Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1

Remember back in elementary
school when you’d pad your book reports with the word “very”? Twilight:
Breaking Dawn — Part 1 is a lot like that. Only here, the teacher (in this
case, the studio) returned the book report (script) and asked the writer to add
a whole lot of padding (pauses, sighs, montages). Why? Because that would allow
one film to become two, and “Twi-hards” could get greedily soaked for twice the
price.

So, for more than an hour, Breaking
Dawn features pre-wedding brooding, one minute of wedding vows (mostly kissing),
post-wedding brooding, pre-coital brooding, one minute of rough sex (tastefully
shot in gauzy close-ups, of course), post-coital brooding, a whole lot of
montages and — voilà! — Bella gets pregnant. If you thought she moped a lot
before, witness the pre-partum depression that accompanies her soon-to-be-born
half-breed suckling.

Yeah, there’s some nonsense
about her bloody bundle of joy violating a previously unmentioned bylaw in the
vampire-werewolf treaty, but this just provides Jacob with something to do.
Contrived as the conflict is, it’s a heck of a lot better than the
show-up-to-storm-off scenes that precede it. Bill Condon (Kinsey, Dreamgirls)
is the series’ first A-list director and, try as he might, he adds very little
to this exercise in soapy inaction and monosyllabic melodrama. He gets the best performances from the cast to date (not saying
much) and creates a few absorbing moments, but his action scenes are murky, the
humor is clunky, and there’s simply no getting around Melissa Rosenberg’s
lumbering and unimaginative script.

Pattinson, once again, smirks
and tries to look soulfully sullen. Lautner acts really, really hard (and
fails). Billy Burke still has his Village People mustache. And Kristen Stewart
proves once again that she’s the best actor not named Michael Sheen in the cast
(he’ll be back in the last installment).

Convincing fans that the Twilight series is anything but revelatory is a waste of time. Like Harry Potter and Star Wars, the films are mostly critic-proof. What makes the films
so risible is how cheaply their devotees are bought. The special effects are
anything but special, and desperately little inventiveness is applied to the
storytelling, cinematography or thematic explorations. Given the box office
numbers involved, Hollywood can and should do better.

More troubling is how author
Stephenie Meyer’s subtext transitions from being pro-abstinence into anti-sex.
It’s one thing to gussy up teenage anxieties over the loss of virginity (an
entirely appropriate reaction); it’s another to punish Bella’s deflowering with
death. I get that Meyer is trying to let her protagonist eat her cake and have
it too (by delivering a baby before turning into a vampire) but there’s no
getting around the fact Twilight puritanically insists that sex isn’t
only scary, it’s fatal. Even if you only have it once. On your honeymoon.

And if that weren’t enough.
The series’ endless focus on hunky, young Jacob as an object to lust after (but
not love) isn’t just a tease, it’s a cruelly delivered mixed message: Long for
the sexually primal nature of werewolves but submit to the romantic sterility
of vampires.

All these thematic
considerations aside, Breaking Dawn — Part 1 fails at the one thing it
was created to do: deliver Bella’s magical matrimonial moment. For
three-and-a-half films, our moody heroine has been wrestling with her sexual
longings and Edward’s chivalrous sense of propriety. But when the moment
finally arrives, Condon and Rosenberg give their consummation less attention
than the honeymoon vacation house it takes place in. Even the climax is an
anti-climax.

This article appears in Nov 16-22, 2011.