I Would Like to See It: Cosmopolis

Cosmopolis is an oddity in David Cronenberg’s long history as a filmmaker. It’s cold where his work typically runs hot, overwritten where he tends toward sparseness in his dialogue, and existential where he inclines toward a certain earthiness. Part of this is the source material, the Don DeLillo novel of the same name, but where DeLillo makes an art form out of probing the American penchant for trivial thinking and transparent projection, Cronenberg struggles to get at the meaning behind the mundanity. The film’s first two acts hold together as a sort of parable of the hollow, aching neediness of ultra-rich existence, Pattinson’s flatly neurotic performance revealing just enough humanity to keep things interesting as characters monologue over and through one another, voicing their thoughts more than speaking, but in its third Cosmopolis comes down to Pattinson and Paul Giamatti trading banal observations in a filthy apartment and what substance there was rapidly cooks off.

Giamatti is not, even by the most generous estimation, a versatile actor. He has one speed — Paul Giamatti — and the rest is costuming, and with his massive compensator handgun and washcloth wimple he reads not as a pathetic, broken-down schlub clawing desperately for meaning by destroying what he idolizes but as Paul Giamatti yelling at a waiter or arguing with his uncle. He can’t communicate the kind of tragic narcissism the film needs from him, and by the end of the sequence it feels like he and Pattinson are in completely different movies. Where Pattinson finds something interesting in probing with a kind of fascinated disgust at his own barely-remembered humanity as his wealth burns down around his ears, Giamatti is just shouting lines. Cosmopolis breaks down completely before ending with a complete fart of an existential crisis/cliffhanger.

It’s a stark contrast to the dirty live-wire intensity of Pattinson’s reptilian billionaire character Eric Michael Packer telling his chief finance officer (Emily Hampshire) she “wasn’t born to run, [she] was born to sit, sloppy-bodied, tied to a chair, while a man [tells her she’s] worthless” as his doctor (Bob Bainborough) examines his prostate in a moving car. When the film leans into its cold and clinical but decidedly nasty sexual aspects, Cronenberg has space to shine. A writhing Juliette Binoche, her hair plastered over her face like some kind of primordial Medusa. Patricia McKenzie’s powerful thighs gripping Pattinson’s pasty, skinny frame, the curve of her hips rolling with fat and muscle as she moves. There is life in Cosmopolis, and in places it manages to resonate effectively with the film’s flat, cold tone, but in the end a piece of bad casting and an under-edited script doom it to mediocrity.