Cosmopolis
Directed by David Cronenberg
Written by David Cronenberg
Written by David Cronenberg
with Robert Pattinson, Sarah Gadon, Paul Giamatti
2012
David Cronenberg’s move from visceral horror to psychological thriller has given rise to some of both his best and worst work, the thoughtfully brutal A History of Violence balanced by the rather middle-of-the-road A Dangerous Method. Beneath its simplistic surface, A History of Violence hid a genuinely subversive purpose, playing with your emotions as you were first exhilarated, then disgusted by, its flashes of shocking action. Although it felt very different to, say, Videodrome or eXistenZ, Cronenberg succeeded in invoking all his usual bloody preoccupations while putting them in a far neater and more considered context. A Dangerous Method, on the other hand, was an attempt at a traditionally respectable picture, based on a stage play and focusing on (mostly) uninvasive phenomena. In direct contrast to the former film, it was designed to convey depth and ambition, but there simply wasn’t too much going on underneath the costumes – especially for a picture involving Sigmund Freud. Cronenberg has never been particularly consistent – there are only a select few of his films I would actually point to as especially good – but he is reliably interesting; whatever the faults of his movies they’re always worth watching, even if only to see what he’s come up with this time. A Dangerous Method was the first of his movies I’ve seen that felt empty.
Cosmopolis, based on the book by Don DeLillo, is a hallucinogenic urban nightmare that looked to be a return to something more recognisably Cronenbergian. Twenty-eight year old Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), a many-times billionaire who built his fortune in capital investment, rides through New York
With its extreme contrasts of wealth, the protests and the general sense of alienation, Cosmopolis marks itself out right from the start as a state-of-the-nation look at the fallout of the economic crisis and free-market culture generally. Eric’s business presents the workings of the world as formulae and data, the whole system predictable and under control as long as you have the right information – in theory, anyway. The people outside his limo are similarly reduced to factors in an overarching system, as his head of security discusses traffic flow and crowd movement as though he’s run them through a computer. This being Cronenberg, the film never turns into fully-fledged social satire; it doesn’t even refute the impersonal chaos-theory view of society particularly strongly. Rather, it gradually slips into a metaphysical discussion of a general loss of connectivity in life. According to Cosmopolis, the tangible world is becoming ever-more compartmentalised and measured, and held increasingly at arm’s length; computers are emerging from their boxes and spreading throughout the ether, interweaving society electronically closer than it could ever be physically. Any unidentified person is a nameless threat, and when bursts of violence do squelch into the picture, they appear as a surreal incongruity, as if blood is rarely seen nowadays.
Unfortunately, the break from business as usual that was A Dangerous Method may prove to have introduced a fatal element of self-awareness to the Cronenberg style. Whether it is consciously a return to the norm is moot, but what did strike me was a sense of a film trying very hard to be like a David Cronenberg film. It starts off well, but there are scenes as the story progresses which are weirded-up in a way that feels gracelessly self-conscious – I’m thinking here particularly of the camera snaking over the floor of the limo, following a crawling, pneumatic Juliette Binoche, and the staring, borderline hysterical activist played by Mathieu Amalric – and the story winds into a grubby, remote, nighttime dreamscape that would hardly have been an unexpected turn in any of his previous work. The sense of misplaced effort is exacerbated by the script, over half of which is constructed of semi-meaningful cyber age drivel, with the rest mainly questionable assertions about human nature. There are points when I was almost certain Robert Pattinson didn’t understand what he was saying any more than I did. IMDb lists as part of the film's trivia the fact that Cronenberg wrote the script in six days. It’s better to be sure what you’ve written stands up before you make that boast. Cosmopolis is a welcome step away from the respectability of its predecessor, but I hope Cronenberg can fully regain his knack for thoughtful boundary pushing.
Tom
