protesters, Eric cocooned in perfect anonymity, but this is simply another pseudo-delight to the destructive dimensions of Eric. He knows he walks to danger, - he created it himself - a manifestation of possible psychosomatic invention? like American Psycho's (2000) Patrick Bateman, another satire on the financial elite, but one in which he is internally, mentally imploding, instead of externalising violence into a fantasy of psychotic whim. Here, Paul Giamatti's disgruntled forgotten work colleague, becomes a potential source of ultimate destruction, or he may simply be a manifestation of his deteriorating psyche.
However, unlike the sharp satirical whit of American Psycho, Cosmopolis is simply too cold, it's characters without depth. But then this could also be a purposeful emptiness. For Cronenberg, it is a return to that clinical aesthetic, and gaunt characterisation of Crash (1996) and eXistenZ (1999), but is too surreal in terms of its non-narrative structure to fundamentally clarify the sardonic elements that could have been so much more interesting. It is a very well made film, as you would expect from Cronenberg, his compositions and its movements and segues are beautifully constructed, but this odyssey into quasi-madness simply didn't enlighten me, or excite me in the way its central idea could well have, and simply is not cohesive enough to produce any major dramatic tension. As with the vacuous, clinical aesthetic of the film, it left me a little cold.
Taking inspiration from journey-into-night films like Martin Scorsese's After Hours and sharing the urgent pace of the techno-thrillers of the 1990s, Good Time is a huge explosion of energy. Taking place over the course of an eventful and increasingly weird 24 hours, we open not with Pattinson's petty criminal Connie Nikas, but his mentally handicapped brother Nick (co-director Benny Safdie). Nick is undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, but is quickly pulled out of it by Connie, who takes no time to convince his impressionable brother to help him rob a bank. In the grand tradition of movie heists, the robbery goes wrong when the bag of money explodes red dye all over the brothers. Nick is caught but Connie escapes, and the former is sent to Riker's Island. With a mixture of street-smarts and pure desperation, Connie sets out to raise the bail money, and later - after Nick is placed in hospital following a violent attack - to break his brother out.
