Robert pattinson the devil all the time

In this period drama, Tom Holland plays a country boy surrounded by Gothic ghouls, including Robert Pattinson’s preacher man.

Video

transcript

transcript

‘The Devil All the Time’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The director Antonio Campos discusses a scene from his drama featuring Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson.

“NARRATOR: Hi, I’m Antonio Campos, and I’m the director of The Devil All the Time. So we’re about 2/3 of the way into the movie, we’re entering the third act. And Arvin has been spying on this preacher and has figured out that he did something to his stepsister. And so he is coming to get revenge. And one of the things I wanted to convey in this scene is that Arvin isn’t a killer. He comes in with the intent of killing him, and in the moment when he’s going to shoot, he gets nervous and he sits down, and he’s got to muster up the courage to go through with the act. He’s a violent kid, but he’s not a killer yet. And so what I wanted to do is I wanted to try and give you two perspectives in this scene, one from the perspective of Teagardin talking to this young man that’s come in.” “You got time for a sinner?” Who wants to confess, get something off his chest, and the other, in close up on Arvin’s face, where we are with Arvin, where we’re with him, we’re seeing that he’s nervous, and that he’s a little anxious. “I’ve done lustful acts.” So we get this angle here, this close-up angle, and that’s where we’re in it with him, and we get to see into his eyes. And then there’s the frontal angle, and the frontal, we’re withholding his eyes. We’re seeing it the way that Teagardin sees him. The other thing there is this little technical thing— is Teagardin has seen Arvin in church with his grandmother and with his stepsister, but with his hat on, and the angle that he’s looking at him, he can’t quite identify him. So that’s the other reason why this wardrobe was really important for the scene. This is, by far, my favorite scene in the whole movie. And I was so excited for these two characters to come together. And for this force of good and this force of evil to finally meet. And it’s the beginning of what becomes Arvin coming up against a lot of different evil forces in the story. It’s a very long scene, so we really wanted you to feel every single beat. And so this scene took about— I think we edited this scene on and off for about nine months. “One day I got this girl in my truck and I drove her out to the sticks, and I had my way with her.” [SIGHS] “She put up a fight?” “No.” And it was really about trying to capture every single detail that these two great actors gave us. I really think that Tom Holland is the greatest actor of his generation. And I think he’s so natural, and he conveys such a wonderful humanity, but still manages to capture this kind of danger. And that Rob Pattinson is this kind of mad genius, and you don’t know what he’s going to give you on the day. And so I had this wonderful footage to work with. And it was really about trying to nail every little micro expression, every gesture. And by doing that, we create this kind of— we start building up the tension to the point where then Arvin stands up and, with standing up, he reveals his eyes and reveals his identity to Teagardin. “I’ve been watching your every move for the last couple weeks. You can’t get enough of that Reaster girl, can you? Is that how you did my Lenora, too?” And this kind of face off, here, was really— this is where it kind of, like, really finely tuned the editing to make sure that every little gesture, once the gun revealed itself, is dangerous for Teagardin. “Don’t do anything you’ll regret, son. Why don’t you put the gun down, and we can talk all about it?” So we really wanted to highlight each beat, and feel every time that Tom gets worked up and Teagardin gets scared. In the sound design, here, you really hear the rattle of the gun. “It was just like this— this Reaster girl.” You get the shake of Arvin’s hand through the sound of the gun rattling, which is one of these things that we didn’t plan on, but when we got into the mix, you really kind of— you realize you needed a sound to convey that sort of nervousness, to heighten the nervousness. ”—soul too?” “Look, I— I didn’t have nothing to do with that.” And then you get this sort of, like, this anger building up. So now Arvin, who came into the scene so, so nervous to go through with the act, is now getting angrier and angrier and angrier. And he’s building up the courage to either shoot or not shoot. We don’t know yet. We don’t know if he’s going to change his mind, if Teagardin’s going to manage to talk his way out of it. “I ain’t going to take the blame for no bastard child. It would ruin me, man.” My wife is the editor, Sophia Subercaseaux. She and I always loved every one of Rob’s deliveries here. “She was delusional. She’s crazy. That’s it.” “Or she was just lonely.”

Published Sept. 16, 2020Updated Sept. 18, 2020

The Devil All the TimeDirected by Antonio CamposCrime, Drama, ThrillerR2h 18m

It’s a mystery where Robert Pattinson picked up the eccentric nasal whine that he (amusingly) deploys in “The Devil All the Time.” Pattinson plays one of those bad preachers who ride through certain deep-fried fictions, the smooth talkers with scripture on their forked tongues and sin in their withered hearts. Sometimes these devious souls have “love” and “hate” tattooed on their fingers (or at least once watched Robert Mitchum’s unholy man in the 1955 noir “The Night of the Hunter”). However wicked, these bad men of the cloth invariably embody religious hypocrisy.

No one is up to any good in “Devil,” a leisurely wallow in the kind of flamboyant evil that some filmmakers just can’t quit, won’t quit. The preacher, Rev. Preston Teagardin, is the least of this story’s ills. By the time he does his worst, knuckles have been bloodied, bullets fired, a dog sacrificed and a man tortured, to list just some of this potboiler’s horrors, which also include a pair of industrious serial killers. Here, in a swath of Appalachia that stretches from Ohio to West Virginia — a land of green woods, white people and Gothic clichés — little rises but everything must converge.

Image

Credit...Glen Wilson/Netflix

Directed by Antonio Campos, the busy, sprawling movie centers on the manifestly unlucky Arvin, played as an adult by Tom Holland, best known as Spider-Man. A second Marvel alumnus, Sebastian Stan, plays a sheriff. The movie features other blurrily familiar faces, including those of Bill Skarsgard and Haley Bennett, who play Arvin’s parents. They met in an Ohio diner where she’s a waitress and he’s a customer, a World War II veteran home; that same day, a photographer (Jason Clarke) meets another waitress (Riley Keough). Arvin’s parents wed and settle in Ohio for their unhappily ever after; the other couple rides off to kill and kill again.

The coincidence of these two matches cleaves the story into not-quite parallel parts that eventually meet again. Until then, Arvin faces minor and major miseries, and ends up living with relatives in West Virginia. There, he mostly protects a family ward (Eliza Scanlen), whose own unhappy history involves a victimized mother (Mia Wasikowska) and odiously malevolent Bible thumpers. Every so often, the serial killers briefly pop up so that Keough can goose the movie. Things only really heat up for Arvin when Rev. Teagardin oozes into town, talking down to his flock and wearing a frilly shirt that doesn’t stay white for long.

Adapted from Donald Ray Pollock’s novel by Campos and his brother, Paulo Campos, the narrative is organized around a series of violent catastrophes. There’s a suggestion that war plays a role in these disasters, evidenced by both a grisly flashback to World War II and a nod to Vietnam. But like everything else in the movie — poverty notably included — war is something that people endure, like bad weather. Despite the wised-up voice-over (read by Pollock) that adds much-welcome glints of wry detachment, there is little sense that the people in this world do anything but suffer or cause others to suffer in between working, church going and occasionally popping out babies.

Campos, whose movies include “Christine,” has always been a capable craftsman, and everything in “The Devil All the Time” looks and sounds professionally engineered. The images are well lit and have shape and texture, and the music and sound design are equally well considered. (The veteran music supervisor Randall Poster is one of the producers.) Every faded dress looks attentively fitted, each ramshackle house artfully weathered. If the performances are considerably less persuasive it’s partly because Campos shows no interest in the inner lives of his characters. And while Pattinson’s and Keough’s roles are risible, the actors at least show signs of (comic) life.

Campos is interested in Arvin’s world or, specifically, its cruelties, but he demonstrates no real curiosity about it or its inhabitants. An early description to Arvin’s childhood hometown offers a rare longer view of these people, “nearly all of them connected by blood through one godforsaken calamity or another,” the narrator says, a direct quote from the novel. This inbreeding perhaps explains why there are no Black characters onscreen, though there’s a handful in the novel, mentioned in passing. Whatever the case, as a result all of the pain and anguish, all the drama and generational trauma, is experienced only by white people, one of the few directorial choices here of actual note.

The Devil All the Time
Rated R for gruesome, bloody violence against all creatures. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. In select theaters and on Netflix. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.