But there’s a fuzziness to the movie, a “Star Wars”-goes-to-the-art-house meditative quality that doesn’t do Chalamet any favors as an actor. There’s a grandeur to “Dune” that makes it a nice pedestal for Chalamet’s beautiful-boy cerebral magnetism. Defeat his enemies, yes, and survive, yes, but what is Paul Atreides’ quest? The character’s messianic trappings don’t feel like they emerge from someplace deep within Chalamet himself, who comes off as stoic and rather placid for all the sand and tumult that’s swirling around him. He’s there at the center of the action, looking like Edward Scissorhands’ red carpet brother in his mop of curly hair and black-leather armor suit, but for much of “Dune” it’s hard to know what, exactly, we’re rooting for him to do. But to me, and I say this as a major Timothée Chalamet fan, I think he gets a little lost in it. If Chalamet were great in the film, it wouldn’t matter how well it’s doing. Is “Dune” a hit? Its box office numbers are being spun as just-good-enough-to-get-by (with its simultaneous opening on HBO Max offered as a kind of get-out-of-underperforming-jail-free card), though in the world as we’ve known it for decades, a second weekend take of $15.5 million for a movie as gargantuan as “Dune” doesn’t exactly sound like a champagne number. But it’s getting harder to read the tea leaves on this stuff. But sustaining stardom is more of a balancing act than it once was, which is why Timothée Chalamet can seem like a very big star and, at the same time, like someone who’s still waiting for the movie that will put him over the top.Īccording to the logic of 21st-century franchise film culture, “ Dune” was supposed to be that movie. Once you’re famous, you tend to stay famous. That’s not a comment on the actors or their talent and it’s not to suggest that fame itself has become fleeting. Instead, it mints people who come up in franchise films and can seem, for a moment, like stars, until that moment passes and, just like that, they’re no longer at the center of things. Or, at least, in an era that doesn’t exactly mint movie stars. We’re now, after all, in the post-movie-star age. His star trajectory - the kinds of movies he’d be acting in, the kind of movie star he’d want to become - would probably be a lot more clearly delineated than it is today. But it makes him an actor who both complements and contradicts his era - or, more to the point, is contradicted by it.īy which I mean this: Imagine that Chalamet had come along 30 years ago. So does that make him a walking contradiction? Not at all. In truth, every one of those statements describes Timothée Chalamet.
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