The Pattinassaince will not be televised. The Pattinaissance will be live.

 

If you had told me at the tender age of thirteen that Robert Pattinson would go on to become one of the most nuanced performers of our generation, I would have scoffed at you from my Twilight phone case. 

 

Yes, even then amidst the closing of the Twilight Saga with the so-bad-it’s-just-bad Breaking Dawn Part 2 (Bill Condon, 2012), the light in my Team Edward eyes was beginning to fade. It wasn’t helped by the two utterly unremarkable films churned out seperate from the Saga during Pattinson’s tenure as the vampiric Heathcliff reincarnate; Remember Me (Allen Coulter, 2010) and Water For Elephants (Francis Lawrence, 2011) to name two of the worst offenders. 

 

Where can one mark the start of the Pattinaissance? It’s hard to say. Maybe we can mark it with Pattinson’s realisation that your understanding of the script will be bolstered by actually reading said script and not confusing it with a sequel to a much more well known film that shares titular similarities: 

 

Kelly: Water for Elephants is obviously based on the novel. Had you read it before? […]

 

Robert: […] I’d been sent the book about a year and a half before, and never read it. I always thought it was, um… What’s the other one… Water for Chocolate! Why would they make a sequel for Like Water For Chocolate with an elephant as the main character? It didn’t make any sense. 

 

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNwwEFYww0Q) 

 

Or perhaps it was when he made the bold move of distancing himself from his famously foppish quiff, when, on that fateful night of Comic Con 2012, he shaved the right side of it off. Though it was a deeply traumatic event for many of us, it would go on to herald a new, and indeed, better era of Pattinson’s career. 

 

Either way, when Twilight ended, many assumed the working life of Robert Pattinson had ended, too. 

 

But no; like a phoenix from the ashes of his previous films, Pattinson rose, and is currently ascending to the heights of super stardom with his take as Matt Reeves’ The Batman. 

 

But, you say, how could that sparkly vampire fop possibly take on the dark and tortured Bruce Wayne?! Oh dear reader, how you’ve missed out. While you were happily dozing in a land free of Robert Pattinson (or so you thought), that pesky thespian was breaking cinematic ground with each new film he made, and you were deaf to it. 

 

To prologue, let me be very clear: Robert Pattinson was never a bad actor, he just so happened to be in bad films. There’s a distinct difference. Let us never forget that he first burst onto our screens as Cedric Diggory in the fourth installment of the Harry Potter franchise, and was arguably one of the most memorable aspects of that very film. It’s just a pity that the talent he had was snuffed out by public (read: older, male, white) disgust for the Twilight films, despite Pattinson still giving quite a good performance when you consider the material he was given. That’s what is important to remember: Pattinson, despite his not always stellar project choice, has never given a lackluster performance. If nothing else you have to admire his sheer tenacity in approaching every film he undertook with a level degree of earnestness and dedication. 

 

So let’s begin. It’s 2012, Breaking Dawn Part 2 has come and gone, and The Twilight Saga is finally put to rest. Our hero-apparent takes a two year sabbatical (deserved) and then pops back on to select independent screens with David Michôd’s The Rover (2014). A post-apocalyptic piece set in the Australian outback, it’s an interesting contrast with Pattinson’s later work with the Safdie brothers; but that latent energy and barely controlled ferocity is still evident, even three years prior. 

 

One only has to look at the directors that Pattinson went on to work on after his Twilight tenure to see that he must not only be good but he also (as someone who prides himself on picking every role he works on) has a firm grasp of truly great pioneers of contemporary cinema. It reads like a film school prospectus: Werner Herzog, Anton Corbijn, James Gray and Clare Denis. The list goes on. He plays a disconnected photographer during James Dean’s seminal Life photoshoot with startling emotional nuance in Corbijn’s Life (2015), he plays a hilarious head-over-heels-in-love cowboy in the Zellners’ genre-bending Damsel (2018) alongside Mia Wasikowska and a miniature pony called Butterscotch.

 

However, Pattinson’s star is once again affixed to the cultural cinematic zeitgeist with his turbulent and traumatic portrayal of Connie Nikas in the Safdie brothers’ Good Time (2017). Charting the rise and fall of a small time New York crook, it received an eight minute standing ovation at Cannes and is often credited with turning the public gaze back onto Pattinson as an actor to watch rather than a Twilight wash-up. And since then, he hasn’t crippled under the pressure (as perhaps he did during his Saga days), and instead has garnered more and more praise with every new role he takes on. From a sociopathic astronaut in High Life (Claire Denis, 2018) to a flamboyant Dauphin in The King (David Michôd, 2019) to an increasingly delusional lighthouse keeper in Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse (2019), at every possible turn is a churning novel performance, each one better than last. 

 

In terms of what we have to look forward to from Pattinson there’s only a little side project he’s been doing by an upcoming director by the name of Christopher Nolan? Ringing any bells? Well if Covid-19 stops being such a killjoy, you can expect to see Pattinson in Tenet, Nolan’s latest mind-bending blockbuster alongside John David Washington and Elizabeth Debicki about preventing World War III through time travel (seems pertinent). Other than that he’ll also be starring The Devil All the Time (Antonio Campos), set to be distributed by Netflix this year and also flexing a strong cast consisting of Sebastian Stan, Tom Holland and Jason Clarke to name but a few. And then there’s The Batman. But you already knew about that. 

Frankly, the first years of Pattinson’s career feels like a non-starter. Had it not been for his time in the clutches of ‘Twi-hards’, he’d be like any other indie darling on the come up, and in reality, he is. Even the public attitude towards Twilight is getting revised, with many noting how cinematically interesting the first installment was. That’s not to say that that will dissuade public opinion anymore, but it’s important to bear in mind: though Robert Pattinson has starred in critically perceived ‘bad’ films, he’s never been anything less than an exemplary actor in his craft. If Tenet or The Batman are the films to open audiences’ eyes to that, far be it from me to yell ‘fake fan!’. But, regardless, Pattinson has a complex and brilliant filmography behind him that is sure to sustain him and his renaissance more than ill-fated Matthew McConaughey’s two. If you weren’t sure before let me be clear: you’re going to see a lot more Robert Pattinson on your screens in the coming years. And you’ll love every second of it.