Life, film review: a painfully protracted photoshoot

Robert Pattinson’s matinee idol looks overshadow the star in this slow-moving tale of how James Dean became an icon
Cool customers: Dane DeHaan, left, and Robert Pattinson
David Sexton25 September 2015

On seeing one of the first daguerrotypes in 1839, the artist Paul Delaroche said, a little prematurely, “From today, painting is dead.” What we can say for sure is that nowadays photography itself is completely degraded as a force. The ubiquity of digital photography — brought home to me most strongly a few weeks ago on an ill-advised walk through St Mark’s Square in Venice, now mainly a venue for selfies, with all the bridges in the touristic areas impassable, being used for the same purpose rather than transit — makes it valueless.

Life is the story of how in 1955 photographer Dennis Stock, then 26, was assigned by Life magazine to photograph the 23-year-old James Dean, who was between the making of East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, and was destined to die in a car crash a few months later.

Stock’s work significantly formed Dean’s image as it existed outside the films themselves, as he followed him from LA to New York, where he took the iconic — as they say — photograph of him walking towards the camera, cigarette in mouth, hunched up in a long black coat, in heavy rain, in Times Square — captured in just five frames — and then to the farm in Indiana where he had been raised by his aunt after his mother’s death when he was nine. This series of pictures was published in Time magazine in March 1955, two days before the premiere of East of Eden, under the explanatory title of “Moody new star”.

So it’s a vignette, an extended meditation on photography and its power to shape our perceptions, rather than any sort of biopic of James Dean himself. It is very slow-moving and deliberately uneventful (there’s no depiction of the car-racing that led to Dean’s death) and self-consciously beautifully photographed, almost more than it is filmed, one might say, throughout.

Its director, Dutch-born Anton Corbijn, began as a music photographer, moving to London in 1979 to pursue this career, taking celebrated pictures of Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Miles Davies, Frank Sinatra, Tom Waits, and so forth, as well as artists such as Ai Weiwei and Lucian Freud.

He has been the house photographer for U2 and Depeche Mode and has made some 80 music videos, for Coldplay, Nirvana, Arcade Fire and so on, as well as designing posters, stage sets and CD covers. In 2007, he released his first feature film, Control, about the life and death of Ian Curtis, the singer with Joy Division, who was subject to epilepsy and depression and felt his life torn apart by his love both for his wife and for a beautiful Belgian journalist. Filmed in colour but printed to black and white, Control has rare authenticity: if Joy Division mean little to you, it might appear unconvincingly reverential, but if you feel the music as Corbijn clearly does, it’s compelling.

His investment in James Dean seems less direct, more to do with nostalgically celebrating the photographer-artist relationship that he has practiced himself so successfully. The film’s dynamic, so far as it has one, is that punky, disaffected James Dean is at first very wary of Stock as part of the whole publicity process that he wants to shun, or at least sidestep, but then he realises that Stock himself, with a failed marriage and unhappy parenthood already behind him, wants to help.

He’s on a journey too, towards a new understanding of a youth culture that refuses big studio norms (represented by monster mogul Jack Warner, played by Ben Kingsley with a nasty glare and an intimidating hooter).

“I ain’t one of those red carpet gorillas,” Stock tells Dean when they first meet, edgily sizing each other up, poolside at a party. Dean takes a lot of convincing. “I lose myself in my roles,” he says. “I don’t want to lose myself in this other stuff — and you are the other stuff.” But he’s wrong about that, he eventually realises. Stock proves crucial to him.

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Unfortunately, Robert Pattinson (both he and Kristen Stewart have emerged so convincingly from Twilight, haven’t they, compared with the Potter diaspora?) is more of a matinee idol as Dennis Stock than Dane DeHaan (The Amazing Spider-Man 2, as the villainous Green Goblin) appears to be as James Dean. DeHaan is mumbly and drawling, slouchy and hunched, always looking away, unresponsive, caught up in his own world in a thoroughly adolescent way.

The real James Dean was so good-looking he could get away with it and still seem fascinating and desirable. DeHaan, who put on two stone to play the role and have a more realistically Fifties physique, doesn’t pull that off. Robert Pattinson is clearly the better-looking and more starry of the two, which makes their dance around each other a little off-kilter — and there really doesn’t seem to be the necessary chemistry.

Since Dean’s death and canonisation it has gradually become clear that he was actively bisexual — Germaine Greer, with her usual delicacy, said in 2005: “Looking back over half a century to the meteoric career of James Dean, the one thing that now seems obvious is that the boy was queer as a coot.” Yet all that element is suppressed, or expressed only in the tentative friendship that develops with the thoroughly straight Stock, seen in one scene briskly screwing a girl in a bar who so much thinks of him as a substitute for Dean, whom she can’t have, that she absent-mindedly calls him Jimmy afterwards.

The film looks good, to be sure, with saturated colours, sharp wide-screen cinematography and ever artful framing. It’s in the very best of taste and it will appeal to all those of a certain age who just love to dwell in this early modern America, with those amazing cars, those great clothes, those endless cigarettes. But it barely moves forward at all and its slow self-regard becomes almost intolerable.

In short, it is itself a painfully protracted photoshoot. And photographs just don’t matter that much anymore now they’re so incessant. Seeing this first in Berlin in February and then this week in a screening room in Soho, I found my eyes gently closing at the same point, two-thirds of the way through. Only one of those screenings was in the evening.

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