by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film we chose to go to
last night was The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1, the awkwardly titled fourth entry in the
surprisingly interesting Twilight series (whose makers decided to copy the stratagem of the makers of the
Harry Potter movies and split the last book in the cycle into two parts so they
could get five mega-blockbuster hit films, and the profits therefrom, out of it
instead of just four). Despite being three (Charles) and four (me) decades
older than the target audience for these films, Charles and I had enjoyed the
first three on DVD and thought it would be fun to see one on the big screen,
with an audience (though not much of one: this is the sort of movie to which
the fan base flocks in the first or second weekend and by the time it’s been
out this long — the release date was November 18, 2011 — only a few stragglers
are still paying their way in). It turned out to be a worthy series entry even
though both it and the immediately preceding film, Eclipse, seem to me to have been comedowns from the
marvelous New Moon (which I’ve loved above
all the other Twilight movies
so far largely because of the director, Christopher Weitz, who shot it in
classic 1940’s style with long, slow takes and a lot of tracking shots that drew us into the story
instead of shoving it into our faces with the kind of short shot lengths and
quick cuts that are supposed to be de rigueur for a movie aimed at today’s teen audience; it
also had by far the subtlest use of music of any of the films, deploying
sophisticated alternative-rock songs and keying them to the emotions of the
story rather than just including them to sell more copies of a soundtrack CD),
and I was a bit disappointed in this given that the director was Bill Condon,
who made two of the best movies of the last decade, Gods and Monsters and Dreamgirls, but seemed hamstrung by his material this time
around. Breaking Dawn, Part 1 opens with preparations for the long-awaited wedding of normal human
Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) to boy vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) —
remember that the conceit of this series is that once you become a vampire, you
stay forever at the physical age you were when you were “changed” even though
you are literally immortal; also remember that Edward has previously explained
to Bella that his morals are too old-school to have sex with her until they’re
legally married by the laws of normal humanity.
The first half-hour of this
117-minute movie is pretty slow going — Edward explains to her that in his early
days as a vampire (which happened to coincide with the original 1935 release of
The Bride of Frankenstein, a film Condon had previously referenced in Gods and Monsters, which was about its director, James Whale) he
actually killed humans before he joined the good-vampire cult and only fed on
animals; Bella has a nightmare in which they’re married against a pure white
background and in front of them is a pile of dead bodies with gleaming red
wounds; and they fly off in a private plane to a honeymoon on a private island
in Brazil the Cullens own. (Charles pointed out that while the Cullen clan was
presented at the start of the series as upper-middle-class professionals — the
clan’s leader, Carlisle Cullen, is a doctor — here they’re definitely part of
the 1 percent; the Underworld movies also posited a vampire clan with no worries about money, but
explained it by making them owners of a plasma and blood products company,
which not only gave them a seemingly inexhaustible source of income but also
allowed them to feed on their own products so they could sustain themselves
without having to kill.) While there, Edward and Bella have sex for the first
time — and, seemingly, the last, since this movie depicts seriously the same
curious dilemma that was played for laughs in the movie Hancock: namely, what happens when a super-powered human
male has sex with a normal human female and how does he keep from burning or
tearing her insides out in the process. (I always figured that’s why Superman
never allowed himself to have sex with Lois Lane even though she’d have been
more than willing.) When they’re done Edward’s sheer energy (remember it’s his first time, too!) has torn the bed cover to shreds
and turned it into a mass of feathers that float picturesquely around the room
when Bella disturbs them by waking up (though why they needed a feather comforter in a tropical climate like
Brazil’s is a mystery); he’s also left deep bruises all over her, which for
some reason bothers him a lot more than it does her, so they spend most of the
rest of their honeymoon playing chess (the “black” pieces on their chessboard
are actually red, and this was used as the motif for the cover of Stephenie Meyer’s source novel)
and skinny-dipping but don’t get physical again.
Then the infallibly inevitable
(at least in the movies!) pregnancy at a single contact occurs — and the film
suddenly gets a lot more powerful and compelling as drama. First of all, nobody
in the vampire clan has any idea what’s going to happen when a vampire and a
human procreate — in fact, they had assumed that would be impossible (which may
explain Edward’s willingness to have unprotected sex with his wife) — and a
search on the Internet turns up some old medieval texts that indicate the
product of such a union would be a particularly vicious and (literally)
bloodthirsty baby vampire. Edward and Bella return to their (and the series’)
home base in Forks, Washington, and the baby develops so rapidly — it’s ready
to be born in just one month instead of the usual nine — it threatens to rip
Bella apart from the insides. What’s more, while carrying the child Bella gets
weaker and weaker, until one of the Cullens correctly guesses that since her
fetus is a vampire, she needs to start drinking blood in order to nourish it
and allow it to be born. There’s a surprisingly pro-choice element in the film
in which Bella resists the suggestions of the Cullens that she have her baby
aborted — though ultimately she decides to keep the child it is quite clearly drawn as her choice, a bit of a
surprise from as hard-core Mormon an author as Stephenie Meyer is reported to
be — and at the very end of the process Bella finally transforms into a
vampire, not (as I’d been hoping all along throughout the three previous films)
as an act of love from Edward to grant her immortality and eternal youth so
they can share their lives together literally forever, but as a last-ditch injection of a large
syringe filled with a grey substance called “vampire venom” (“Did they just happen to have it around in case of an emergency like
this?” Charles asked) to sustain Bella through the difficult (to say the least)
process of giving birth to the first Cullen vampire of the next generation.
Meanwhile, through all of this Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), the Native American
werewolf who was Edward’s rival for Bella’s affections (and quite frankly
Lautner, especially once he bulked up for New Moon and became considerably more muscular and butch,
does a lot for me aesthetically than the almost terminally neurasthenic Robert
Pattinson — and some of the hunky actors who’ve been cast as “bad vampires” in
earlier episodes of the series seem even hotter!), has tried to protect Bella
from the demands of the rest of his tribe, who had warned earlier in the series that if Bella got turned
into a vampire — even if she were willing — that would nullify the peace
treaty between vampires and werewolves and the wolves would launch an all-out
war. The film has moments that either don’t make sense or seem gratuitous, and
several times it verges uncomfortably close to risibility — I had a hard time
keeping from laughing when the various Native people in wolf form held a
meeting and between dog-like barks, growls and keening screams, they spoke to
each other in English through a voice distorter made to sound like English
would if a dog (or a wolf) could speak it. (If they wanted to give the idea
that the wolves, when they transformed, would still retain the power of
language, it would have been better for them to put heavy echoes on their voices
and establish that they were “speaking” to each other telepathically even
though they were in body forms whose throats could not form words in English or
any other human language.) I also could have done without the “inside” shots
purporting to show Bella’s circulatory system in action as she underwent the
various stages of human-to-vampire transformation.
But this film was mostly
taut, exciting drama, intelligently scripted by Melissa Rosenberg from Meyer’s
novel and effectively directed by Condon (even though this was clearly an
assignment for hire for him rather than a personal movie like Gods and
Monsters or Dreamgirls), and leading to a chilling climax in which Jacob
saves the Cullens from attack by a wolf pack that outnumbers them by
“imprinting” on Bella’s baby, Renesmee (pronounced “Ren-ESS-May” and a compound
name Bella made up from the names of some of the female Cullens), which
supposedly means that the werewolves can no longer kill them. (Charles pointed
out another plot hole: why the wolves couldn’t go ahead and kill everyone else in the Cullen clan is never explained — and the denouement suggests an alternative version of the story in
which the werewolves do massacre
the Cullens and Jacob is stuck with the obligation to raise the now-dead Bella’s
and Edward’s child.) A post-credit sequence offers three almost unbearably
effete Quentin Crisp-ish vampires making it clear that they disapprove of the
birth of Renesmee and they’re going to take countermeasures against the Cullens
in the next (and last) film in the cycle — a rather disappointing conceit that
the straight vampires are good and it’s the Gay vampires that are bad — but
despite the annoyances and the moments that edge towards the silliness that’s
an occupational hazard for fantasy writers, overall The Twilight Saga:
Breaking Dawn, Part 1 is quality entertainment,
a gripping tale well told even though it’s hard to sustain the sense of doomed
romanticism that made earlier series entries so powerful when the two leads are
married to each other and their problems are no longer those of adolescence,
but of adulthood.
