"Cosmopolis" Review by Little White Lies
David Cronenberg’s superb latest is an existential road movie for our
financially and morally bankrupt times, interested as much in addressing
the semantic minutiae of the corporate apocalypse as it is deep felt
anxieties relating to stress, success, control and our inability ward
off death with money and status.
Like The Social Network, it combines a credible depiction of a person
whose age and intellect are dangerously off kilter, while sending its
‘hero’ on an anti-capitalist nightmare odyssey that discharges all the
dry cynicism and insouciant doomsaying of Godard’s Week End.
Very neatly abridged by Cronenberg himself from the 2003 novel by
American postmodernist writer, Don DeLillo, his screenplay filets out
much of the dialogue from the source while expunging the flashbacks,
dreams and internal monologues.
Robert Pattinson is magnetic as Eric Packer, slick, jaded 26-year-old
CEO of Packer Capital who decides to take a fleet of Limousines across
across New York City in search of a haircut. This is his best
performance to date by some considerable margin. Yes, even better than
Remember Me.
But there’s something strange about this idle whim. Eric is a man to
whom people and services come, not the other way around. As his loyal
security guard, Torval (Kevin Durand), says, he could have a barber come
to the office, or even to the Limo. During a single day, Eric
experiences an Icarus-like fall from grace while numerous acolytes and
paramours visit him in his cab to chat numbers, health and even the
sudden death of rap megastar, Brutha Fez.
People want Eric dead, or in the case of Mathieu Amalric’s mad Andre
Petrescu, to throw a pie in his face. He has become a walking wanted
poster for the corporate scourge who cheerfully wipe out millions with a
few swipes of touchscreen computer. For Eric, murder is also starting
to shed its taboo status.
It’s a richly verbose film, even more so than his majestic, 2011
exploration of extreme emotional repression, A Dangerous Method. It gets
to the point where much of what is spoken cannot be fathomed – “talent
is more erotic when it’s wasted” – but the film is about the rhythms of
dialogue, the verbal posturing, sparring and deceptions employed in the
economic sector.
The way in which Cronenberg photographs the talk, too, is subtle,
elegant and intense without ever drawing undue attention to itself or
feeling overly oppressive. Per Cronenberg himself, this is a film in
which “fantastic faces say fantastic words”.
Beyond its withering critique of contemporary capitalism, Cosmopolis is
also fascinated by that ongoing Cronenbergian concern: the limitations
and mutations of the human body. Eric desperately wants to scale an
economic Mount Olympus and be able predict the permutations of the
Chinese Yuan, and his inability to attain this level of cerebral
perfection acts as a signifier for his mental and physical decline.
In one scene, Eric has a prolonged rectal examination after which he is
informed that his prostate is asymmetrical. In a climactic showdown with
a disgruntled, pistol-wielding ex-employee (Paul Giamatti), this small
bodily imperfection becomes the key to understanding Eric’s meltdown.
This film clocks up the astronomical price of achieving so much at such a
young age, when your body and mind reach a state where there is no
reason left for them to function.
"Cosmopolis" Review by Empire
Somehow David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis articulates everything I think
about post-financial crisis capitalism, ie, the world today. It goes
without saying that it is weird, but even from the director of eXistenZ
and Videodrome it is bizarre, with the mannered, affected performances
of the former and the outsider characters of the latter. It doesn't
quite fit with the early body-horror movies but there is, like A
Dangerous Method, a viral metaphor at play here, and this time the virus
is not free thought but the free economy (towards the end of the movie,
Robert Pattinson's vampiric playboy comments that “nobody hates the
rich, everybody thinks they're ten seconds away from being rich”). But
what is money? Is it the dollar? The baht? The dong? Could it be a rat? A
live rat, a pregnant rat or a dead rat? What does money even mean?
Cronenberg's cool, intelligent film asks all these questions – literally
– and more, then goes even further, asking: what does meaning mean?
Seriously. Even by the director's lofty standards this is a talky film,
and most of it goes round in circles. As promised, it concerns a limo
ride to get a haircut, but Cosmopolis – based (to what extent I have yet
to find out) on Don DeLillo's novel – is a surprisingly roomy affair,
and not simply a one-set gimmick. In some senses it resembles Godard's
Weekend, since the traffic is terrible and civilisation seems to be
crumbling outside it, but this will also play well to genre fans and is
definitely one of Cronenberg's most ambitious movies to date.
For Robert Pattinson, however, this is another league, and his celebrity
status certainly suits the part. He plays Eric Packer, son of a
super-rich businessman, a society kid who has made his fortune with
mysterious dotcoms and by playing the money markets. Today he is betting
against the baht and losing hundreds of millions of dollars in the
process. The inside of the limo glows with LED screens, and Eric is
joined by a roundelay of guest stars (including a very slinky Juliette
Binoche and, more surprisingly, an edgy Samantha Morton) who engage him
in bizarre, solipsistic conversations. These talks border on self-parody
but somehow they work. It reminded me of Roy Andersson's wonderful
Songs From The Second Floor, since this is what the end of the world
probably would sound like. Though the budget is clearly quite low,
Cronenberg does convincingly convey a sense of apocalyptic doom, from
his characters' psychotic babble (at one point Eric is attacked by the
custard-pie wielding Pastry Assassin) to a full-on riot that covers the
pristine car in spraypaint and anti-capitalist graffiti.
The stylised nature of the language will limit this film's appeal, and
its self-conscious craziness might also be testing to some (why does the
professional barber Eric finally visits cut huge steps in his hair?).
And after Water For Elephants it remains to be seen whether Pattinson's
teen following really is willing to follow him anywhere. But Cosmopolis
does prove that he has the chops, and he parlays his cult persona
beautifully into the spoiled, demanding Packer, a man so controlling and
ruthless that only he has the power to ruin himself. Lean and spiky –
with his clean white shirt he resembles a groomed Sid Vicious –
Pattinson nails a difficult part almost perfectly, recalling those great
words of advice from West Side Story: You wanna live in this crazy
world? Play it cool.
"Cosmopolis" Review by the Playlist
"Cosmopolis," an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s typically provocative novel
of the same name, is the first feature film since 1999's "eXistenZ"
that filmmaker David Cronenberg has directed and scripted. This in part
explains why "Cosmopolis" is such a triumph: it’s both an exceptional
adaptation and a remarkable work unto itself.
Cronenberg makes slight but salient changes to DeLillo’s source
narrative. These changes, which are best described by one character as
“slight variation[s],” prove that Cronenberg’s given serious
consideration to what should and shouldn’t be represented in his
adaptation of the author’s ruminative, conversation-driven narrative.
For example, in Cronenberg’s film, Eric Packer (a surprisingly adequate
Robert Pattinson), an ambivalent and self-destructive power broker, does
not get to have sex with his wife like he’s wanted to do throughout
DeLillo’s book. Other changes, like the fact that Packer is investing
and studying the steady rise in the Chinese yuan in the film and not the
Japanese yen, as in the book, are equally striking. These differences
noticeably enrich DeLillo’s original story, making Cronenberg’s
"Cosmopolis" that much more rewarding in its own dizzying way.
It’s fitting that Pattinson, today’s It boy, plays Packer, considering
who Cronenberg’s Packer is. As a former start-up wunderkind, the 28
year-old Packer is comically death-obsessed. “We die every day,” he
risibly exclaims to one of his sizeable retinue of advisors. Packer gets
daily check-ups from his doctors partly because he enjoys the routine
of it but also because he’s looking for something to confirm his
suspicions. He’s convinced he’s found that something when he’s told that
his prostate is asymmetrical. It’s pretty funny to see Pattinson, being
the young, pretty tabula rasa that he is, play Packer, a wheeler-dealer
that used to be hot shit but is now unable to sleep because he fears
that he’s no longer relevant.
Throughout both versions of "Cosmopolis," Packer searches for a break in
his routine. Against the advice of his over-protective bodyguard Torval
(Kevin Durand), he fights back anarcho-protestors and gridlock traffic
caused by the President’s visit to another part of town, so he can go
get a haircut. The ritual, and also the familiarity of this ritual, is
what matters to Packer. But Packer also insists on going out and getting
his haircut now because, as he explains during one of many declamatory
speeches, of the turbulent conditions Torval has warned of. He’s no
longer waiting on his death, he’s inviting it.
Packer is in that sense, as is also later explained point-blank in a
speech, a contradictory figure. For example, he allows Vija Kinski
(Samantha Morton), one of the more decisively outspoken of his advisors,
to tell him that the anti-capitalist protestors that are impeding his
progress are actually just another part of the capitalist system.
Pattinson’s Packer latently agrees with this assessment but that changes
when he sees one protestor self-immolate himself. Kinski insists that
the protestor’s gesture is unimportant, but Pattinson sulkily protests
that it has to be. The fact that Pattinson’s practically pouting when he
rejects Morton’s negative assessment is telling. His death wish is
sheer petulance, something that doesn’t come across as directly in the
original novel.
Cronenberg and Pattinson’s Packer is a different kind of suicidal but
their character isn’t significantly less active in constructing his own
demise. In DeLillo’s "Cosmopolis," Packer knows what’s happening with
the yen, whose value keeps exponentially increasing, but is keeping that
knowledge close to his chest. In Cronenberg’s variation, Packer is less
sure. Pattinson’s Packer is thus more immediately defined by his
frustration with the finite-ness of his capabilities. He looks to others
for solutions to his problems and finds that his yes-team can only
confirm his own impotence. The film version of Packer is not slyly
organizing his own downfall, he’s frantically seeking it out, unsure of
whether or not he can find what he’s looking. Pattinson’s Packer only
succeeds by sheer dumb luck: an assassin is looking for him and he and
Packer have a lot more in common than the two realize.
At the same time, Cronenberg doesn’t slim down DeLillo’s simultaneously
sprawling and precisely dense narrative as much as he carves his own
flourishes onto it. A couple of scenes, including Packer’s interest in
bidding on a chapel full of art, and his visit to a night club full of
drug-fueled ravers, are only necessary to establish a uniform pace to
Cronenberg’s narrative. But in that sense, these scenes are just as
essential as the ones where Kinski and Torval give Packer advice.
Everything matters in Cronenberg’s "Cosmopolis," but not everything is
necessarily the same as DeLillo’s book. And that makes the film, as a
series of discussions about inter-related money-minded contradictions,
insanely rich and maddeningly complex. We can’t wait to rewatch it. [A]
Credit The Playlist / Via @ThinkingofRob
Via PattyStewBoneCT
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