Cosmopolis

David Cronenberg – 2012 – Canada

  

David Cronenberg is pretty much the only director who can lure me into a movie theater these days.  (I love Terry Gilliam equally, but unfortunately his films are tragically infrequent…)  Although, in terms of milieu at least, we are certainly back in Cronenberg territory with Cosmopolis much more than in last year’s A Dangerous Method, the two films share a similar troubling problem; the fact that Cronenberg is interpreting existing source material rather than originating it.  There’s no reason why this can’t work just as well – as in Naked Lunch (1991), Crash (1996) and A History of Violence (2005) most notably – but in both these newest films, I had the nagging feeling that he is holding back, perhaps in the interest of sustaining some commercial viability.  Nevertheless, an underwhelming Cronenberg film is still considerably more interesting than a success by most directors.  Robert Pattinson joins the ranks of pallid, spacey Cronenberg leading men – (Christopher Walken, Peter Weller, James Spader, etc.) – and does a fine job as a young American billionaire businessman making his way across Manhattan in his fancy stretch limo.  He just wants a haircut, but getting in his way are funeral processions, demonstrations, and news from headquarters that someone is out to assassinate him.  Themes familiar to Cronenberg fans make welcome recurrences; identity crisis, radical politics, sexual ambivalence, and insensibility to pleasure and pain, to name just a few.  The film is definitely anti-climactic, which will be an understandable nuisance to a lot of viewers, but Cronenberg seems to be saying that whatever resolution he could show wouldn’t really have an impact on the main issues of the film, which is true.  Anyone else, (including me), might have brought the riot sequence from the middle to the end of the film, but that was likely too obvious for Cronenberg.  That’s why he’s an auteur and not a hack.