WHERE MANY ACTORS can’t seem to break free from Hollywood’s tentpole machine, Kristen Stewart got away and has seldom looked back. She used the cachet from the Twilight movies to take on more exciting indie projects and work with visionary directors, much like her former co-star Robert Pattinson.
The first director to optimise her understated skills was Olivier Assayas. In Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), he cast Stewart as Valentine, the young personal assistant to aging star Maria Enders, played by the more seasoned Juliette Binoche. Masking her own self-doubt behind wide-rimmed glasses, Valentine helps allay Maria’s insecurities. Maria is especially insecure because she has been asked to take on the role of the veteran actress, not the ingenue she played decades earlier, in a revival of an All About Eve-type play.
In a scene, Valentine and Maria go to see the new Hollywood blockbuster starring 19-year-old Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz), the actor who will be playing the ingenue. Maria is quick to dismiss the movie as trash, Jo-Ann as a “bimbo,” and her character as “stupid.” Valentine mounts a defence that could be read as Stewart’s own against critics of Twilight movies. When she insists “there is no less truth” to such movies, Maria can only laugh. But it doesn’t stop Valentine from doubling down on her point, commending Jo-Ann’s self-confidence at her age and her ability to find a dark side to a superpowered character.
As Assayas described Stewart’s performance in an interview with Vulture, “I realised that every single tiny thing I gave her to do, she would invent something: She would make it interesting, she would make it sexy, she would make it weird. It ended up being a bit frustrating because her character in Clouds of Sils Maria is written as less multi-layered than Juliette Binoche’s character, and so the question stayed with me, ‘What would happen if I gave her a bigger part?’”
That’s exactly what Assayas did in their second collaboration on Personal Shopper. Again, Stewart played an assistant to a diva. Only this time around, she is the focus and doesn’t have an actor of Binoche’s skill or stature to play off. For the most part, she shares the screen with an iPhone and a possible ghost. This puts the spotlight firmly on her, punctuating her gestural modalities and exposing the less-is-more mechanics of her acting. It was a performance that confirmed just how orphic a screen presence Stewart can be.
As Sheila O’Malley described in a column for Film Comment, “Stewart feels the sunbeams on her face: she works with the camera in an extraordinarily intimate and vulnerable way. It is her primary relationship. Her awkwardness does not close her off, or make her tighten up. There’s a part of her that always seems a little bit uncomfortable being looked at, but what is special about Stewart — and not often remarked-upon — is that she doesn’t try to combat this. She doesn’t try to correct it. She just lets us see that part of her. She lets us see her discomfort and shyness. This is where her magic really lies.”
It was on watching Personal Shopper that Pablo Larraín decided to cast Stewart as Diana in Spencer. Too often, the razzle dazzle of rote impersonations confuses awards bodies into thinking they are worthy showcases. What Stewart does is far more layered, as she seems to leverage her own celebrity baggage into her performance. At the age of 11, the actor had gotten her big break as Jodie Foster’s daughter in David Fincher’s home-invasion thriller Panic Room (2002). Six years later, the Twilight saga had thrust a still teenaged Stewart into the kind of media scrutiny she wasn’t prepared for.
The oppressive pressure of living an over-examined life under the paparazzi’s intrusive eye gave her all the emotional raw material she needed to play a princess living an over-examined life under the paparazzi’s intrusive eye. Stewart’s face turns into a life-and-death mask in the mood piece. Rather than resort to overt melodrama, she captures the spirit and soul of her subject, locating the despair underlying an eating disorder.
A similar meta-context informs her portrayal of French New Wave darling Jean Seberg in Seberg. Though Seberg is neither as well-made nor as well-thought-through as Spencer, Stewart still breathes her artistry into it. The same goes for her take on riot grrrl Joan Jett in The Runaways, where she owns the titular band’s “bad reputation” while unpacking the pain fuelling it. Her ability to mobilise the pain of a character or the energy of a scene via physicality allows her performances to cut through even bad movies.
The good ones understand all the tangible and intangible elements that Stewart brings to a role, no matter the screen time. In Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, she plays Beth, a city-based lawyer who makes an eight-hour round trip twice a week to teach law to interested residents in a small town. One of Beth’s students is Lily Gladstone’s infatuated ranch hand Jamie. Beth remains a bit of a mystery. But through Jamie’s eyes, Stewart’s role encapsulates her own tantalising yet elusive power.
What Certain Women and Clouds of Sils Maria also established is how well Stewart can play off her co-stars. She is as comfortable acting as she is reacting. It is her support act that lends depth, texture and humanity to Gladstone’s Jamie and Binoche’s Maria. She holds her own even opposite Julianne Moore in Still Alice, playing a young woman watching the gradual decline of her mother caught in the unforgiving grip of Alzheimer’s. “I always knew how special she was,” Moore said of Stewart in an interview. “What was a pleasure for me, working with her, was to witness somebody that’s got that enormous reserve of emotion at their fingertips.”
With each performance, Stewart keeps expanding her dramatic range. But her delirious turn in Crimes of the Future makes you wonder what she could do in an out-and-out comedy. All the exciting possibilities only suggest she is a star yet to tap into the full extent of her superpowers.
