Cosmopolis

Here is a movie from a director that I admire greatly, David Cronenberg, featuring zeitgeist themes and dialog, which I just could not get into the frequency of. Others love it, but I found it an annoying, shrill frequency to try to tune myself in on. The best word I could think of for it was didactic. And that’s most of my problem with it.

In-between scene after scene speechifying about cyber-capital and protests over the soulessness and greed of the 1%, we’re treated to a succession of random characters who show up for one scene, and don’t really matter much once they’ve disappeared. The performances vary, most are in a highly stylized deadpan, and a few are given the chance to emote and actually make an impact (Juliette Binoche, Samantha Morton and Paul Giamatti, and no one else), and at the center of it all is Robert Pattinson. I can’t decide if he’s just a terrible actor with no true discernible talent besides starring off broodingly, or if those same trademarks work well for this performance. The dialog never flows correctly out of his mouth, and any time he tries to conjure up a real emotion he just seems to flail about, but there’s a level of snark that’s quite nice in the role.

A vast majority of the film takes place in limo of Pattinson’s character, not all of it, we are treated to several brief scenes which play out like random stops on a road trip to visit tourist traps and freak shows. This limo is really more of a rolling war room, outfitted with every tool one could think of that someone in any variation of the financial industry would need to do business. And we’re told numerous times that this thing can do some impressive tricks, pity we don’t witness much. There are lots of fancy screens and a bar, but nothing too terribly impressive.

And that’s the movie. Characters come and go, only long enough to deliver a speech about this invisible currency that exists only as binary when you truly think about it, and we move from one point of the city to another. There’s provocative ideas brought up, but it’s so unbelievably uninteresting. Cosmopolis always feels like it’s trying far too hard to be edgy, profound, rebellious, avant-garde as it drones on and on and on. Whoever wants it, can have this mess of a film. I’ll cuddle up with Videodrome and The Fly any night of the week instead.