The “incredible” 1999 movie that changed Robert Pattinson’s life: “So funny and so powerful”
Name a better British actor in movies over the past 15 years than Robert Pattinson, I’ll wait. Actually, no, I can’t wait, I forgot I have some chicken dinosaurs in the airfryer, so let’s just agree that he has been pretty much at the top of his game for a long time now, and really should have won far more industry awards than he has.
Maybe it’s because he started off in the teen fantasy worlds of Harry Potter and Twilight that he wasn’t taken seriously enough for several years, but then that wasn’t his fault; everyone has to start somewhere, and besides, Ryan Gosling was a Mouseketeer, and he’s won three Oscar nominations and six Golden Globe nods compared to Pattinson’s zero from both organisations.
In fact, looking at that stat, it’s fairly outrageous that Pattinson has never been nominated by the ‘big two’, because he’s rarely been less than stellar in all manner of different, daring, and creative roles in films that are definitely, definitely better than La La Land.
There’s the moody A24 black and white two-hander The Lighthouse, for a start, in which he was brilliant, then there’s 2017’s cracker Good Time by the Safdie brothers, where again, he was incredible. His reinvention of the Caped Crusader in The Batman was spot on, and his career is stuffed full of superb films people just frankly missed, like the space horror High Life and the Deep South thriller The Devil All the Time.
To use trendy internet parlance, the bloke is simply not getting his flowers. He could have been expected to play it safe after the mega franchises, to stay resolutely stuck to those teenage bedroom walls and to sign up for one blockbuster after another. But what did he do? He made a hard left and signed up with David Cronenberg to make 2012’s Cosmopolis, a deeply strange anti-capitalist art film in which he gets a prostate exam in a limo and a man gets stabbed in the eye on live TV. That’s a long way from invisibility cloaks and Ron losing his pet rat.
So what caused Pattinson to take on the kind of movies he has, films that by no means guarantee any kind of box office success, films that quite often are polarising and if anything sometimes work to make him less endearing to casting directors? Well, it seems it’s because the London-born actor is simply a fan and student of movies that traditionally are exactly that: eclectic, arthouse, controversial, very lead-character driven.
Over the years, he has expressed an admiration for films like Jean Luc Godard’s fiercely cool 1965 road movie Pierrot Le Fou, Ken Russell’s banned 1971 horror The Devils, and the brilliantly bloody Jo Nesbo adaptation Headhunters from 2011. And closer to home, Pattinson is a fan of another uncompromising director in the form of Shane Meadows, the man responsible for the searingly bleak Dead Man’s Shoes and the 1999 comedy-drama A Room for Romeo Brass, which is a particular favourite of his.
He told Vogue, “I saw this movie when I was a teenager, and I thought it was so funny and so powerful…the performances are just incredible, and the writing’s amazing. Paddy Considine is legendary in it. I remember parts of it so clearly; when I was younger, I used to watch it all the time.”
Co-written and directed by Meadows, Room for Romeo Brass is Considine’s screen debut and tells the story of two boys who are best friends, and a loner who steps in to save them from being beaten up, only to fall for one of their sisters. Made on a small budget, it was nominated for several industry awards and has the claim to fame of being comedian Bob Mortimer’s favourite ever movie.
