Express Yourself
Originally published at Agent Incite. Please leave any comments there.
I somehow get talked into seeing some movies that are occasionally uneven in quality. This isn’t surprising, as most movies are. One of the things I notice in both books and movies is how characters expressions work, change and communicate. The latest movie was Snow White and the Huntsman. It’s not a bad movie. It’s not an instant classic, it probably won’t win any major awards but it was a good way to spend a couple hours.
Not having taken the opportunity to see any of the Twilight movies, I don’t recall ever seeing Kristen Stewart in a role before. As an actress she does have a couple virtues. She can deliver lines clearly and with some force. She poses well, even if she looks slightly uncoordinated in motion, and while not blindingly beautiful, she’s hardly unattractive. What she can’t do is transmit emotion through expression. It just does not come out. Watching the movie I couldn’t get a single read off her face the whole film.
This isn’t just a Kristen Stewart problem. The only movie I’ve ever seen with Angelina Jolie that I could read her expression and guess independently of other cues what’s on her mind, was Salt. There are a few others, most notably the cast of a couple sitcoms I’ve been subjected to.
In books it’s opposite problem in some cases. Or at least over repetition of notice of one part of the face. I recent had to put down a mil-sf title for this. Three chapters in I’m willing to bet every single character to appear on two pages or more had been noted to smile. Yes, these were almost exclusively military people on duty, receiving reports or otherwise hard at work. In the case of this book, there were also three species involved.
Whatever happened to subtly expressing half a dozen different emotions or giving people their own quirks? A raised eyebrow, widening of the eyes or the like. Communicating the emotional content of a book in particular, but movies or other visual arts is fully half the work of making it successful. Flat characters are no fun, well not unless you live in Flatland.