Kristen Stewart's Cloudy birthday weekend
Thursday, April 9, 2015 at 9:30PM 
Your weekly reminder that Julianne Moore won an Oscar. It's still true and still amazing.Tim here. It's a good weekend to be Kristen Stewart: today is the actress's 25th birthday, and tomorrow begins the limited U.S. release of Clouds of Sils Maria, which has won her the best reviews of her 15-year career. It's the natural endpoint of a very good 12 months for Stewart, which saw the premiere of three movies (Camp X-Ray, Sils Maria, Still Alice) that found her proving herself to all the hostile critics that were ready to write off her entire career as an asterisk following her starring role in the Twilight movies.
Having been one of those critics – part of the fun of The Twilight Saga while it was ongoing was having an annual opportunity to trot out my list of synonyms for "catatonic" in describing Stewart's performances – I am happy to have been thus defeated. What she's doing in Sils Maria isn't just giving a solid performance and holding her own with a modestly complex part and proving that there's more to her than just gaping blandly at a sexy shiny vampire and a sexy jailbait werewolf. We just saw Stewart do that in Still Alice, where she did a fine job of keeping one corner of the movie nailed down as it hunted for anything interesting besides Julianne Moore's performance.
No, Stewart's performance in Sils Maria is an out-and-out revelation, the kind you tell your grandkids about. She's not just "fine" or "solid", she's the best thing in the movie – she steals the movie right out from Juliette Binoche, and that's simply Not Done.
Admittedly, my enthusiasm for Stewart's performance is directly related, and inverse to my general detachment from the film itself. Director Olivier Assayas hasn't perpetrated anything quite as clumsy in years, employing a metaphor about actresses' relationships to the roles they play, and women as aspects of a single personality, that feels like it was boxed up in the 1960s for being too obvious, and then stretching it out to feature length by having the character relentlessly state and re-state each and every thematic echo. This brittle over-articulation is rough on Binoche, who has to play the same scenes over and over again; it's deadly for Chloë Grace Moretz, who gets in deep over her head as the third leg of this triangle. But Stewart glides through it effortlessly, despite having the same blunt, overdetermined dialogue and situations that Binoche does.
The film hands itself over to her entirely for its first act, letting her play the unflappable personal assistant and protective superego to the neurotic art film star Binoche plays. It doesn't seem possible for wrangling schedules over the phone to be as compelling as Stewart makes it, especially as she threads unspoken feelings of exasperation and maternal care towards Binoche underneath all her slick, jargony conversations. Her silent expressions are as meaningful as anything she says or does in building one of the strongest personalities to have shown up in a movie this year or last.
It doesn't seem possible that this is the same actress who was such a liability to the already soporific Twilight pictures, or who inertly slumped her way through the enormously bland Snow White and the Huntsman. Even in her best pre- and intra-Twlight work – Into the Wild, Adventureland, and The Runaways, primarily – Stewart hasn't been so confident in her choices and dominant in her screen presence. Is it the relief of having real, meaty concepts to devour? The thrill of getting to play scenes with a world-class talent like Binoche? Whatever did it, Stewart was freed up her do things far beyond anything ever asked of her, and she was flawless in every way. And with a Kelly Reichardt film currently in production pitting her against Michelle Williams and Laura Dern, with an Ang Lee film waiting in the wings, it's easy to hope that this newfound ascension to the top levels of her generation of performers will stick, too.
So happy birthday, Kristen Stewart, for you and for us – because with a performance like this one waiting to be discovered and enjoyed, it's the audience who's received the best present.
Are you convinced that we're on the cusp of the Stewartssaince, or do you need more time to wash the Twilight taste out of your mouth? Perhaps you've been a believer all along.
Reader Comments (18)
Nice write-up! Thought ur little bit about telling the grand kids was funny (going a little overboard there dear sir!)
Too bad she couldn't have ridden Julianne's Oscar buzz into that fifth supporting actress spot a la Maggie Gyllenhaal with Jeff Bridges a few years back. That would've been interesting. I'm sure she had a bit of support.
I don't think we're on the cusp of the Stewartssaince - I think we're in the middle of it. Between Camp X, Still Alice, and Clouds of Sils Maria, she's become a sudden (deserved) critical darling.
I saw her talk at a screening of Clouds last week, and while she remains visibly uncomfortable with Q&A's, she also conveys a simultaneous "fuck you" attitude and genuine excitement about filmmaking. I wasn't initially on the KStew wagon, but I am all for her now.
Also helps that she's building a lesbian following to outmatch Angelina Jolie's...
Philip- it's easy for me to say since we'll never know, but I'm absolutely confident that if Clouds of Sils Maria had somehow managed to open in the States in 2014, she'd have gotten a nomination for Still Alice on the strength of the cumulative reviews.
I have been a believer (Stewarter? Krisbian?) since Into the WIld. And now that everybody else is cottoning on, I couldn't be more thrilled. I adore her. So looking forward to whatever her career may hold.
I had never seen Twilight and knew of Stewart from the tabloids and Panic Room but after seeing her Camp Xray and Still Alice I couldn't see what all the hostility towars her,maybe I need to see the Twilight series to appreciate how dfar shes come.
She indeed is the next best thing about Still Alice after Moore to the extent that I found myself wanting to see more of her character any time she was off screen, which is always a good thing. I've been more apathetic than vitriolic about her as an actress, but I think that's because her performances if nothing else tend to read as unsure.
Sorry to piss in the punchbowl, but I think Stewart still has a long way to go. She was good in Still Alice -- she convinced me she was the character, not just a movie trying on a tough role -- but I was mostly aware of how untrained she is. She's all surface impulse -- little inhales and exhales to convey emotion, "dramatic" pauses and eyerolls that destroy the poetry of the language (what she did to Chekhov and Kushner, ugh). Watching her next to Julianne Moore was such a clear contrast between a veteran who knows how to use her instrument and a newbie who needs to shake off her tics before they become bad habits.
Tired of the Julianne reminders..... lots of actresses have won Oscars....
Kathy Bates acts best as only a head and as a mustachioed man with a horrible accent
Need someone way better to do a Marie Dressler bio.
@rick – Instigator.
I disagree, however, with discrediting Binoche and Moretz efforts. yes , Stewart was good , but mainly because she didn't pale next to Binoche s brilliance. Persona and Two women are some of my favorite films and is precisely of this "boxed up" idea from the 60's .
I fell in love during On the Road, and am SOOOO excited to see this one!
@3rtful
oh yeah .... and you aren't
my biggest shock on this blog... that you are in your early thirties and I thought you must be at least in your early 70"s....
@rick
You're a self-loathing gay man.
Ladies, please!
I agree that Stewart is the best thing about the movie, and totally love that you noted how weirdly fascinating it is to watch her organise a schedule, but I also loved the rest of the film around her. I could take or leave Moretz, but found Binoche similarly compelling in many scenes (like Stewart's final scene).
I've never seen the Twilight films so I never built up any feeling - positive or negative - towards Stewart.
I absolutely didn't get the fuss about her work in Still Alice - I thought she was forced and awkward for the most part, and just stratospherically awful in the Chekhov scene.
But I'm definitely excited to see her in Sils Maria and Camp X-Ray.
I agree with San FranCinema. Stewart was good but not that good. I do think she has potential, after all she is still young. She is much more watchable than say, Emma Watson, whose tics are so unbearable on screen.
@ 3rtful
If I were gay...I would definitely become straight so as Not to be identified as a person such as yourself ...