Robert Pattinson is going to have some exciting projects in between Eclipse and Breaking Dawn, films that seem promising for various reasons. Despite everything that clouds him, the incessant rumors about his personal life, he is still a terrific actor and he has work outside of Twilight that attests to that fact. Now at some Redbox locations are his films Little Ashes and How to Be. Little Ashes is the story of the tumultuous relationship between surrealist painter Salvador Dali (Pattinson) and poet Gael Garcia Lorca. This is one of Pattinson's bravest ventures to date and he does not hold back in the film. It required multiple romantic scenes with actor Javier Beltran and to be a tad bit eccentric. In How to Be, he is Art, a college-age kid who is going through what he calls a quarter-life crisis and brings a Canadian self-help guru over to Britain to help him "be more normal."
Bel Ami is based off of a short novel by Guy de Maupassant. Pattinson will play Georges Duroy, a young man who uses his powers of wit and seduction to lift himself out of poverty in late 19th century Paris. He makes his way up from being a noncommissioned soldier to a journalist, from there an editor and onward to loftier pursuits. Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod directs a screenplay written by newcomer Rachel Bennette. The cast is awesome and holds a lot of potential - Christina Ricci, Uma Thurman (Kill Bill), and Kristin Scott Thomas (The Horse Whisperer, Tell No One) are all part in the film.
Pattinson will be playing young Jacob Jankowski in Water for Elephants. Water for Elephants is based off of Sara Gruen's bestselling novel by the same name. The novel starts out with an elderly man, an older Jacob (who will be played Hal Holbrook) who is a home for the elderly. Like many in his situation, he is profoundly unhappy with his life. Another man at his same home triggers a flashback as he claims that he brought water to elephants, a fact that Jacob very much argues against. Jacob begins to reminisce to his mid 20s while he was a veterinary student at Duke during the prohibition era. The effect of profound personal tragedy causes him to leave school before he earns his degree and he winds up joining a traveling circus. There he meets Marlena Rosenbluth (Reese Witherspoon), a beautiful circus performer who he falls in love with. She's married to the volatile August Rosenbluth (Christoph Waltz) who is belligerent one day and makes up for it the next. Jacob, Marlena, and August form an awkward, quasi-workable trio of friendship that lasts for awhile but eventually breaks.
This film holds a lot of potential not just because of the cast but because of the excellent source material and the writer whose adapting it. Screenplay writer Richard LaGravenese has done a number of original works, like Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King, and a few adaptations as well, notably The Bridges of Madison County and The Horse Whisperer. While The Horse Whisperer film did not have the same ending as the book, the spirit of it was pretty consistent so again, it could reasonably be asserted that he will not deviate too dramatically in Water for Elephants.
He will also be in Madeline Stowe's Unbound Captives alongside Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz. Weisz plays a woman whose children, one of which will be played by Pattinson, have been kidnapped by a Comanche war party after her husband was murdered. Jackman will play the frontiersman who will help Weisz try to get her children back.
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