What is the price for a haircut these days?
"The script is chatty but Pattinson navigates through it with talent and conviction"
Reviewer ratings: 5 Stars of 5
Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) is not just another Wall Street big shots, not just another Master of the Universe, or Gordon Gekko clone, he's a cross between Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Steve Jobs - but younger and prettier. Packer is looking for a haircut, and he knows exactly where he wants to do it. He works in his limousine, basically it's an office on wheels, and goes around the New York City even if it kills him.
And it may well be because the president is in town and there are threats and disturbances. At the same time a funeral for the recently deceased rap celebrity, who died of "natural causes" as the streets are real death traps. Packers men are not happy. But what Packer wants he will get, you can be sure of that. It's David Cronenberg's adaptation of Don deLillos novel from 2003 in a nutshell. If the incredible trailer has deceived you to expect something dynamic and impactful, you've really been fooled. This film is entirely something else. I think that it's brilliant.
A long-desired return to the kind of subversive, scientific fantasies that used to be Cronenberg's specialty, before he became respectable. (Okay, I exaggerate, but A Dangerous Method, Eastern Promises and A History of Violence is well posed films in comparison). Cosmopolis received a mixed to a cool reception during the final stages of Cannes but the people were not ready for the film's strange things, all the talk, all the static and Pattinson ... It's a strange combination. But it is pure Cronenberg: his most "Cronenbergish" film since eXistenZ (which was the latest own script, so it's obviously not a coincidence), and in many ways this is a return to Naked Lunch and Videodrome.
First and foremost, the film is a satire, a cool but not entirely unsympathetic portrait of a modern man, cut off from the outside world, whether he wants to or not, technology, luxury and financial necessities. Packer may be a billionaire (but his shares fall in value during the film and the Chinese currency continues to elude his predictions), but like the rest of us buried in his work. His sex drive (which is extensive) is almost indistinguishable from his obsession with doing business. He has sex with everyone who he can access (including Juliette Binoche and he has a meeting with Emily Hampshire during his daily prostate check), but his three-week-old marriage with the heiress / poet Elise (Sarah Gadon) remains unfinished, despite their specific meetings for breakfast, lunch and dinner. (It is never explained how she gets around the city, maybe she walks.) Like another iconic trader, Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho, Packer lives his dream life as if it were a nightmare.
He is hyper-intelligent but barely aware of his own exclusion. Some, perhaps most, will perceive this movie as weird and artificial - but it's clearly intentional. Outside the soundproof and bulletproof windows limo projected the city as a carnival of protest and unrest, but Packer barely blinks, not even when his car is tarnished by slogans and smudging. It takes a pie in the face by Mathieu Amalric to shock him for a response - sad for his bodyguard! But it turns out that the obsession to get his hair and sideburns cut is more about re-establish human contact with his hairdresser than on quality. But it is still not enough, Packer must go further, and we realize that his slow journey is really a death wish.
Some people are reluctant to admit that Robert Pattinson can act. They will change their mind now. The guy is more than his haircut. This script is chatty, but he navigates through it with talent and conviction, especially in the long scene between him and Paul Giamatti at the story's climax. The film is slyly funny and just as philosophical as political. By that I mean that it is just as committed to the existential anxiety of social injustice. I predict Cosmopolis will eventually be seen as one of Cronenberg's purest works.
Translation by Gossip-Dance
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