David Cronenberg (2012)

Cosmopolis is based on Don DeLillo’s novel of the same name.   Published in 2003, the book appears to have been regarded as a significant post-9/11 piece.  Less than ten years on, it also seems to foretell the global economic crisis of 2008.  David Cronenberg’s movie (he also wrote the screenplay) is set in Manhattan – for much of the time within the stretch limo of the billionaire protagonist, Eric Packer.  In spite of these contemporary resonances, Cosmopolis (‘universe city’) is meant, I guess, to be set in the future – the date unspecified but near.  I found the movie peculiarly depressing – it was as if I was watching something made after my own death, seeing what the world and cinema were going to be like some years from now.  As a result, the story seemed to be taking place in a universe which, although it was physically recognisable, was more remote than the imagined landscape of something like Prometheus, which offers the security of resemblance to other sci-fi screen worlds.

The subject of Cosmopolis is larger deaths – of capitalism, of technology.  There are a great many words about these themes, words delivered as virtual monologue in deliberately expressionless voices – although it’s possible that Robert (Twilight) Pattinson, who plays Eric Packer and whom I’d never watched before, always speaks like this.  Samantha Morton doesn’t, though.  I lasted less than an hour – not long enough even to see or hear Juliette Binoche, Mathieu Amalric or Paul Giamatti.  The most physically striking presence in the part of the movie that I saw wasn’t Pattinson but deep-frozen blonde Sarah Gadon as Packer’s new wife (?), more distinctive here than she was as Mrs Jung in A Dangerous Method.   For a while, I wasn’t sure if I could rouse myself to leave this hypnotically boring picture but it seemed unfair on the two others I’d given up on this year to stick it out.  Part of me, as usual, felt guilty and that, as with Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, I wasn’t up to the demands of a ‘masterpiece’.  Then I got home to Sight & Sound and a headline in a piece about Cosmopolis, praising the casting of Robert Pattinson as an acute comment on the vampiric nature of financiers.   That took away the guilty feelings.

19 June 2012