Forbes: Twilight Goes High Brow (Breaking Dawn)

The vampire teen romance series Twilight has captured the the hearts of teeny-boppers–and, surprisingly, their middle-aged moms–all over the country, but it has hardly seduced critics, who largely regard the books and the films they have inspired as, well, insipid. (For good reason–the books owe less a debt to Bram Stoker or Anne Rice than to the bodice-ripping The Immortals After Dark series of romance novels.) Despite the success of the latest Twilight film New Moon (U.S. gross: nearly $300 million), it seems that the films’ production company, Summit, is tired of sneering reviews. So it has, /Film reports, approached arty auteurs Sofia Coppola, Gus Van Sant and Bill Condon to direct the final installment of the series, Breaking Dawn. All three directors have been nominated for Academy Awards.

These are certainly interesting choices. Perhaps the strangest is Condon, who has directed decidedly grown-up biopics on sex researcher Alfred Kinsey and James Whale, the man who brought Frankenstein to the screen. Van Sant has directed plenty films about teens, but these include My Own Private Idaho (very loosely based on Shakespeare’s Henry IV and about gay hustlers), Elephant (a stream-of-conscious interpretation of the Columbine massacre) and Paranoid Park (about a skateboarder who finds himself involved in the death of a security guard). Hardly the milieu of Twilight’s virginal sparkling vampires–yes, they sparkle in the sun. Coppola, who is cinema’s keenest observer of the feelings and desires of teenage girls, seems the best fit of the three.

But if the prospect of a Coppola or Van Sant-directed Twilight film has critics drooling, how will the books’ fans respond to it? Considering how rabid Twilight enthusiasts are, none too happy I would guess. Usually fangirls and boys want films to follow the books religiously–this is the Harry Potter formula. And these directors are unlikely to do a faithful adaptation (honestly, I would never have guessed My Own Private Idaho was based on Henry IV if I hadn’t read it on the back of the DVD box). Furthermore Coppola and Van Sant tend to make slow, impressionistic movies rather than plot-driven ones, which no doubt will have tweens bored to tears in the theater. Perhaps it won’t matter, since the franchise is such a juggernaut it will make gajillions of dollars anyway. But, as much as the books make me cringe–I have tried reading them multiple times, to no avail–it does seem a little unfair to ignore the series’ fans when choosing the last film’s director.