Veteran director David Cronenberg, who for decades has occupied a distinguished residence as one of the most interesting and inventive living American filmmakers, seemed to be sailing into safer passages.
A trio of classy dramas, hard-hitting at times but nothing you couldn’t take your mum to (A History of Violence [2005], Eastern Promises [2007] and this year’s A Dangerous Method) bore little of the audacity of the circuit breakers that defined his oeuvre as proprietor of the ‘New Flesh‘: the wild mutations of body and psyche in films such as Shivers (1975), Scanners (1981), The Fly (1986), Crash(1996), and eXistenZ (1999).
Post-GFC existential rumination Cosmopolis — faithfully adapted from Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel, prophetically penned a handful of years before America’s banking system thumped the world’s ledgers and spawned global recession — changes the state of play in Cronenberg’s career. Or perhaps it simply realigns perception of it, reminding audiences of the visionary’s penchant for at times bewildering intellectual games boxed in simple premises.
The film’s most obvious achievement, the number one talking point for the MSM movie press peanut gallery, is to bring Twilight alumni Robert Pattinson squinting into the daylight — or if you like, revelling in the shadows — of art cinema, to the cries of confusion from tweenage girls staring greedily at his poster on their bedroom walls, who may have considered Francis Lawrence’s soapy 2011 circus-drama Water for Elephants a mite too heavy for their liking.
If Pattinson groupies buy the ticket and take the Cosmopolis ride, they may find themselves not so much in the wrong cinema as the wrong plane of existence. Like everybody else they will be railroaded into a simple choice: whether to engage with the film on the intellectual levels it demands or dismiss it as something incompatibly strange; a gunk of ramblings from alien characters in a ‘whole world is a stage’ cast of crazy-pattern exchanges. It is based in a not-too-distant metropolis hinterland, a city sort of like our own and sort of not, made harsh by grim realities and chilled by the reverberating vibes of a dream-like wind.
Most of Cosmopolis is based in and around the limousine of 28-year-old billionaire Eric Packer (Pattinson), which he uses as a traveling office, penthouse and forum for the views of fulminating associates who pop in and out and are rarely seen again, as if he were dimly recalling from his deathbed a lifetime’s worth of meet-ups condensed into single fleeting moments. The film is essentially a collection of conversations.
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The dramatic friction in Cosmopolis is generated by personified components of the outside world who hop in the car, attempt to rationalise their existence while attempting to rationalise Packer’s as he rationalises them, the vested interests they represent and shifting sands they stand upon. Packer is linked to another institution, his wife, their relationship depicted as a boardroom series of agreements and stipulations. Both represent emperors of industry, staring cooly into each other’s windows and seeing only their own steely rationale reflected back.
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Cosmopolis is the first great GFC art film, linked to financial and social catastrophe in tantalisingly evasive ways. In retrospect, knowing where the system started to crumble and how it all turned to hell, it had to come from inside. It had to be an American story. Where better to frame it then the duel setting Cronenberg deploys: on the street in plain sight, but behind tinted glass, in a vehicle doubling as a corporate king’s increasingly soiled throne.
The film is destined to be derided and misunderstood, and, deliciously, to thrust stray tweens into an idiot wind of confusion when it is realised that the prime-cut of Robert Pattinson’s surface values can’t possibly appease them. Not this time. Whether Cosmopolis was financed partly because of his involvement, or whether Cronenberg believed he was the best man for the job, or both, few can say. But yes: the Twilight smirk-maker is very good in a role that plays to his strengths, not as a chest-exposed heartthrob but as a societal icon we might like, we might not like, be deep or cursorily familiar with, but whose image connotes largely empty fame, the person inside invisible behind a sheet of celebrity.
The cast intone the kind of downbeat histrionic dialogue strewn throughout Larry Charles’ 2003 post-apocalyptic word smith mind-bender Masked and Anonymous, in which every conversation plays like they have been precisely prepared and weighed beforehand. The characters initially sound like high-powered intellectual robots exchanging internal monologues, their words snappy and nuanced but their brain-to-mouth filters virtually non-existent, a sort of politicised, extreme Seinfeldian reversal where nothing is always everything.
Semi stream-of-consciousness conversations spray across a smattering of subjects, linked by the characters’ constant appraisal and reappraisal of their positioning in the universe: of themselves, of each other, of what the other side of the equation expects, of what the numbers add up to. Even the way they talk is business.
If this is psycho babble for blocked ears, find the right pair of lobes and the film, with DeLillo’s dialogue and Cronenberg’s audacious image of a ravaged metropolis, is more than distinctive, or original, or unique. It is virtually unparalleled. It is also another wretchedly potent vision of a people’s dream gone bad, and while this one may have germinated in Uncle Sam’s sleep, we no longer have the privilege to call it “American”.
Cosmopolis’ Australian theatrical release date: August 2, 2012. Full Interview: HERE
To read my interview with interview with David Cronenberg, published in March, click here.
Thanks Mel452
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