Anna Kendrick is everything a young girl or boy should strive to be. She is confident, she performed a lip synch battle against John Krasinski, she made her way to number one on the billboards with the use of a clever cup/clapping routine (you may have heard the hit sensation: “Cups”), and she manages to be snarky and still remain America’s sweetheart- a surprisingly difficult thing to do. Yet, it was none of these things that made me fall in love with her.
In case you live in a cave, my email requests have finally been answered and “Twilight” has made its way to Netflix, appeasing fans everywhere and ensuring that I now start my campaign for the next four movies to arrive on the site. Anyone who read all the books, including “Midnight Sun” (the unpublished but leaked companion piece to “Twilight”), will have inevitably seen all the movies. Anyone who has read all the books and seen all the movies will inherently have qualms about the transition from book to screen, but in all of that vampire lust and werewolf induced euphoria, we neglected to notice the questionable acting and the shining star who managed to salvage the film. That star is, was, and always will be, Anna Kendrick.
I’m not sure if I was high from preteen hormones the first time I saw this movie, but had you asked me then, I would have said that “Twilight” was the perfect illustration of what I’d imagined of this world Stephanie Meyer created. Currently, watching it as an astute college student who evidently still watches preteen movies, I’m struck by the befuddled mess of ill-contrived characters who lack the emotional depth and intrigue Meyer intended. I’m well aware that the Twilight Saga is not the epitome of intellectual reading, and I promise I do read “grown-up” novels, but there is a reason that these books managed to sell over 120 million copies world wide, and that reason's name is Kendrick.
This film’s star should have been Bella Swan in all of her angsty glory, but instead, Kristen Stewart’s performance depicted Bella as little more than a damsel in distress, setting the tone for the films to follow. This is not to get into the feminist debate of Bella’s character being too subservient or reliant on the men in her life- this is simply to comment on the portrayal of the character Meyer intended. While Stewart adequately captured Bella’s clumsiness, she drafted a character far too helpless. Bella is supposed to appear to the world as innocent and fragile, often described as childlike and with translucent skin, but is in possession an undeniable inner strength and selflessness that allows her to move for her mother’s sake to a far off, “alien” planet to begin school. It’s this same strength that enables her to fight back at Edward despite being fearful of his prowess, stay calm in moments of crises, and sacrifice her own safety for that of her loved ones. Stewart detracts from these moments of bravery with desperate pleas, quivering glances and a shaking voice.
Anna Kendrick, on the other hand, found a way to bring life to a character and stay true to the tune of the novel. Every word from Jessica, Kendrick’s character, is layered with duplicity and contention in the film, just as it is indicated in the book. Everyone knows a Jessica, and probably been a Jessica. The girl who is constantly seething with jealousy, secretly waiting for you to fail so that she can swoop in victorious. In reality, had this girl spent half as much time worrying about her own life, she’d probably be happier in the end but that is a conversation for another day and article.
More so, Jessica was like a breath of fresh air in a truly gray film. She breathed life into the scenes she was in and provided that drop of winning sarcasm to scenes filled with Bella’s suffering in not-so silence and Angela’s endless complaining (I will not be touching upon Angela's portrayal at risk of further exasperation). When Jessica interrupts Bella and Edward’s conversation in the green house, no one really minded her inadvertent messing with the centripetal love story, because Edward was just being cryptic, and frankly, annoying as usual. This is what Anna Kendrick does. She finds a way to bring humanity and relatability into the most irrelevant, or more likely prevalent, characters. Due to her impressive performance, Jessica gets more lines in films to come than the books warranted, which can only be attributed to the overall comic relief she adds to a surprisingly serious book about vampires and werewolves (but I'm not complaining).
The movies in the series do progressively improve along with the increasing budget, establishing the parameters for other young adult series to follow, but the first film had little to brag about except it’s one true redeeming quality.
So thank you Anna Kendrick. Also, I love you.
