Ciao ciao!

The peak of the Venice Film Festival has arrived, and I feel like I’m finally getting my stride. It has gotten hotter and more humid, which has meant that I’m drinking about six gallons of acqua frizzante a day, but the heat has somehow not dampened the mood. I went to a little pre-premiere cocktail reception for Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine on Thursday evening, and everyone standing in the Excelsior Hotel’s garden—including McDonagh’s romantic partner Phoebe Waller-Bridge—seemed happy to be there instead of squirming and fanning themselves and swatting away mosquitoes.

Then they all went to the premiere, where I’m told the audience went nuts and John Malkovich cried. It suddenly feels like a given that Malkovich will be Oscar-nominated, though a win is far from ordained. I keep hearing more and more from people who have seen it—at pre-screenings and at Telluride—that Elsinore’s Andrew Scott is probably going to run the table all season. For once, a gay guy might ruin it for the straights.

Malkovich only had 48 hours to enjoy all the Venice best actor talk on his own, because then came Robert Pattinson in Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, in which he plays To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen, a man famous for sending adults who look like children into rental homes and having them wait for men who think they’re about to have sex with a minor. (And then those men would get arrested, but a lot of the cases were ultimately thrown out because of entrapment laws. Oh, and one guy killed himself inside his own house while TCAP cameras were hovering outside. Cool show!)

It’s a weird role for Pattinson to tackle, but I suppose we all must admit that Prince Edward of Forks, Washington has somehow become 40 years old and can now play middle-aged men. And of course we long ago admitted to ourselves—or many of us did, anyway—that Pattinson really can act. He’s a surprising chameleon, tending to favor deep character work over leading-man, star-appeal stuff. Even his Batman is a wormy little creep. Quite improbably, both Twilight leads have managed to forge really interesting careers for themselves, not something you can say about a lot of YA and genre blockbuster actors who got frozen in their iconic roles for all time. Pattinson and Stewart are by no means the only two to have broken that mold—Kellan Lutz is currently doing Krapp’s Last Tape at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre to raves; Cam Gigandet is considered the Peter O’Toole of his home planet—but Rob and Kristen have certainly distinguished themselves.

And now Pattinson has Primetime, a moody and compelling satire-drama about media madness that gives the actor the chance to play a really complex villain. His Hansen is shrewd, vain, and ambitious. He’s kind of a dumbass without actually being dumb. It’s a pretty vicious portrait of TV news man-hollowness, ego, and desperation, highlighting both the vacuity of it all and, well, the actual hard work. The movie might be too moody and too arty for Pattinson to actually win the big prize, but I’d be surprised if he wasn’t nominated at this point after all the raves here, even in this most-crowded best actor year.