How The Devil All the Time’s Robert Pattinson killed the ghost of Edward Cullen

Here’s another opinion piece. I’ve been blogging about Rob for 12 years and although to Rob’s new fans it may feel like Rob’s having this success overnight – I still remember the non-flattering opinions for Bel-Ami, Cosmopolis and even The Rover. How times have changed, it’s so refreshing to see that others have given him a chance (especially knowing how hard Rob’s been working for the past 10 years) and seeing what we’ve known all along. Here’s an excerpt from Paul Bradshaw’s article for Radio Times:

Pattinson, in fact, only has a small role in the film, but he still feels like the lead thanks to a swaggering performance that out-weirds and out-creeps everyone else around him. A sex-pest southern preacher who wrings everything he can out of his small-town influence, he makes his entrance in a frilly pirate shirt, slickly dipping two fingers into a gravy pot as he smooth talks the church widows with one eye on their granddaughters. Affecting a high-pitched voice and a spidery walk, he seems marginally larger than life – overplaying his part just enough to feel odd without tipping over into parody. In a long film crowded with famous faces and big events, Pattinson is the one thing that stands out.

… Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is about as strait-laced as blockbusters get – a coolly grown-up sci-fi with no room for grandstanding – but Pattinson still managed to play the film’s background time-cop as a raffish gentleman sidekick that he modelled on English intellectual Christopher Hitchens. John David Washington might get the film’s Bond role, but it’s Pattinson who gets most of the wit and charm, pushing his affectations to the limit again in another performance that seems to be deliberately different from everything else he’s ever done.

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Last year saw him overplay The Duke Of Guyenne (complete with panto pantaloons and a thick French accent) in The King, and underplay Ephraim Winslow opposite Willem Dafoe in gothic arthouse horror The Lighthouse. Throw his menacing Reverend Preston Teagardin into the mix from The Devil All The Time and it’s hard to paint a picture of who Pattinson even is – an ever-changing coatrack of characters in different, difficult films that he plays with fierce sensitivity and curious oddness.