Twilight: The Charlie Swan Saga

The following contains spoilers, but if you’re reading this you have already either read the book or seen the movie. Also, I will take great pleasure if this review spoils “Twilight” for somebody.

The “Twilight” movie is a feature-length motion picture based upon a book I’ll never read. The story, as far as I can tell from the film, revolves around Charlie Swan, a simple man with simple pleasures, who is forced to deal with the life-altering circumstances that befall his small town. Ultimately he discovers something special that has been there all along.

Charlie is a good man. He is a respected man. He’s an important guy on the police force. You can tell because he never takes orders, he gives them. He also has a mustache. Charlie loves his mustache. He also loves the simplicity of his life. He wakes up, he grooms his mustache, he has breakfast with the locals, he investigates the mutilated bodies that periodically show up, he goes to bed.

He has never actually discovered why any of the bodies have been mutilated. Some people say it’s a bear. Some people say it’s a mountain lion. Charlie is smarter than that and thinks different. All the signs are there -- the puncture wounds in the neck, the bodies drained of blood, the nighttime attacks, the handwritten note near one of the victims that read “OH CRAP IT’S A VAMPIRE.” Yes, clearly the town is dealing with something dangerous and Charlie has the best theory: rabid badgers. Obviously he can’t share his theory until he has proof, so to keep the town calm he lets the people remain ignorant and apathetic to all the carnage surrounding them.

Life is good in the Pacific Northwest until his daughter, Bella, arrives. She had been living with her mother, Charlie’s ex-wife, in Arizona. But Bella’s mother abandoned Bella for a minor-league baseball player, same as she did to Charlie. Charlie could have played minor-league baseball to keep his wife, but that wasn’t where his passions lied. Minor-league baseball wasn’t casual police work, and minor-league baseball wasn’t investigating mutilated bodies. Minor-league baseball wasn’t even a suave mustache, so what was the point?

Bella is a source of resentment for Charlie, and not just because she reminds him of her mother. Charlie is no good at the fatherhood thing and it is painfully obvious every time he tries to act like a father. Charlie doesn’t like to be constantly aware of his shortcomings.

Additionally, Bella is terribly irritating. She’s clumsy and breaks stuff. She wanders around aimlessly. She needs to be fed. She costs money. And when she talks she stammers like a broken windmill.

The stammering may be Charlie’s fault, and this in and of itself is another source of consternation. Charlie himself used to have verbal problems. He would accidentally replace appropriate words with inappropriate words. Philanthropy became philandering. Marginal became vaginal. Bus tickets became butt sex. And so on. But he learned to control his impediment by talking slower and avoiding certain words. Unfortunately the DNA that caused his poor mouthing abilities was passed down to his daughter, and she continues to stammer like an auctioneer tumbling down a hill.

This is all in the movie, I swear.

Charlie decides to get rid of Bella. She is cramping his style. She is making him feel bad about himself. She is making flocks of friends at school without any sort of effort. She has to go.

Initially he tries gently nudging her away by subversively making her life miserable. He gives her a dumpy vehicle. He makes her befriend the weird Indian guys with whom he watches Seahawks football. He takes her to his breakfast haunts and introduces her to an offender he let out of prison for the sole purpose of creeping her out. (Later a rabid badger would mutilate that offender, but he was a creepy guy, so he probably deserved it.) Still she does not leave. Something at that disproportionately large high-school is keeping her around. More drastic measures need to be taken.

Despite an enrollment of ten-thousand, only one black guy attends that school. Frustrated about being different and the only member of his gang, he is easy to buy off. Charlie offers the one black guy a large sum of money and some sweet police swag to smash Bella with a car. Charlie intends to double-cross the kid by immediately tagging him with a vehicular manslaughter charge, maybe also blame all of the mutilations on him, and let him fry for being the only black guy in town. But there are two things Charlie doesn’t count on. First of all, the black guy’s car is a flimsy twenty-year-old Chevy van. Secondly, a guy named Edward Cullen has really firm forearms.

Everybody in town knows about the Cullens. They like to be left alone and do so by maintaining a high public profile. The daddy Cullen is a locally respected doctor and is likely the only physician in town. He is also an albino. The mommy Cullen may also be an albino, but one who dyes her hair. Together they have three sons and two daughters. Four of them are not shy about their public displays of affection with each other, and that bothers the other kids at school. It bothers the other kids so much that they overlook the fact that the siblings have been in the same grade for ten years.

Edward Cullen is different, though. He doesn’t make-out with his siblings. He’s always last to enter the cafeteria. He has really firm forearms. Sometimes when Charlie is out in the forest cleaning up the baseballs that mysteriously appear after thunderstorms he will see Edward scampering up a sequoia like a caffeinated spider monkey. He seems harmless enough, even as he tackles down a scampering deer and rips out its heart with his teeth, and until now Charlie never paid too much attention to him. But as Edward enters Bella’s life, so too does he enter Charlie’s life.

Edward, it turns out, is tremendously attractive and has sparkly skin. And Charlie’s mustache, it turns out, is completely irresistible.

The men long for each other, yet do not know that their feelings are mutual. Edward grows closer to Bella, protecting her from Chevy vans and frat boys. In reality Edward hopes these actions would bring him closer to Charlie. Charlie, jealous of the affection Bella receives from Edward, and also because of his continuing irritation with her, still wants her gone.

Again, all in the movie. You just have to read the subtext.

Unbeknown to Edward, Charlie hires a very pale and very hairy hit-man to dispose of Bella. With Bella gone Charlie can more aggressively pursue Edward. But before the hit is made Bella abruptly leaves Charlie to go back south. This would have thrilled Charlie were it not for the nasty thing Bella said about leaving for the same reasons her mother left Charlie. Charlie knows it isn’t true -- his wife left because she was a minor-league loving whore -- but words still hurt.

Edward and his weird family follow Bella and save her from the hit-man. In fact they brutally set him on fire inside of an inordinately ornate dance studio. Bella ignores this twisted proclivity towards violence and returns to the northwest with Edward. Edward is still draws close to Bella but, due to his feelings for Charlie’s mustache, remains emotionally distant. Charlie can’t get rid of his dumb daughter and eyes Edward from afar. Bella still can’t talk like a normal person. Everybody lives happily ever after.

There are some good things about this movie and there are some bad things about this movie. As far as the good goes, first of all the soundtrack is surprisingly good. This is only incidental goodness though because if you’re watching a movie for its soundtrack then you need to be punched in the head. Secondly, the scenery is pretty. Lots of woodland, tall trees, lots of greenery, some beaches. It’s all very nice. Thirdly, there is a lot of subtlety going on here. If you’re casually watching this you might mistake “Twilight” for a movie about vampires and werewolves and whatnot. Instead it is a complicated story about the feelings two men of differing ages have for each other. The vampire thing is just a metaphor for how this illicit love is sucking the life out of the characters. It took me two viewings just to catch on.

As for the bad, I feel the character of Edward was badly miscast. The role should have gone to William H. Macy. Additionally I feel the role of Bella should have also gone to William H. Macy. In fact, this movie would have been much better if each and every character were played by a bunch of William H. Macys. Next, the portrayal of the Native Americans was abysmal. There wasn’t one pow-wow, not one tee-pee, not one Indian raid... they weren’t even portrayed by white people with dark make-up. I think I saw the wheelchair guy maybe thinking about drinking a beer, but alcohol consideration is not the same as gun-toting public intoxication. Completely disappointing.

Overall I rate this movie 2.5 irresistible mustaches... out of 5.