Review of Cosmopolis (2012) by Rainer K — 26 Sep 2012

After three decent films David Cronenberg falls in a slump again.

Main reason for this is imho Robert Pattinson. He plays the title character Eric Packer who is some sort of hotshot manager and shamelessly rich. Packer is a cold and distant character and Pattinson is, admittedly, a natural choice for such a role - unfortunately the film consists of numerous monologues that Pattinson is arguably not capable to deliver in a way any viewer would care about it. Maybe this film would have worked better with someone like James Franco, Michael Fassbender or Leonardo DiCaprio as the lead.

Because the material is not bad. I'm just a bit curious whether it's filmable material in the first place. The scenes in the limo work out as a cruel parody on chamber plays (Pattinson smuttering his lines while some of his co-players actually do a decent job - Sarah Gadon and Kevin Durand for example) and while some films benefit from limited areas like phone booths, caskets or planes, Cosmopolis just doesn't use the narrow area as an asset. Instead the people instead just talk and there's never a thing that couldn't have happened in another place (so, we don't get too distracted by some scenes that just change location to hotel rooms, diners,... etc for no particular reason).

The film is not very good but the script has interesting points (Samantha Morton's part most prominently) but this is arguably a book you should rather see than watch (haven't read it myself but it can't get worse).

So, there's possibly an hour of a film that just went into the wrong direction and suffers from ONE poor casting choice. After that it evolves into a messy, partly surrealistic, piece of junk and with the appearance of Paul Giamatti (an actor who I normally love) Cosmopolis totally loses it - I just couldn't keep track of what was going on and what they were talking about - neither was I really interested in it.

This is Cronenberg madness which I explored in Crash and eXistenZ and made me decide to not further evaluate his older work (I loved History of Violence and respected Eastern Promises and A Dangerous Method though) and I hope he can rebound otherwise won't catch up on his new releases either.