Is Robert Pattinson the Best Actor of His Generation?
On Saturday, September 5, Primetime premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival, and the reviews of Robert Pattinson read like the end of an argument. He plays Chris Hansen, host of To Catch a Predator, the Dateline NBC segment that lured would-be predators to staged houses on camera, in a story set in 2006. Merritt Wever plays his producer; Skyler Gisondo and Phoebe Bridgers play the adult decoys paid to pretend they are young teenagers. The BBC's Nicholas Barber gave the film five stars and closed with a sentence that could have been our headline: "This is the best performance yet from the most intriguing actor of his generation." The Playlist's Marshall Shaffer went shorter: "A new high-water mark for Pattinson."
The film is a harder sell than the man in it. Lance Oppenheim, a documentary director making his first narrative feature, shoots it in grainy, saturated 4:3 like a horror movie, and critics split on whether it has anything to say. The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney called it a "flashy but shallow movie" and still found Pattinson "riveting." TIME's Stephanie Zacharek wrote that "Pattinson's performance is one of the only reasons to see it." Oppenheim told the BBC his Hansen is a cross between Jerry Maguire and Dracula.
Primetime opens in US theaters on Friday, September 25, in a year that already gave us The Drama and The Odyssey. Barber's "intriguing" is a hedge. Is Pattinson the best actor of his generation?
Yes. The proof is a pattern that runs through more than a decade of choices: nobody his age picks directors the way he does.
From Razzie nominee to Cannes
He started as Cedric Diggory, the golden Hogwarts champion, in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 2005. Three years later Catherine Hardwicke cast him as Edward Cullen opposite Kristen Stewart in Twilight, and five films made him one of the best-known faces on the planet. They also made him a punchline. The Razzies nominated him three times for his acting in those years, including Worst Actor for Remember Me and Eclipse, and romantic leads like Water for Elephants kept him parked in heartthrob territory.
Then in 2012, the year he played Edward for the last time, he made Cosmopolis with David Cronenberg: a 28-year-old billionaire crawling across Manhattan in a stretch limousine while a day of bad currency bets eats his fortune. It competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and The Telegraph's Robbie Collin called it a "sensational performance." It flopped, and he kept going anyway. Cronenberg cast him again. David Michôd took him to the Australian outback for The Rover. James Gray sent him into the Amazon, bearded and nearly 35 pounds lighter, for The Lost City of Z.
The director is the co-star
That sounds like a boast until you read the list. Before Good Time, he saw a single still image from one of Josh Safdie and Benny Safdie's films and became convinced they should work together, The Observer reported. When he got the call that he had the job with Claire Denis on High Life, he could "barely even stand up." Then came Robert Eggers and The Lighthouse, Michôd again for The King, Christopher Nolan for Tenet, Matt Reeves for The Batman, Bong Joon-ho for Mickey 17, Lynne Ramsay for Die My Love, and Nolan again for The Odyssey this summer, as Antinous, a suitor of Penelope he described as sleazy and likened to James Woods's character in Casino. Name another actor his age whose filmography since 2012 reads like that.
The list matters because of what he wants from each director. "If I'm doing a scene and I see that the other actor is expecting me to do it the way I'm doing it, if I can just see that it hasn't surprised them, I immediately feel stupid," he told The Observer. Surprise is the job, and he hires directors to supply it.
The arthouse years were never an escape from fame, either. Reeves watched Good Time while he was writing The Batman. "I became dead-set on it being Rob," he told Esquire. The strange little crime film is what put him in the cape.
Primetime is the purest version of the habit. Pattinson came aboard as a producer before there was a director: "It was the first time I've been on a project pre-director through release," he told The Hollywood Reporter. He told GQ that he and his team thought of Oppenheim, with whom he was already developing a documentary: "I think his style is really perfect for it." He held off on playing Hansen until the version Oppenheim and screenwriter Ajon Singh built proved too compelling to turn down. He bet a lead role on a director with no narrative feature to his name, and the Venice reviews say the bet paid.
The case against him
There is a real argument on the other side, and it starts with the trophy shelf. The major nominations on his record are two Independent Spirit nods for Best Male Lead, for Good Time and The Lighthouse, plus one each from the Gotham Awards, Australia's AACTAs and the Canadian Screen Awards. Barber calls Primetime "sure to be an Oscar contender," but until voters agree, his case has to rest on the work. And he misses. Critic Owen Gleiberman called his turn as the husband in Die My Love a "rare bad performance," and several critics think Primetime itself never digs deep enough.
The strongest rival has been standing next to him since 2008. Kristen Stewart took her own exit from Twilight into arthouse drama, and her shelf is heavier: a César, the BAFTA Rising Star Award, and a Best Actress Oscar nomination for playing Diana in Spencer. Last year she premiered her first feature as a director, The Chronology of Water, at Cannes. If you want to argue that Bella Swan outran Edward Cullen, you have a case, and it is the only one worth making.
He still wins it, on range. Since 2012 Pattinson has played a Queens bank robber, a convict with a baby to raise in deep space, a 19th-century lighthouse keeper, a camp French dauphin, a lewd small-town preacher in The Devil All the Time, a spy handler whose mannerisms he borrowed from Christopher Hitchens, a young Bruce Wayne, a disposable space worker in two versions at once, and now Hansen. IndieWire's David Ehrlich said Mickey 17 held "two of the best performances of his life." That spread, from Nolan's blockbusters to Eggers's almost-square black-and-white frame, with the same appetite for risk in every one, is the case.
The verdict
So yes. Robert Pattinson is the best actor of his generation, and the reason is the skill he ranks above acting: he told The Observer his great gift is choosing the right people to work with. He finds the director who will push him somewhere he has not been, then commits without protecting himself. Sometimes that gives you Die My Love. Far more often it gives you Good Time, The Lighthouse and High Life, and, if the Venice reviews are any guide, Primetime.
If you only know him from Twilight or The Batman, the list below is your catch-up, in order. If you have time for one film before Friday, September 25, make it Good Time: a fast-talking man bluffing his way through one bad night in New York is the nearest thing in his filmography to the Hansen that critics came out of Venice raving about.
