“[A] rat became a unit of currency.” That epigraph introduces Cosmopolis, the hypnotic, maddening, cold-blooded new feature from master filmmaker David Cronenberg. The quote is a snippet from “Report from the Besieged City,” an evocative, disquieting poem by the late anti-Communist Polish writer Zbigniew Herbert. Cronenberg has an eye for the punchy phrase that pulsates with dread and hidden meaning, whether it is his own or another writer’s: Think Videodrome’s “Long Live the New Flesh” and Naked Lunch’s “Exterminate All Rational Thought.” Herbert’s line squirms underneath the surface of Cosmopolis, and not just in a scene where characters quote it directly and swap witticisms about “rat futures” and “corrections in the rat market.” Cronenberg’s film looks on—half aghast, half giggling—as economies, civilizations, and minds are forcibly evolved, remade into something that is (paradoxically) primordial and repulsive. Like Herbert's poem, it announces with a quiver: “We have raised a new species of children.”
One of those children is Eric Packer (a superbly detatched Robert Pattinson), a 28-year-old billionaire currency speculator who is as flawlessly groomed and attired as a Dolce & Gabbana model. “We need a haircut,” he announces dryly to his chief of security, Torval (Kevin Durand), while they stand before an array of stretch limousines on a Manhattan street. Eric’s own custom-built limo puts the vehicles of the workaday one-percenter to shame: a lavish lounge and office studded with touch-screens, on which a never-ending stream of financial data scuttles, like an army of remorseless, stinging ants. The limo is cork-lined in an unsuccessful effort to silence street noise—although Eric observes that it is not the effectiveness of this modification that matters, but its extravagance. Sealed within this capsule of opulence, Eric takes a glacial journey through midtown gridlock to obtain his haircut, an objective about which he is simultaneously single-minded and ambivalent.
The faint tracings of both Homer and Joyce are visible in Eric’s climate-controlled odyssey, which sees him crossing paths with a succession of sycophants, adversaries, and sex partners in the space of roughly 24 hours. (He has no actual friends, of course.) Visitors appear in the limo, converse elliptically with him for a time, and then vanish: 40-something art dealer/plaything Didi (Juliette Binoche); anxious computer security czar Shiner (Jay Baruchel); exasperated financial partner Jane (Emily Hampshire); faux-punk economics wunderkind Michael (Philip Nozuka); and supercilious, space-cadet philosopher Vija (Samantha Morton). The only repeat encounter is with Eric’s new bride Elise (Sarah Gadon), an unruffled blonde aristocrat who regards him with faintly disgusted wariness, as though he were a python. Eric emerges from his limousine three times to wheedle her into a shared meal, during which the surreal table conversation orbits the subject of their anemic and still-unconsummated marriage.
Meanwhile, Torval provides nonstop updates on the minutiae of the limo’s route, which is adjusted in response to various obstacles: the visiting President’s motorcade, a celebrity funeral procession, and a swelling movement of pseudo-Occupy activists and anarchists (who, pointedly and rather comically, fling dead rats as an act of political protest). The security chief also speaks gravely of a “credible” threat to Eric’s life, a rumor apparently sifted and plucked from an ocean of digital intelligence. For his part, the billionaire seems remarkably unconcerned about this menace, venturing from the limo not only to fruitlessly cajole Elise, but also to dawdle in a throbbing nightclub, watch teens play late-night basketball, and furiously couple with his shapely bodyguard Kendra (Patricia McKenzie). Following this latter encounter, Eric urges Kendra to shoot him in the chest with her Taser, so he can “feel something.” Yikes: The affected world-weariness isn’t half as disagreeable as the post-coital backhanded swipe at the poor woman’s sexual performance.
Cronenberg adapted Cosmopolis from the 2003 Don DeLillo novel of the same name, which generally received a cool to hostile response from critics. Such reviled source material might give a lesser filmmaker pause, but Cronenberg’s adaptation is both adroit and enthusiastic, preserving the novelist’s logorrheic, bewildering dialogue, while shaping it into a work for human performers and physical spaces. Indeed, the script could work splendidly as a stage play with some adjustments—one can envision a Brechtian take on Eric’s limousine encompassing eight folding chairs. However, given Cronenberg’s characteristic command of the mise-en-scène, the appeal of this Cosmopolis is utterly, marvelously entangled with its cinematic character. The film’s climactic confrontation between Eric and a dyspeptic paranoid (Paul Giamatti) is a visually stunning marathon of anticipation and deflation, and easily one of the most fascinating scenes of Cronenberg’s career.
Undeniably, Cosmopolis’ remorseless undertow of words and unpleasantly frosty veneer will render it an aggressively alienating experience for many viewers. When regarded from the wrong angle, the film can resemble an obnoxious, vacuous portrait of ultra-wealthy ennui and excess, as though a Whit Stillman feature had been drained of its humane affection. Surely, one is not meant to empathize with Eric Packer, a man with a polished aluminum cavity where his soul should be? Far from it: Eric is presented as an object of ridicule, along with every character in Cosmopolis. Cronenberg skillfully evades the latent, preening seriousness of the dialogue by highlighting the ludicrous quality of each exchange and gesture. The film’s deadpan satirical bent is at times subtle and at times scrumptiously savage. (This viewer, for one, couldn’t stop giggling at the sight of protesters violently jostling Eric’s limo while Vija sips premium vodka and spews her social Darwinist futurist ramblings.) Like Mary Harron’s cult masterpiece American Psycho, Cronenberg’s film achieves depth by embracing gravity to the point of caricature. Beyond its contempt of Eric Packer and everything he represents, beyond the cascade of self-satisfied demi-people talking and talking and saying nothing, Cosmopolis discovers the exhausted terror of Herbet’s poem. It conjures a potent vision of a society crumbling under the weight of its blood-flecked ideologies and its desperate insistence of its own significance.
