Why The Batman is an organic step ahead in Robert Pattinson’s filmography, rich in both blockbusters and indie gems-Entertainment News , Firstpost

In the 200th episode of The Big Bang Theory, aired in 2017, the makers of the show gave fans a cameo that had been teased on the show for a long time — Adam West, the original Batman of television from the 1960s TV series, playing himself.

In the episode, the gang [Leonard, Howard, and Raj] are driving West down to Sheldon’s [Jim Parsons] birthday party as a surprise for their friend. In the car, they all start ranking the various Batman actors down the ages, unsurprisingly. Howard says, “Look, can we all agree that we’re worried about [Ben] Affleck?” upon which West deadpans, “What’s an Affleck?” The gag is that Ben Affleck was, at the time, shooting for his role as Batman in the Zack Snyder film Batman v. Superman, and already drawing worried, panicked responses from DC fans.

Something similar is afoot right now, with Robert Pattinson set to become the next onscreen, live-action Batman, in Matt Reeves’ The Batman, in theatres on Thursday. We are told that Pattinson pointedly refused to engage in martial arts training for the role, preferring to do his fight scenes on instinct and cold rehearsals alone. Now, that is the kind of thing that can turn out to be either an inspired move or a disastrous one. Generally speaking, however, I find the fan-driven anxiety around Pattinson to be much more misplaced this time around — Affleck was clearly too old for the role while Pattinson is just as clearly the perfect age [35].

Actors of Pattinson’s generation started their careers at around the same time that the movie business became explicitly driven by intellectual property. Indeed, so many of his contemporaries have done basically nothing outside of franchise movies. And while Pattinson’s career began that way, with high-profile roles in the Harry Potter and Twilight movies, he has since put together a solid body of work in small, independent and/or auteur-led movies. The man did not need $2-5 million budget movies at all basically, but he did them anyway because they appealed to him, because he felt they were important to his development as an actor. And that is not something you can readily say about his contemporaries.

Pattinson’s ‘alt career’ began in 2012, with David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, based on the Don DeLillo novel of the same name — in turn a kind of contemporary, Wall Street-set response to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Even the most unambiguously brilliant Cronenberg movie is not for everyone, and so it was not surprising that the film drew mixed reviews. I found Pattinson’s performance as a well-nigh-soulless young billionaire unexpectedly moving. There was a controlled chaos amidst all the tastefully shot stillness in the movie, as we follow asset manager Eric Packer on a slow car ride across New York on an April day. And Pattinson’s performance was at the heart of this artfully executed dissonance — the scene where Packer barely registers the fact of his impending assassination is a masterclass in stylized numbness. That Pattinson, on the back of the Twilight movies, was then one of the biggest superstars in the world seemed almost beside the point. 

Robert Pattinson in Cosmopolis

Pattinson then did two ‘rugged outdoorsman’ movies very different from one another — he played a gauche American youngster in David Michod and Joel Edgerton’s Aussie Western The Rover [2014]. The duo would later also cast Pattinson in their William Shakespeare adaptation The King [2019], based on the bard’s Henriad cycle of plays. And his performance in the exploration period drama The Lost City of Z was praised by pretty much everyone; indeed, he all but stole the show f of the film, Charlie Hunnam.

The latest in that series of acclaimed, asymmetrical, auteur-led Pattinson movies is Robert Eggers’ intensely claustrophobic black-and-white horror film The Lighthouse [2019], where Pattinson and Willem Dafoe are the only actors on display, playing two men slowly going mad on account of seclusion in the titular lighthouse, described in the screenplay as “an erect penis” [Eggers is not a big fan of subtext, if you have seen his previous film The Witch). 

Robert Pattinson in The Lighthouse

My favourite Pattinson performance, however, belongs to a film that was more bootstrapped and ‘indie’ than all of these. Shot on a meagre budget of $2 million, the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time [2018] is Pattinson’s magnum opus so far, and I am still kinda bummed he did not receive an Oscar nomination for this [although the movie itself was nominated for the Palm D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival]. The Safdie Brothers, DIY filmmakers who grew up in the seamier parts of New York, are to the city what Harmony Korine is to Middle America — clear-eyed, unsentimental chroniclers of the underworld [not the mafia, just the neglected, underfunded and overlooked parts of town].

Robert Pattinson in Good Time

Their tumultuous upbringing had inspired their earlier feature Daddy Longlegs, and here, in Good Time, they have Pattinson playing a smoother-than-thou petty criminal called Connie, who has all the charm in the world, and is always on the lookout to exploit this fact. Pattinson is just so very, very good as Connie — one moment, displaying his enviable gift of gab, another, beating up someone till his knuckles look like they were smashed with a hammer. Both the violence and the charm are portrayed as equally affectless, crucially. They are both complementary aspects of Connie’s sociopathic personality — even his affection for his developmentally disabled brother is a kind of narcissism, like he is patting himself on the back for being such a good guy. The really terrifying part of Good Time is that we have all, at some point, been taken in by the wily charms of charismatic conmen like Connie [hint is in the name, right?], but this knowledge does not necessarily help us the next time around. 

Robert Pattinson in Twilight

Personally, I think Pattinson would do well to channel some of that same sociopathic flavour for The Batman. Because there is something inescapably pathological about a man who dresses up as a bat, looking to extract justice with his fists — and Pattinson, in my opinion, is just the man to highlight this aspect of the iconic role. 

The Batman is slated to release this Friday in cinemas.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.

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