Movie Review Cosmopolis 2012

The director David Cronenberg has climbed back into an automobile. In “Crash,” his collision saturnalia of 1996, adapted from a morbidly sexual novel by J. G. Ballard, Cronenberg staged violent and erotic happenings in a kind of vehicular theatre of the imagination. He has now adapted the work of an even more talented apocalyptic fantasist, Don DeLillo, whose novel “Cosmopolis” (2003) has furnished him with a superbly written text set mostly in a stretch limo. Cronenberg has made an eccentric and beautiful-looking movie—a languid, deadpan, conceptualist joke. The hero is one of those young capitalist predators who have been haunting American fiction (in, say, “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “American Psycho”). His name is Eric Michael Packer, and he’s played by the hesitant, long-jawed Robert Pattinson, the gallant and fastidious vampire of the “Twilight” series. Eric is a twenty-eight-year-old asset manager whose life is at once completely protected and utterly vulnerable. He steps into his limo in the morning in a Gucci suit and dark glasses, and announces his intention to cross Manhattan for a haircut. But his progress through the city is impeded by the traffic-snarling appearance of the President.

In “Crash,” speed and recklessness behind the wheel kept the movie going, but this time life in a car has literally slowed to a crawl. Various people visit Eric, including two twerpy geniuses, barely shaving, who stare at handheld devices and give investment counsel; an old lover (Juliette Binoche), who has sex with him among the black leather couchettes while offering to find a Rothko for his collection (Eric wants the Rothko Chapel—the entire chapel); and a doctor who gives him his daily prostate exam. Outside the limousine, the tawdry and electric city slowly passes, as if in a moving diorama. Eventually, the car is engulfed by a ferocious and madcap anti-capitalist rally. Vague threats materialize—someone unknown may be trying to kill Eric. All the while, he is watching millions of dollars vanish: he has placed an enormous, heavily leveraged bet on the fall of the yuan, which, stubbornly, improbably, continues to rise.

An erudite but vacant young man, Eric lives mainly within the pulsing circuits of electronic information. We can feel DeLillo’s loathing for the dematerialized world of financial manipulation; he makes Eric a kind of science-fiction metaphor of a human being, and Cronenberg cast the right man for a living cyborg. Pattinson has large eyes, heavy eyebrows, a soft voice. He’s sombre and quiet, a minimalist actor, but he has just enough tension to keep us interested in this intelligent creep. For Eric, the past doesn’t exist, the present is simply money zipping around the globe, the future is his to inhabit. Inside his car, he lives at a still point, but the market economy creates hysterical activity all around him. Though DeLillo wrote the novel a few years after the tech collapse of 2000, it now seems prescient about the much greater collapse of 2008. “We’re speculating in a void,” as one of the twerps says, but that remark no longer sounds extravagant—not after billions of dollars bet on derivatives and “synthetic credit products” have disappeared into the air. And the book’s anti-capitalist theatrics in the streets seem a very accurate anticipation of the Occupy Wall Street movement. DeLillo even understood the ambivalence of the protest: did these people hate capitalism or were they afraid that they had been left behind by it?

Cronenberg has retained much of DeLillo’s dialogue, which is, by turns, clipped and expansive and idea-studded—a kind of postmodernist exposition of how money functions in cyberspace. And he has come up with an equivalent to DeLillo’s curt and cool equipoise—a style of filmmaking that is classically measured and calm, without an extra shot or cut. The interior of the car is designed in shades of black and dark gray, with chrome trim and blue, glowing screens. Despite the constrictions, Cronenberg keeps the space handsome and active. For long stretches, “Cosmopolis” is dreamy and funny, in an off-centered way. At one point, the limo pulls alongside a taxi, and Eric steps into the cab and sits next to a pretty young woman (Sarah Gadon), who turns out to be his wife of twenty-two days. They have a polite conversation; they agree to meet for sex. But as the violence outside grows more frantic, and the money disappears, the tone of the movie darkens. Eric uncoils, slowly losing his will to dominate. He becomes masochistic and virtually indifferent to everything but the most extreme body sensations. When John Updike reviewed the novel in these pages, he asked why we should care about the possible death of this arrogant cipher. A good question, but I’m not sure that emotional involvement is the goal of either the novel or the movie. A certain ghastly possibility—a glimpse of a stone-dead future temperament—has been made potent for us. But it doesn’t go unchallenged. At the end, Eric meets the world he has left behind, in the person of a former employee, the dishevelled, rasping Paul Giamatti. The future may have overtaken the present, but the clay beneath Eric’s feet is still capable of active revolt.

When “Compliance” was shown at the Sundance Festival, last January, some people in the audience got so upset that they started shouting during the screening; others simply walked out. Watching “Compliance” recently, I also began to squirm and talk back, but not because I disliked the movie, which I think is brilliant. American movies are saturated in physical violence; this one is devoted to spiritual violence. “Compliance,” an independent film written and directed by Craig Zobel, is about something serious—our all too human habit of obedience when we are faced with authority. The movie is driven by an urgent moral inquiry, yet it has the mesmerizing detail and humor of a very idiosyncratic fiction. Zobel’s setting is a fast-service chicken franchise in Ohio. The sixtyish Sandra (Ann Dowd), the manager, has a lot on her hands—a heavy Friday-night crowd, not enough bacon in the larder, and a few young employees who slack off when they can. The phone rings: a man identifying himself as a police officer (Pat Healy) says that one of the girls working the front counter, Becky (Dreama Walker), a pretty teen-age blonde, has stolen some money from a customer’s purse. He has the victim sitting next to him, he says, and also surveillance footage of the crime. Sandra, a good-natured sort but eager to stay in control, then does what he instructs her to do—confronts the baffled Becky in a back room, searches her things, and, finally, strip-searches her. (The cop says it’s easier than hauling Becky down to the station and booking her.) The customers come and go, the fries sizzle in fat, the bacon runs out. Sandra, as she deals with the police, keeps the restaurant working, while the other employees, fond of Becky but hapless, take part in her detention and humiliation, doing what the man on the phone orders. Zobel works close to his characters, catching them at moments of doubt before they press ahead. The actors, inspired by the attempt to do something daring, display a perfect balance of casualness and intensity. For this fable to work at all, you have to believe everything in it, and experience the girl’s plight as a genuine violation. I didn’t detect a false note: the rhythm of the movie is workaday and unforced, the restaurant details so oddly right that you feel sure you understand everyone who works there.

Rating : 3 / 5 - courtesy : newyorker.com