Cosmopolis, David Cronenberg’s film version of Don DeLillo’s character-driven novel of the same name, is one of the best book adaptations in recent memory.
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David Cronenberg’s Novel Mantra for Cosmopolis? ‘Let It Express Itself’
The movie is a testament to the director’s attention to detail and dedication to his source material, but that ultimately means that how much anyone enjoys the movie is dependent on their reaction to DeLillo’s thought-provoking rumination on money, power and self-destruction in 21st-century America.
Cosmopolis, both the book and the film, is a brainy narrative about capitalism’s calamitous effects, both on the haves and the have nots. Both begin with a quote (“a rat became the unit of currency”) from writer Zbigniew Herbert’s poem “Report From the Besieged City.”
This idea of rodent money is readily familiar to the story’s anticapitalist protesters as well as its protagonist, self-made billionaire Eric Packer (played by Robert Pattinson, who’s here to remind you he was an actor before he was a sparkly vampire). And all involved want to strike a match just to watch the world burn.
(Spoiler alert: Minor plot points follow.)
The R-rated movie, currently playing in select cities and opening in more theaters Friday, begins on a relatively normal morning in Manhattan in which Packer, a 28-year-old entrepreneur with “a New York pair of balls,” decides to take his heavily tricked-out limo across the city to get a haircut.
This is the premise that has caught up a lot of the general public until now — “A movie about a guy going for a haircut?” — but that’s just the sort of absurdist premise that this kind of narrative needs. As Packer moves across the Big Apple at a snail’s pace (a presidential visit has slowed New York traffic to a near-stop), his life devolves. He has sex with women just for the thrill, becomes indignant when informed he can’t outright buy the Rothko Chapel, tries and fails to have make love to his wife, hears warnings of threats against his life, and finds himself in a very Occupy-esque (though far more violent) protest against the capitalist system.
More than half of these things happen without him ever leaving the limo. What Cronenberg, who wrote the screenplay, has done with the vehicle is make it the vessel carrying the narrative along — a rolling fourth wall. It was the same in the book, but unlike on paper, on-screen there is a sense of how utterly silent and controlled things are in Packer’s isolated world compared to the chaos that erupts outside. Each time noise, or a new visitor, comes into the car, the shell of protection is broken. As the day crawls along and Packer’s façade crumbles, Cronenberg lets more and more of the outside into the car, creating a sense of suspense that’s almost unnoticeable until the walls are caving in.
This type of slow burn seems to be Cronenberg’s strongest suit of late. From A History of Violence to Eastern Promises, there is a sense of dread that is always palpable, but we often don’t know what it is until it explodes in a bloody steam-room brawl or, in the case of Cosmopolis, a shot fired in a dark corner of the city that is handled with unnerving charismatic nonchalance.
Until those shock-and-awe moments, each scene deals strongly in subtleties. What viewers read into those subtleties — Packer’s smirking reaction to anarchists throwing rats in a diner, the fidgetiness of a twenty-something tech whiz who’s short on sleep — are the story more than anything on the screen.
Cosmopolis follows Packer’s quest to get a haircut, a journey that somehow sums up his entire life in a single day.
Photo courtesy Entertainment OneA bit of credit for the cold disquiet here goes to DeLillo’s tricky dialog, which Cronenberg followed faithfully. At times it’s anything but subtle — Packer telling his “chief of theory” (Samantha Morton) that anarchists believe the “urge to destroy is a creative urge” even as protesters rock the limo in which they are riding and his millions are disappearing in a foreign market. But in the moments when, say, Packer is talking to his new wife Elise Shifrin (Sarah Gadon) about what she wants for lunch or why they have yet to sleep together, Cosmopolis’ central idea — that perfection is empty and fragile — is made clear.
Then there’s the third act. The actual haircut. By the time Packer makes it to his childhood barber, his life and psyche are shambles, and he’s on the brink of self-destruction — Patrick Bateman with a suicidal streak. (In case you’re wondering, the actual haircut in this scene might explain why Pattinson showed up at Comic-Con 2011 with an asymmetrical ‘do.)
By the time Packer leaves, so distraught and desperate for something to happen that he chases after the assassin who has been pursuing him, his fate is so unsealed anything is possible.
This is Cosmopolis’ greatest strength and inevitable peril. It’s a brilliant film, meant to be contemplated upon as much as watched, and that might not sit well with all audiences. Chromatically, the movie’s palate deals a lot in black and white, from Packer’s suit to his limo. But the film itself is anything but, coming from a point of view that takes no sides on the issues being dealt with on the screen.
Is its protagonist a privileged nihilist who deserves to be laid to waste? Or is he no better or worse than the anarchists who would actually crush Wall Street if they could? Cosmopolis provides no answers, which will elicit exciting debate among some viewers and prove dissatisfying to others.
Cosmopolis the book was released in 2003, two years after 9/11 and nearly a decade before Occupy Wall Street gripped the world’s attention. DeLillo set his novel in 2000, but the film is billed as being set in the “not-too-distant future,” and it feels awfully prescient, especially to those of us familiar with Silicon Valley’s instant millionaires and the realities of financial crisis.
Still, Cosmopolis’ fractured, alternate universe does not predict what lies ahead, either for would-be moguls or the muddled masses raging against whatever they hold in contempt. Instead, it merely reminds us that there are many ways to interpret our splintering reality.
WIRED Beautifully shot; awesome performance by Pattinson; very Cronenberg-ian sense of dread; Paul Giamatti; dead-on adaptation of Don DeLillo book.
TIRED Leaves a little too much to the imagination; probably a bit too subtle for some viewers.
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