What did we do before Timothee Chalamet?
Livin' It's first shitpost-adjacent work?
The cynic in me wants to deny him so bad. I find it to be my most important job to deny that pretentious voice in my head that begs me to “not get” things, because just going with the cool stuff is so much more fun. And I honestly think I get things most of the time! But this journey has never been harder for me than it is with Timothee Chalamet. He’s the internet’s favorite guy. He’s transparently a rich theater kid. He looks like he contracted a 17th century illness and has weeks to live. But I, from the moment I saw him for the first time, understood it.
I think the one thing that helps Timothee Chalamet as opposed to many other historical heartthrobs, who coasted on nothing but their good looks and charm, is that he is somehow indescribably good at his job. It is, frankly, unbelievable how many incredible directors he has worked with in his young career. It is perhaps more unbelievable that seemingly every single one of those movies is kinda great? You got Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name and Bones and All1, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird and Little Women, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. That murderer’s row ignores others, such as Jason Reitman, Adam McKay and he-who-must-not-be-named, but that’s still a pretty respectable batting average! A batting average good enough to make me not completely dread Paul King leaving Paddington for a Willy Wonka origin story!
In fact, I get the Chalamet thing so much that I have been left wondering recently what we did before he was around. He is so good at playing his type of character — thinks he’s cool in sort of an alt way, openly emotional and sensitive but also hiding real vulnerabilities, fake deep. Who was playing fake deep teenagers before Timothee Chalamet?
I think the best illustrations of him mastering this archetype include Don’t Look Up (a terrible movie in which Chalamet’s character is easily the most successful part), The French Dispatch and Bones and All.2 But perhaps the only true way to explain the Chalamet appeal remains Lady Bird. Kyle Scheible (a name I, embarrassingly, did not have to look up), is still Chalamet’s best-cast role to date simply because it weaponizes all of the red flags that made me not want to embrace him in the first place. Chalamet is a try-hard rich kid who went to LaGuardia, summered in France and then transferred from Columbia to NYU. He looks exactly like the kind of fake hipster asshole reading communist theory and smoking a pack of day that Lady Bird falls for, as we all would at 17 years old.
Chalamet is helped out by virtue of the fact that we don’t have any other heartthrob movie stars of his age anymore. Old is in for male objects of desire, so in terms of mid-20s it-boys, we are left with Chalamet, as his Lady Bird co-star Lucas Hedges has seemingly disappeared from movies and I sincerely hope we no longer hear from he-who-must-not-be-named. But hey, maybe Paul Mescal is happening now?
But it’s not just process of elimination, and it’s not even the one type he fills, because I also feel like he doesn’t credit for the real range he possesses. Laurie in Little Women might be one of the first roles that feels like a departure for him, but that climatic scene where Jo rejects him for the final time and he responds by threatening to kill himself perhaps reaches Kyle-from-Lady-Bird levels of male manipulation. Dune is probably a better example, and while the “chosen one” is probably not the hardest character to play, Chalamet infuses some real pathos into Paul Atreides, and seeing him earnestly portray that innocence rather than weaponizing it with overcompensation is a welcomed change-of-pace. There’s also The King, another not good movie3, where he plays a Henry V that has been confusingly written to be constantly drunk and uncaring about about every single thing on the planet, but injects enough charisma into it that you can sometimes forget about the script’s very strange choices.
Watching Bones and All, another Timmy performance where he plays a too-cool teen who has withdrawn from all emotion besides his love for you, girl, rather than dealing with the traumas of his life, I realized that it’s now been about six years since Chalamet was first insufferable on our screens,4 and I would really miss it if he stopped being insufferable on our screens anytime soon. He has won me over by being the worst breed of soft boy so successfully and so consistently, and I truly do not know what we (or Luca Guadagnino and Greta Gerwig) would do without that.
Miscellanea
A rundown of awards-season movies I caught since my last newsletter: Argentina, 1985 (meh), The Whale (bad), To Leslie (meh, and don’t worry, no newsletter about the Andrea Riseborough of it all), Triangle of Sadness (pretty good!), Till (saved by an unbelievable lead performance), The Good Nurse (pretty good!), Blonde (I know better than to talk about that on the internet), Aftersun (wonderful), Armageddon Time (pretty good!) and Decision to Leave (great).
Non-awards season 2022 releases I caught up on: Men (fight me, I was into it), Mad God (great), Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (deeply flawed but who cares), and Resurrection (YES!).
I hate watching TV! Pretty much all TV should be a movie! Poker Face actually does incredibly well being an episodic, murder-of-the-week TV show. Wonderful new show, long live Rian Johnson and Natasha Lyonne, both of whom are better at what they do than anybody else on the planet.
This movie, which I am so totally a sucker for, is what inspired this newsletter.
Call Me By Your Name features maybe Chalamet’s greatest performance, but he’s too much of a softy to really fit the toxic archetype that I’m talking about here. No matter how much bullshit philosophy he’s spouting, Yule from Don’t Look Up is not being that earnest in his love for Jennifer Lawrence, let alone Armie Hammer!
Once again, not his fault.
It’s been nine years since his debut performances in Men, Women and Children, Interstellar and something called Worst Friends, but that doesn’t mean as much to me because he’s pretty minor in Interstellar, Worst Friends probably isn’t a real movie, and I try so very desperately not to think about Men, Women and Children at all times.
Timmy