It sounded like a dream combo: Robert Pattinson (fresh from Twilight superstardom, pulling an “adult” role), director David Cronenberg, and a source novel by Don DeLillo. Yet the resulting film, Cosmopolis, did minuscule box office this year (it never made it to these shores) and it’s one tricky ride, loaded with theory and philosophy, as we follow info analyst Eric Parker (Pattinson)’s torturous limo passage through Manhattan… to get a haircut.
Yet in the hands of Cronenberg, it’s an oddly polished polemic — as cold and smooth as the Carrara marble installed in Parker’s futuristic limo, pimped out with twittering computer touchscreens, a well-lit bar and cork lining (to reduce street noise).
The dialogue seems lifted straight from DeLillo’s short novel of the same name and, needless to say, it sounds better on paper. DeLillo is an ideas man, someone who loves to explore the cultural zeitgeist (usually Manhattan’s) in elliptical dialogue that reveals patterns and misperceptions about the world. It’s a movie where people recite things like “Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself” with calm, expressionless faces.
Parker, 28, is a self-contained analyst in a spiffy Gucci suit, a man who surfs the world’s fortunes by studying “ratios, percentages, patterns,” though he’s recently made a huge miscalculation about the Chinese yuan. Plus, someone is out to kill him. He drives around in a gas-guzzling limo while outside, pedestrians dangle dead rats in front of his window (an epigram at the movie’s opening predicts “The rat will become the world’s unit of currency”); meanwhile protesters fight cops and immolate themselves in the street (“It’s not original,” dryly comments one of Parker’s many passengers). DeLillo’s novel was published in 2003, so coming well before the 2009 financial crisis and the Occupy Wall Street movement, this all seems oddly prescient. DeLillo, for all his unwieldy prose, usually does.
And if there’s a director well suited to filming theoretical novels about wealth and capital, man’s relation to time and money and sex and death, it’s Cronenberg, who has in the past tackled J.G. Ballard’s Crash (which also spent a large amount of time inside cars). Cronenberg gives his faux Manhattan a scruffy, alien look — it’s a city that “eats and sleeps noise; makes noise out of every century,” Parker notes — but the limo itself is Parker’s office. At nearly every corner, a new passenger steps inside, such as Didi Fancher (Juliette Binoche), Parker’s art consultant, who we first see riding him doggy-style on the back seat. There follows a conversation about art. Another passenger, Parker’s chief adviser Vija (Samantha Morton), comes aboard to discuss the future of humanity and technology. (“People will not die. People will be absorbed in streams of information. Computers will die. They’re dying in their present form. Even the word ‘computer’ seems ancient.”) Parker’s hip-hop producer friend hops in at one point, and the two discuss the recent death of Brutha Fez, an Islamic rapper artist played by K’naan. And so on. Earlier, Parker carries on a conversation with another female passenger while he endures a prostate exam. (Come to think of it, that’s a pretty good metaphor for watching Cosmopolis.)
The journey takes us to the faraway barbershop of Parker’s dad’s haircutter — located, of course, in an even scuzzier part of the city where danger lurks on every darkened street corner. Why such trouble to get a haircut? Couldn’t this billionaire simply have the barber visit him? “A haircut has… associations,” Parker says in his limo. “A calendar on the wall, a barber’s chair.” The hot towel, the neck rub; we get it, Parker.
Cosmopolis, the novel, probably tried to jam too much into its slim plot device — a limo ride where everything is evaluated, from the clashes of wealth and poverty to the historical function of violence and the ineffable pull of sex. As he often does, DeLillo tries to say too much, offering ideas instead of storytelling. This translates to an odd movie where crucial dialogue is expressed mostly in flat monotone, not unlike David Mamet’s House of Games. Parker’s relationship with his new wife, glamorous young poetess Elise (Sarah Gadon), is almost a theoretical construct: it occurs at stop lights, where he sees her in an adjacent cab, or at diners where she blandly observes, “You reek of sex.” “It’s not the sex you think I’ve had,” Parker counters. “It’s the sex I want. That’s what you smell on me.” Later, when she learns he’s probably lost all of his fortune, she says she will support him with her family’s money, but “I think we can agree, this marriage is over.”
No matter, because Parker is heading for a downward spiral much bigger than a theoretical marriage. Earlier in the day, he asks another lover to Taser him (presumably so he can “feel” something). He’s attacked at one intersection, not by a terrorist or a lone gunman, but by The Pastry Assassin (Mathieu Amalric), a Frenchman who boasts that he’s hit the world’s movers and shakers in the puss with cream pies. Thus, terrorism is reduced to an act of public humiliation, a practical joke.
Later, after his semi-haircut, Parker meets his true fate: it turns out a former employee, Benno Levin (Paul Giamatti), is stalking him. Parker confronts Benno in an abandoned hovel, and stoically hears him out. Unfortunately, their meeting tells us nothing we don’t already know — Parker’s a hardcore cybercapitalist, and Benno is one of the cockroaches who is blithely stepped on in the race to world domination. The scene is almost like a reversal of Apocalypse Now, where Brando (Kurtz) calmly waits for Martin Sheen to come assassinate him (Giamatti even wears a towel around his neck, as Brando did).
What lingers instead is Vija’s analysis of the future, and why protesters are spray-painting Parker’s limo and tearing up the streets. She blames it on the rush to the future, which the “haves” are way better equipped to engineer than the “have-nots.” “The more visionary the idea, the more it will leave people behind,” Vija explains to Parker, while sipping a cocktail. “Visions of technology and wealth… the force of cybercapital that will send people to the gutter to retch and die: this is what they’re protesting.”
We like to think of the future as glittery, as attractive and trouble-free as (most of) our gadgets. Vija sees it otherwise:
“What is the flaw of human rationality? It pretends not to see the horror and death at the end of the schemes it builds… The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We’re all tall and happy there. This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel, happy place we want to make it.”
True. But can’t it at least be a little bit more fun?