Cosmopolis (MA). Director: David Cronenberg. Starring: Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Sarah Gadon, Kevin Durand, Samantha Morton, Paul Giamatti, Patricia McKenzie. 109 minutes
The opening title sequence features the time-lapse apparition of a Pollock-esque splatter painting. Curlicues of gloomy colour fleck the screen, layer upon layer, forming a dense and convoluted labyrinth. A Pollock painting proffers a randomness and abstractness that only with time and reflection might suggest meaning. This is the kind of attention Canadian provocateur Cronenberg asks you to pay to Cosmopolis — be warned.
Eric Packer (Pattinson) is a Wall Street billionaire who sets off across town for the mundane purpose of getting a haircut. His transport is a modified limousine-cum-moveable office, sound- and bullet-proof and decked out with television and computer screens. But this is no mere luxurious cross-town drive. Traffic is at a virtual standstill, due to the coincidence of a presidential visit, the funeral of a Sufi hip-hop artist, and an anti-capitalist rally.
This purgatorial traffic jam hints at Packer's own encroaching hell. A bad investment has sent his vast fortune plummeting. It dwindles as the interminable road journey progresses, plunging Packer into a veritable existential funk. A drive to get a haircut evolves into a search for meaning in a life that's been dedicated to vacuous wealth.
En route Packer exchanges fluids and philosophical tete-a-tetes with a succession of advisors and colleagues. These exchanges are frequently cold and abstract, yet for the viewer are utterly compelling, as the actors emit authentic human feeling even as the dialogue consists of heady riddles and abstractions.
Try, for one, to take your eyes off Pattinson. He may have cemented himself in the minds and libidos of many an adolescent girl with his portrayal of a certain sulky vampire; here he is an altogether different beast. Packer is like a rancid egg; hard and beautiful exterior churning beneath with unglimpsed horrors and instability. He grows more complex with each twistedly comic or absurdly earnest, illuminating or incomprehensible encounter.
Packer's Virgil on his journey is his chief of security Torval (Durand), who speaks to him with the authority of 'The Complex', presumably the financial monolith to which Packer is bound and with which he shares a symbiotic relationship. Soon they learn that an assassin has made a credible threat on Packer's life. This worries Torval, but Packer is apathetic; he gradually becomes less interested in self-discovery, and more in self-destruction.
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