Slick story is all brains, no heart
David Cronenberg’s latest work takes us along for a stylish ride in a world devoid of real emotion
COSMOPOLIS Starring: Robert Pattinson, Sarah Gadon, Juliette Binoche, Paul Giamatti, Samantha Morton and Kevin Durand Directed by: David Cronenberg 14A: sexually suggestive scene, nudity, violence Running time: 110 minutes Rating:
Honking at the capitalist world order with all the energy of a narcoleptic cab driver, David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis feels like it’s been stuck in traffic all day, reading back copies of The Economist.
Dreary as that may sound, it’s not a particularly bad scenario for the Canadian director with a Cartesian bent because it mirrors the content of Don DeLillo’s novel upon which the film is based.
It also gives Cronenberg a chance to turn the global economic system into a single, symbolic body that fuses flesh and luxury leather upholstery.
Cosmopolis unfolds almost exclusively within a very large stretch limousine. Its passenger is Eric Packer ( Robert Pattinson), a twentysomething billionaire who just bet big on the Chinese yuan.
We meet Packer in the morning, a time full of possibility and promise. He’s still master of the universe, and he wants to prove it by going crosstown to get a haircut — despite the presence of a presidential motorcade paralyzing the city grid.
Packer enjoys playing up his whims and imposing his will on others, so even when his security chief tells him it’s a bad idea to fight the power and the traffic, Packer is unmoved. He forges ahead regardless, sitting pretty in his motorized sedan chair that’s been cut down the middle — then artificially lengthened to the buyer’s desired size.
Packer is one of those arrogant people who lectures his minions about everything from limousine construction to the essence of time.
He blathers endlessly about himself, whether it’s solicited or not, because he thinks he’s the most important person in the picture at any given moment. He’s absolutely certain everyone is hinged on his every word, and in many ways, they are.
Packer is rich. He is handsome, and he’s confident he’s decrypted the complex code that is the financial market. Bullish, he asserts himself on the world with every physical manifestation he can muster, from sex to bodily excretions.
One of the few times he exits the limo is to rendezvous with his wife ( Sarah Gadon) for a midtown lunch. She looks at him with aloofness and tells him he reeks of sex. He says it’s the sex he’s hoping for, not the sex he’s already had.
But the viewer knows better. We just watched him bang Juliette Binoche in the back seat, a sprawling, sweaty, and slightly gymnastic encounter that felt entirely soulless, but appeared physically satiating all the same.
When he tries to reap the same satisfaction from his own wife, however, she refuses — and essentially declares the society marriage over.
The scene lacks any passion, emotional inflection or drama — and therein lies one of the central problems with Cosmopolis: It’s impenetrably cold. Certainly, as a metaphor for the international monetary system and the cashobsessed world order, Cronenberg designed his film to refuse intimacy.
The whole point of this plodding, self- conscious allegory is to point out how removed we’ve become from our own world.
Packer sits in his limousine, protected and encased from the throng around him who grow increasingly violent with each passing hour.
Cronenberg’s sound designer does a wonderful job hammering this point home by making sure there’s a whole other world of sound when the windows or doors are open.
When the doors are closed, however, it’s deathly silent inside the Corinthian leather cocoon.
Packer receives various guests into his wheeled womb- tomb, including a genius programmer named Shiner ( Jay Baruchel), a theoretical financial analyst named Vija Kinsky ( Samantha Morton) and his doctor, who informs him he has an asymmetrical prostate.
Every exchange feels entirely clinical, which leaves our central character lacking a core sense of humanity.
Again, this is intentional because Packer is an attractive package — he just happens to be entirely empty. Over the course of the film, as Packer’s investment in the yuan starts to tank, and the masses begin to rebel, he and his limo are rattled — but they both remain intact until the final, cryptic frames, when the packaging is finally breached.
The symbols are all functional and Cronenberg’s allegory for a civilization divorcing itself from its own humanity is entirely realized, but without a potent emotional angle, it’s little more than an intellectual exercise.
We never care about Eric Packer, even if that is Robert Pattinson up there. The scenes that could humanize him are stilted, and most of the movie feels like theatre of the absurd — only with the axis reversed.
Instead of the human feeling lost in a world he can’t control, we’re watching a man who controls the world, slowly lose his grip — without ever becoming emotional.
To really make his point stick, and sink deep into the public imagination, Cronenberg needed to find some redeeming scrap of humanity to flesh out the tragedy of the loss, but he can’t. The whole exercise collapses as an experiment in style and technique instead of divine comedy.
Perhaps that was the intent, with Cronenberg picking up his filmic fiddle as civilization goes up in smoke, but there is no catharsis here. Cosmopolis is a two- hour car ride that goes in circles.