Let's get this out of the way: Team Jacob. All the way. Whether he's repairing motorbikes, chasing stealth vampiresses through a forest on all fours, or simply standing outside a car window, begging the girl he loves not to fly to Italy to intercept the ritual suicide of the dude she's totally hung up on, Jacob is the closest thing that New Moon has to a plot-generator, and for that we salute all 18 of his abs (on display for about 70% of his screen time, and capable of inducing a squeeing only audible to wolves). The second chapter of The Twilight Saga is at once a vast improvement over its predecessor -- thanks to the assured hand of director Chris Weitz, whose grasp of filmmaking is more sophisticated, if less viscerally emotional, than Catherine Hardwicke's -- but a step backwards in terms of storytelling.
It's hampered from the start by its heroine Bella Swan, played by Kristen Stewart. As her talk show tour has reminded us this week, Stewart comes off as a nice enough girl bobbing in a sea of anhedonic neuroses. In New Moon, she is literally defined by the men, or man, she chooses to fixate on, and Stewart puts those emotional tics in her arsenal to good use. A birthday party gone badly at the Cullens -- a surrogate family of gentrified vampires with bottle-blond hair, who have welcomed Bella as one of their own -- leads Edward, her ruby-lipped, immortal Romeo (and he literally recites Shakespeare, should there be any doubt) to dump her in the woods. "This is the last time you'll ever see me," he tells her, and Robert Pattinson almost has us convinced. Make no mistake: Pattinson is the Rudolph Valentino of swoony sparklepires, able to quake entire theaters simply by a flare of his shimmery nostrils.
In the real world, break-ups this sudden and severe are because of one thing and one alone: the fact that men are assholes. (Alternately: women are cold-hearted bitches.) But in New Moon, it's because Edward loves too much, and wants to protect Bella from his horrible, vampirey fate. What's so terrible about being a vampire isn't exactly established: We never see them feeding on blood or so much as baring a fang; they have flawless, wrinkle-free skin without the use of cleansing scrubs or synthetic injectibles; they live forever; they travel a lot; exposure to sunlight results in transformation into a human disco ball. What's the problem, exactly? I've just described my dream existence.
In any case, Edward's absence sends Bella into a crippling depression, whatever sleep she can manage robbed by late-night screaming fits that spook her pedostachioed father. Her days are spent sitting in a chair staring out a window, as autumn turns into winter outside. (The passing months are listed in subtitles, should there be any confusion about how quickly snow falls in the Pacific Northwest.) Her only emotional outlet comes through e-mails sent to Edward's sister, Alice -- long, searching missives invariably bounced back to sender. Who hasn't been there? (Please put your hands down.) Are we sick of this yet? We're definitely starting to be, and it's only about 20 minutes into the movie. Not even Edward's return, in aerosol form, to warn Bella away from the reckless daredevilism she begins to crave just to feel ... anything ... can release us from a sinking and unmistakable feeling that we've wandered into the cinematic equivalent of one of those yappy, recently disposed-of, permagrieving friends. Call us back when you're over, it, OK?
And that's when Jacob arrives. Shorn, shirtless and cute as a Shar-Pei puppy, Taylor Lautner straddles the sweet spot between boyishness and manhood, acutely aware of his effect on women (and men -- "This isn't a lifestyle choice," he tells Bella, shortly after she learns of his secret identity), but committed to only using his newly acquired pectoral powers for good. As presented, Jacob is New Moon's shameless, hormone-tweaking sex object, and yet in him Weitz finds some of New Moon best rhythms. A scene in which he stands at Bella's window -- the most clichéd of all teen romance tropes -- is turned lyrically on its head as he leaps up the branches of a tree and lands gracefully in her bedroom (shirtless, of course). His arc is soon muddied by the script's failures, however, as a poorly developed allegiance to his den of vampire-stalking, anger-management-challenged werewolf brothers leads him to turn his back on Bella for her own good as well. She gets him back, however: By the time she climbs onto that Virgin Atlantic flight bound for Italy, Bella has given him countless cases of blue wereballs.
Not that it's his fault, but with Pattinson's return, New Moon quickly goes downhill. An audience with the "Volturi," the fancypants-wearing vampire elite, is utterly without credibility or tension. Michael Sheen's sinks his fangs into the marble scenery as their leader, but the performance is hammy and embarrassing, to the point of it actually bleeding into his other movies: during one of his interminable speeches, my mind wandered to and began to second-guess his showy work in The Damned United. Probably not what an actor wants to hear. Dakota Fanning, on the other hand, doesn't overplay anything, mainly because there's nothing to overplay. As a telepathic Venturi henchwoman, she simply glowers in an almost wordless performance; her longest scene is in a muzak-filled elevator.
At their best, what makes the Twilight movies work aren't their supernatural elements, which tend to be threaded into the narrative clumsily and executed the same way. It's their ability to boil things down to a boy, a girl, and an overpowering feeling. They may be filled with unintentionally laughable moments -- one vision of Edward and Bella prancing through a meadow in something that resembles a feminine napkin ad comes to mind -- but they also dare to indulge, free from irony, a teenager's fundamental need to need and be needed. And so it doesn't matter what you or I think: New Moon isn't for us. And it succeeds.