COSMOPOLIS (David Cronenberg 2012)

[Chris Knipp]

FAN NOTES, COMMENTARY.

COSMOPOLIS has a fan website:

New Yorker Magazine movie blogger Richarg Brody wrote a detailed comment about COSMOPOLIS,

INDIEWIRE has an interview with Cronenberg.

SIGHT AND SOUND ran a cover story on COSMOPOLIS at the time of its Cannes debut. The link will take you to a site that gives scans of the cover and article plus a transcript of the article.



I would never normally do this, but this time I'd recommend for viewers of the film to go out and read Don DeLillo's 2003 source novel, which Cronenberg followed very closely in writing his screen adaptation. The novel is s short, and available in a new paperback for $15. You can get new compies of an earlier edition not adorned with a still from Cronenberg on the cover for $10 or less. (A copy signed by the author will cost you more. Even books the critics initially hated can turn out to be valuable.)

The book's brilliant and reads as a near-perfect companion piece to the film, and vice versa. Rarely in my experience have a book and a movie so nicely and handily complimented each other. The movie will illuminate the book and make it glow in the mind. The book will explain and enlarge upon the movie, and the dialogue of the movie is taken almost completely verbatim from the book; so it reads as an illuminatingly annotated screenplay. Inner dialogue in the book will enhance your perception of the movie's key scenes. If you choose to hate the book or insist the book is better than the movie or feel obliged to prove the movie is better than the book some or all of the pleasures I promise will be lost to you. If you take book and movie as both good and of equal merit, each in its own mode, you will have a swell time.


REVIEWS.


The Guardian critic, Peter Bradshaw, is very disapproving.

Sadly, the resulting film is as heavy, unmanoeuvrable and preposterous as the stretch limo at its centre; a "day in the life" drama with no satisfying life. And DeLillo's highly charged language, when parcelled up into film dialogue, is cumbersome and self-conscious without the original speck of deadpan drollery. It is possible to read Cosmopolis as a premonition of the economic crash we now know all about, but really it looks like an exercise in zeitgeist-connoisseurship that appears obtuse, self-indulgent and fatally shallow.

All very well, but the trouble is that Bradshaw's criticisms are just a long string of adjectives. Anyone can opine. It's quite another thing to convince. In fact Cronenberg has rightly sensed that the novel's dialogue will transfer perfectly to the screen, and on the screen it has exactly the effect it has in the book, only more so. What is "zeitgeist-connoisseurship"? How is that a fault, to pinion and delineate the zeitgeist? It is what DeLillo seeks to do and what the movie also does. Since when was "connoisseurship" a dirty word?

The Observer's Philip French, on the other hand, is admiring.

The central character, Eric Packer, brings to mind two wilful financial anti-heroes, Sherman McCoy of Bonfire of the Vanities and Gordon Gekko of Wall Street. But the 28-year-old Packer is younger, infinitely richer, and altogether more self-knowing. As played with frightening conviction by Robert Pattinson he's a Gatsby-esque figure, remote, inscrutable and doomed.

The link with Gatsby is an interesting, especially with DiCaprio's Gatsby on the way.

David Denby of The New Yorker provides a positive review that clearly relates the book to the film and the action to post-2008 economic developments and to the Occupy Wall Street movement and makes the movie and the cast, even the interior of the white stretch limo is shown, look good. He describes Pattinson favoably as a "minimalist" actor.

Walter Chaw of Film Freak Central, an online journal, rates COSMOPOLIS four out of four stars : he describes it as a summation of Cronenberg's oeuvre thus far.

As I've noted Mike D'Angelo at Cannes tweeted this (and note in D'Angelo's rigorous system a 59 is a very decent score):

Cosmopolis (Cronenberg): 59. Demands an incredibly precise tone that Cronenberg nails about half the time. Thrilling when he does.

I would maintain it is indeed thrilling when it does but walking into the film directly from reading the novel I found he nails it 90% of the time not about 50%.