On Entourage, Vincent Chase would do his dumb-whore popcorn movies (like Aqua-Man) and feel humiliated, but the truth is that he rarely looked more hapless than when he was making one of his “integrity” projects — like his Pablo Escobar biopic, or the I’m-just-Vinnie-from-the-block indie Queens Boulevard, which wound up getting showcased at Sundance. If Entourage wasn’t about Vincent Chase but was about Kristen Stewart instead, her Escobar-meets-Queens Boulevard wince-worthy integrity dud might be Camp X-Ray, in which Stewart plays a guard at Guantanamo Bay who winds up uncovering the big lie of American anti-terrorist policy by making friends with one of the prison camp’s detainees. Has he been unjustly imprisoned? Maybe, but as the film sees it, the real injustice is that he’s been locked up with no end in sight, and he’s nice.
The haters of Kristen Stewart are everywhere, perpetually pouring out of the woodwork to declare their unholy catechism of derision (“She’s always the same!” “I’m sick and tired of her high-school-girl petulance!” “Did you see her on that awards show? She acts like she’s too good for stardom!”). But even though I get where the bashers are coming from, you would never count me among them. Ever since I watched Stewart in Greg Mottola’s Adventureland, the incandescent ’80s nostalgia movie that premiered at Sundance four years ago, I have seen what she can do in the right role, working with a director who knows how to harness her snarky brainy moodiness. I thought she had a genuine sensuality in the Twilight films, and she always made the role of Bella feel urgent. But in Camp X-Ray, I never believed — not for a moment — that she was someone in the military. She has no toughness, no moxie, no callouses on her hide. The Stewart mannerisms (the pretty-girl scowl, the flared nostrils) really make their presence known this time, because even though she’s working hard to play them down, trying to give an almost minimalist performance, all of that substitutes for what she should have been doing: acting in a way that breaks new ground for her, with, perhaps, a greater sense of physicality. Her character, Amy Cole, has been thrown in with a bunch of macho military brutes, and the reason she doesn’t fit in with them isn’t that she’s just about the only woman. It’s that they really seem like soldiers, and she seems like…Kristen Stewart trapped in Guantanamo Bay.
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