I’m always up for a movie directed by an actor I love. Often, that actor will turn out be good at directing other actors, and building a serviceable movie around that, and that’s about it. Yet there’s still an adventure involved when you feel like you really know an actor.
I went into “ The Chronology of Water ,” the first movie directed by Kristen Stewart , with a heightened curiosity and a heightened hope. I’ve long felt that she’s a great actor and a great star. What would she reveal as a filmmaker? The hope paid off.
“The Chronology of Water” isn’t some pretty good, prosaic, actor-directs-actors-how-to-read-the-script thing. It’s far more artful and captivating than that. It’s based on the 2011 memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, who told the story of how she grew up in a sexually abusive household, and how she attempted to squirm away from the legacy of it — through competitive swimming, through sex and drugs and anger and other escape hatches, and ultimately through becoming a writer in the mode of Charles Bukowski.
Yet for a long time her escapes didn’t work. She was too imprinted with the sickness that had been visited upon her. All of this is incredibly internal .
It’s the sort of thing I’ve seen a hundred filmmakers try to dramatize, and what you tend to get is good intentions, a lot of piety about abusive households, and maybe a workable shadow of the consciousness the film is out to capture. Kristen Stewart shoots past all that. As a writer.
