Cosmopolis must surely rank as one of
the slowest road movies ever made. It follows the gradual crawl of a
white limousine as it moves from one side of Manhattan to the other.
Inside is Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), an insanely rich and
staggeringly young billionaire who simply wants a haircut. Packer is
the pinnacle of the ultra-rich 1%, one of Tom Wolfe's self styled
Masters of the Universe; in this case, a portable, self contained
universe. We see Packer's self engineered financial and personal
downfall as he is ferried ever closer to a climactic confrontation
with Unabomber-like former employee Benno Levin (Paul Giamatti), the
nadir of the other 99%.
In terms of it's place in the oeuvre of
director David Cronenberg, the easiest and most obvious connections
would be with his other automotive nightmare, Crash. Both films
create a glacial, hermetically sealed world, but whereas Crash allows
us to peer in at this world through the glass, Cosmopolis places us
inside of it. The interior of Packer's limo, bathed in the blue light
of the screens bringing him news of his financial destruction, is
scarily silent. Whenever the door is opened, the sounds of the city
are almost deafening. His succession of advisers and analysts all
speak in stilted sentences and strangely hollow sound bites, Samantha
Morton in particular being disarmingly blank and angular as Packer's
personal theoretician. As the cold and vulpine Packer, Pattinson
undoubtedly has the hardest job, being on screen for almost every
second of the movie, but he adds further proof of Cronenberg's canny
eye for casting. He plays Packer as someone who has done too much,
too young, and has nothing left but the thrill of losing it all. When
we first see him holding court in his limo, he's dwarfed by his
throne like chair. And when he exits the limo to confront an
attacker, a gun tucked into his trousers, he does so with the cocky
strut of a schoolboy trying to act harder than he feels. It's a pitch
perfect performance that proves there is more to Pattinson than an
army of screaming and swooning fans.
Paul Giamatti, on the other hand, has
nothing to prove. The final twenty minutes of the movie, where Packer
finally exits his universe and enters that of Giamatti's balding,
dishevelled Levin, are the real triumph of Cosmopolis. The likes of
Levin, those who have fallen through the cracks, have no place in
Packer's world; “Do you think people like me can't happen?” Levin
demands. He's the abandoned chickens of rampant capitalism come home
to roost, desperation in his eyes and a gun in his hand. It's a gold
standard of naturalistic scenery chewing, and armed with Cronenberg's
style and Don DeLillo's words, he doesn't put a foot wrong.
Those looking for grand, damning
statements on the evils of capitalism may not find Cosmopolis
entirely satisfactory. Cronenberg seems more interested in showing
modern society stretched to breaking point, threatening to snap at
any moment. It's an incredibly easy film to admire, and an extremely
hard one to love. It's certainly not a film for everyone, but then
there's no fun in films that aim to be for everyone, and by extension
are for no one. Cosmopolis is a film for some, and on those grounds
it is almost flawless. And that's just fine by me.
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