Is there life beyond the living dead? Can Robert Pattinson, the 24-year-old Englishman who achieved a teen-talisman celebrity playing the dreamboat vampire Edward, find longevity in a post-Twilight Saga acting career?
For a few moments in Water for Elephants, the answer seems yes. As Jacob Jankowski, a part that requires him mainly to be shy and watchful, RPattz radiates a slow magnetism that locks the viewer’s eyes on him. His easy smile — not the smirk he often plasters on Edward, or the louche sneer familiar from TV interviews — invites us inside his star quality. And even without fangs, he’s got great teeth. Riffling Hollywood history for other icons who can suggest preternatural handsomeness in galoot roles, we might think dreamily of Gary Cooper, Montgomery Clift…until the vapors pass, we return to 2011 and realize that, however strong Pattinson’s anachronistic attractiveness, they don’t make movies like Cooper’s Ball of Fire or Clift’s A Place in the Sun any more.
But they try — as in this pachydermally ponderous film version of Sara Gruen’s popular novel. A circus memoir of the 1930s related decades later by the elderly Jacob , Elephants is itself a flashback to Hollywood’s midcentury, when sentimental best-sellers routinely became films of high purpose whose every noble or venal emotion is cued by ostentatious program music.
