Romance Dies in a Passionless New Moon
After her birthday party goes frighteningly bad, vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) tells the teenage love of his immortal life Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) that he and his family must leave the small town of Forks, WA forever in order to make sure she is protected. Heartbroken, the high school student spends months stewing in her own depression, thinking her life is over now that her undead boyfriend has forsaken her.
Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart in Summit Entertainment's The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Things change a little bit for the better when she starts hanging out with friend Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), a local from the reservation who for some strange reason has developed a shockingly muscular physique with no effort whatsoever. But just as this relationship begins to heat up the red-headed vampire Victoria (Rachelle Lefevre) returns to unleash vengeance upon those she feels are responsible for the death of her mate one year ago, her appearance sparking a supernatural change in Jacob taking him, too, away from Bella.
There’s more, but fans of author Stephenie Meyer’s novels are already going to be more than familiar with the plot mechanics going on within The Twilight Saga: Mew Moon. All a person needs to know is that there is a love triangle, the main character spends a lot of time crying about how much she wants to be a vampire, there’s a quick third act jaunt to Italy and werewolves are now part of the supernatural equation. Otherwise there isn’t much to tell, and those expecting anything more complex should look for their gothic fantasy love story thrills elsewhere.
Granted, the rest of us will probably want to do the same because, for as complicated as much of this is in theory, in reality Meyer’s soapy prose barely supported the multitude of pages she gifted it in the first place. While an easy read, not much of consequence actually happened, and other than that aforementioned European side trip the book itself wasn’t much of a page-turner.
With that being the case I can’t say the 130-minute film fares all that much better. The first hour, other than that opening bit at Bella’s birthday party, is a ponderously self-important bore that seemed to go on forever. The young woman spends so much time whining and moaning I kept waiting for her dad Charlie (still nicely underplayed by Billy Burke) to slap her. She has fits, she tosses in her sleep, she breathlessly stares out from her window for months on end, and while all of this would have been okay in moderation to show the breadth of Bella’s depression director Chris Weitz (The Golden Compass) piles on so much of it I nearly fell asleep trying to endure it all.
The problem is, even when returning screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg finally moves onto the beginnings of the Bella-Edward-Jacob love triangle the scenes between the morose human girl and the wolfish Quileute teenager are so clunky and filled with so much stilted dialogue they’re almost unintentionally laughable. There is no spark between the two of them; no intimate underpinnings that could make their relationship click. In the end, I had trouble believing the pair were friends let alone potential love interests, and as this tangent takes up most of the running time it’s a humongous problem the movie can never overcome.
What’s funny is that for all that is wrong with New Moon, there is a point roughly around the two-thirds mark where things manage to get extremely interesting and then stay that way almost all the way through the end. Starting with a breathless chase through the mountain forest between the werewolf pack and Victoria before culminating in Italy with a standoff between Edward, his omniscient sister Alice (Ashley Greene, stealing every scene she’s in), Bella and an omnipotent clan of vampires known as the Volturi, the third act hums with an invigorating and intoxicating electricity the rest sadly lacks.
Can one scene save an entire film? I asked that question a couple weeks back in regards to the low budget The House of the Devil and I find myself asking it again here. Thanks to David Brisbin’s (The Lookout) spectacular production design, relative newcomer Peter Lambert’s crackerjack editing and Javier Aguirresarobe’s (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) sweeping camerawork Weitz’s direction comes alive, everyone involved raising their respective games to a level they don’t come close to equaling anywhere else. Add in passionate and magnetic performances from Michael Sheen and Dakota Fanning (who says maybe six words yet is still utterly captivating) and these scenes are nearly worth the price of admission on their own.
Yet as good as these climactic moments are (there’s an additional coda back in Forks but the less said about that the better) they only magnify just how lackluster and uneven the rest of the movie is. Stewart and Pattinson seem to be going through the motions, marking time until they can be done with this series and move on to other projects of more consequence. As for Lautner, while he looks the part (and while I imagine teenage girls are going to swoon over his shirtless physique) sadly he just isn’t a good enough actor to make his haphazardly written character worthy of all the fuss.
I admit I enjoyed the first Twilight more from a sociological perspective watching the audience more than I did anything else, but I will say that director Catherine Hardwick understood teenagers and their angst in a way that elevated the film a bit above Meyer’s soapy source material. What she couldn’t do was direct a suspense or action sequence to save her life, that movie’s ultimate failings having more to do with how little tension there was throughout more than it did anything else.
Thanks to Weitz, New Moon is a far superior product in regards to that second point. Unfortunately, it is that first one where the film frustratingly fails. The central relationships have all the zip and the flair of Ferris Bueller’s economics teacher lecturing about the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act. While the finale has passion, the remainder of the movie sadly does not, and I think even Meyer’s rabid fan base are going to be disappointed after they walk out of theaters showing this picture.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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