Is Timothe Chalamet a movie star? Or the coolest actor in the desert?

Quickly, which of the following statements describes Timothée Chalamet? He is the brightest male star of his generation. He’s an actor who has starred in a handful of indie hits (“Call Me by Your Name”, “Lady Bird”) but has never, on his own, in the classic sense of the word, really opened a movie. It’s a clothes horse with a futuristic, surreal Haider-Ackermann-meets-Gustav-Klimt fashion sense – fuschia suits, metallic silver and warm flowers on black, tucked in sweatpants, the electric blue silk pajama look – it is to upset and redefine the masculine style. He’s a vintage Hollywood actor with 20-20 feelers who knows how to say the right thing. It’s a revolutionary millennial with a witty sense of its own idiosyncrasy. He looks like a hacker. He looks like a more glamorous Daniel Day-Lewis. His future is… who knows?

In truth, each of these statements describes Timothée Chalamet. So does that make him a walking contradiction? Not at all. But that makes him an actor who both complements and contradicts his time – or, more precisely, is contradicted by it.

I mean by that: Imagine Chalamet arrived 30 years ago. His star trajectory – the types of movies he would star in, the kind of movie star he would want to become – would likely be much more clearly delineated than it is today. We are now, after all, in the post-movie star era. Or, at least, at a time that is not exactly the age of movie stars. Instead, it brings to mind the people who appear in franchise movies and can look, for a moment, like stars, until that moment passes and, like that, they are no longer the center of things. This is not a commentary on the actors or their talent; and that doesn’t mean the fame itself has become fleeting. Once you’re famous, you tend to stay that way. But maintaining the fame is more of a balancing act than before, which is why Timothée Chalamet can seem like a really big star and, at the same time, like someone who is always waiting for the movie that will put him on top.

By the logic of 21st century franchise film culture, “Dune” was meant to be that movie. And maybe it is. But it’s getting harder and harder to read the tea leaves on this stuff. Is “Dune” a success? Its box office numbers are touted as just good enough to get by (with its simultaneous opening on HBO Max being offered as a sort of prison-free card for the underperforming), albeit in the world as we’ve known for ages. decades, a $ 15.5 million second weekend for a movie as gargantuan as “Dune” doesn’t exactly sound like a champagne act.

If Chalamet was great in the movie, it doesn’t matter how well he does. And he’s certainly not bad in that. But for me, and I say this as a big fan of Timothée Chalamet, I think he gets lost a bit. He’s there in the center of the action, looking like the silver-handed red carpet brother of Edward in his mop of curly hair and black leather armor, but for much of “Dune,” he’s tough. to know what, exactly, we are looking for him to do. Defeat his enemies, yes, and survive, yes, but what is Paul Atreides quest? The character’s messianic attributes don’t feel like they emerge from a place deep within Chalamet himself, who comes across as stoic and rather placid for all the sand and uproar swirling around him.

There is a grandeur to “Dune” which makes it a pretty pedestal for the cerebral magnetism of the handsome boy of Chalamet. But there is a blur in the film, a meditative “Star Wars” quality that goes to art-house that does Chalamet a disservice as an actor. I thought he had more strength and heroic energy a few years ago in “The King” (2019), a neo-Shakespearean historical-political swashbuckler in which he invested the young man who would be the king of England with the allure of a neurasthenic rock star. In this movie, he had the X factor. Which means he will have it again. (You can’t fake the X factor.) But I’m not sure he totally has it in “Dune”. With its suite now lit and slated for release in two years, “Dune” looks like a full-scale trail station for Chalamet. It matters, indeed, as his prestige version of a comic book movie, the way he plays the hit game, and maybe that’s why he can’t quite be the star you want him to be. ‘there either. The only real star of “Dune” is “Dune”: the construction of the world, the austere and majestic sci-fi desolation.

However, we must not forget that Timothée Chalamet, at his best, is a splendid actor who seems to be able to do it all. He’s 25 years old and in just over a dozen films he’s appeared in, he’s been captivating in an impressive array of roles. In 2017, after enjoying the shrewd sensibility of her performance as a delicate soul caught in the passion and danger of a true – and forbidden – love story in “Call Me by Your Name”, I was shocked at how brilliantly he played a callous high school Lothario in “Lady Bird”. “Beautiful Boy” was a flawed addiction drama, but there was something fearless about the way Chalamet put the character’s destructive narcissism there. And if you watch him in the center segment of “The French Dispatch,” where he plays a wispy, mustached student leader caught in the whirlwind of Wes Anderson’s whimsical version of the time machine. university uprising that sparked the events of May 1968 in Paris, you see his acting spirit. He is the “revolutionary” student as a bourgeois amateur, and the most fantastic of erotic adventurers.

What Chalamet must find now is a role with which he merges and which is based on his qualities of – attention! possibly dated phrase ahead – a leading man. His performance in “Little Women” was a stepping stone to that, but Greta Gerwig’s film was an ensemble piece, and it wasn’t exactly focused on him. Chalamet needs a movie that does for him what “Titanic” did for Leonardo DiCaprio or “Fight Club” and “Ocean’s Eleven” did for Brad Pitt: define him as an alpha star – someone who transforms every scene in a vehicle for its mystique.

Maybe “Wonka”, coming in 2023, will be that movie. (I don’t hold my breath about “Dune II: More Sand.”) One thing I predict is that Chalamet, within the next five years, is going to undergo a look evolution that will elevate its presence to the screen. At the moment, it’s an extraordinary camera subject but with an undeniably childish side. No problem with that. But when he gains some facial toughness and fills up a bit, I think that’s going to seriously deepen his glamor. Brad Pitt didn’t become a star until his late twenties, and Daniel Day-Lewis didn’t fully become Daniel Day-Lewis until his early thirties. Chalamet might turn out to be the biggest male movie star since Pitt, but the trap he must avoid is a certain passivity that’s too cool for school. The great cinematographic performances concern actors who seize the day with all the fibers of their being. Chalamet always plays the young men to whom things happen. He will go up when he plays the one who makes him happen.