Review of Cosmopolis (2012) by Kenneth L — 31 Jul 2013

Well, I've read Don DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis, and this movie adaptation lined up pretty much exactly with how I imagined the novel in my head. It's a very faithful adaptation - it's been a year since I read the book, but I felt like most of the dialogue was lifted verbatim from it. It's not satisfying for an audience in the way most movies try to be - the characters are deliberately thin, being more vehicles for philosophical monologues than actual human beings. If you try to relate it to emotionally, the way most people do with most movies, you'll probably hate it. If you relate to it purely intellectually, the way it's clearly meant to be taken, then you'll at least see what it's doing, whether or not you like it.

The story follows a sociopathic Wall Street billionaire named Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) as he takes his huge, high-tech limousine across New York City to get a haircut. Along the way, he has numerous strange, oblique conversations with various characters, and there seems to be some rioting going on outside the car, but he doesn't care. Ultimately, he ends up having a philosophical conversation in an abandoned warehouse with a crazy, would-be assassin (Paul Giamatti).

This movie isn't really about normal human beings so much as it is about ideas and large-scale social and economic phenomena. To put it simply, the movie is about contemporary high-tech capitalism, and it doesn't paint the nicest portrait of it. The movie portrays a world of high finance that is so abstract and so removed from any actual human endeavor as to be absurd and meaningless, yet makes clear that this world has effects on the daily lives of everyone on the planet. I wouldn't characterize it as a Marxist critique of capitalism, since Marxists usually have some sort of replacement in mind; I'm not sure that the novel or the movie really propose any alternatives, or even try to. Even the characters themselves frequently admit of their own theories and descriptions of the world, "I don't understand this." As far as the movie can tell, there's no way out.

The movie was adapted and directed by the singular David Cronenberg, and he really was the perfect director to handle it. While Cronenberg is known for his earlier body-horror movies like The Fly, his more recent work has been heading in more and more abstract and purely psychological directions (Spider, A Dangerous Method). His chilly, removed style is perfect for these characters, since they're not even supposed to be real people anyway. This is the first movie I've seen starring Pattinson, and he's actually perfectly cast as the emotionless Packer. Samantha Morton brings the same sort of dissociative, aloof weirdness to her scenes here that she did as the pre-cog in Minority Report. Paul Giamatti is very good in a role that's unflattering even by Paul Giamatti standards. While this is by design a very limited and abstract sort of film, it's probably the only good movie adaptation of a Don DeLillo novel we'll ever see.