From Page to Screen
Twilight: New Moonby Claire E. Gross
The second cinematic installment of Stephenie Meyer’s vampire romance series The Twilight Saga is best left for only the most devoted fans. Both book and movie follow the deepening friendship between heroine Bella and Jacob. A sweet, younger-brother type in the first movie, he’s suddenly bulked up to become a romantic counterpart to Edward: warm to Edward’s cold, present when Edward disappears without a trace (having been convinced by a paper-cut that Bella is better off without him). Meanwhile, Jacob is a werewolf, his tribe sworn to protect humankind from vampires — sorry, Edward — and vampire-with-a-grudge Victoria closes in on Bella. Oh yeah, and Bella’s depressed a lot.
Unlike the first movie, which liberally streamlined the book’s plot and punctuated the melodrama with humor, New Moon hews more closely to the original text — and the result is not for the better. The novel lacks focus, careening from threat to threat, unable to settle on a single emotional touchstone or theme. Is the showdown with the Volturi the climax, or is it the showdown between Edward and Jacob? (And where did Victoria go, anyway?) Is the main plotline the love triangle, or the exploration of the werewolf mythology, or Bella’s and Edward’s parallel self-destructive streaks? And if Bella’s existence is all that’s keeping Edward alive, as he dramatically professes, just what was keeping him going for the previous two hundred
years? Also, why is Jacob randomly shirtless all the time? Of course, the movie is guilty only of failing to fix these holes in the series, not for actually creating them (save perhaps that last one).
When translated to the silver screen, the novel’s weaknesses become even more obvious. With the plot compressed into a still-too-long two hours and ten minutes, the lack of trajectory is impossible to miss. Even more problematic is the unflagging intensity: when every scene is the most significant scene ever in the character’s lives, it’s not exciting, it’s exhausting, especially when half of those scenes are little more than intense looks exchanged among characters. When the music (which overlies almost every moment) swells to a violins-sobbing, drums-pounding, and/or voices-keening emotional peak every three minutes, the score isn’t accompaniment, it’s transparent manipulation. The barrage of high-impact scenes ultimately means that they lose impact, individually and as a whole.
Both Robert Pattinson (Edward) and Taylor Lautner (Jacob) are decent actors, and both show promise in this film, but too often, in keeping with the overblown tone of the movie, they play every moment as if they are on the verge of either jumping the person next to them (whether in violence or in lust) or throwing up. Kristin Stewart is still quietly compelling as Bella and manages to make her often trite lines seem more natural than they are. Her body language and facial expressions even hint at a less naive heroine than that of the book—a refreshing change, though one undercut by later plot developments. The rest of the cast, including a remarkably creepy Dakota Fanning and the solid Billy Burke (who grounds the production as Bella’s worried, diffident dad), is strong but underused.
As for the triangle itself, it loses its power as Edward — shadow-eyed, palely distant, and self-destructive — loses his appeal. Who wouldn’t choose Jacob instead, with his open smile, steadfast friendship, and overexposed six-pack abs? All the flaws of Stephenie Meyer’s novel — the redefinition of conflict as prolonged miscommunication, the romanticization of obsession over affection, the passing off of incident as plot — are laid bare in this self-indulgent cinematic adaptation.
| Claire E. Gross is associate editor of the Horn Book Magazine. |  |
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