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.