There’s a scene toward the end of Cosmopolis where Robert Pattinson walks up a flight of stairs. Pattinson, who plays a sinfully wealthy 28-year-old asset manager named Eric Packer, is looking to confront a man who for unknown reasons has been planning to kill him all day. The scene is terrifically directed. Packer ascends the stairs slowly, the camera floating along behind him and the soundtrack bubbling with impending menace. It’s tense, exciting, and completely unlike anything else in the movie.
That’s because Cosmopolis, the latest from indie director David Cronenberg, is a hard-core art film, very concerned with big ideas and very unconcerned with whether or not you’re entertained. Based on a 2003 novel of the same name, it follows the inscrutable Packer over the course of a very long day spent rolling across Manhatten in a tricked-out limousine on a quest to get a haircut. Along the way, Packer converses with a variety of associates, family members, and passersby who have all manner of opinions on the subjects of death, sex, and money.
People talk in this movie. They talk a lot, and much of what they have to say is very interesting. Take Packer’s chief of theory (Samatha Morton), who stops by his cavernous limo to tell him that “money has taken a turn.” Wealth, she posits, is now collected for its own sake. It’s lost the narrative quality it had in days past and is effectively “talking to itself.” Cosmopolis takes place in a near future when the divide beneath the haves and the have-nots has become so pronounced that the have-nots are starting to revolt. As Packer and his advisor calmly talk economic theory, a band of occupy-ish protesters spray-paint his limo and jostle it from side to side. The scene is finely textured satire, deftly directed and eloquently parsed, and far from the only such scene in the movie. The problem is that after it’s over, it’s over. Apart from the constant presence of the Packer character, there’s very little pulling the movie from one isolated encounter to the next.
And Eric Packer is not a character likely to hold an audience’s interest for very long. For most of the movie, he’s a cipher. Robert Pattinson puts his bland good looks to excellent use here, hiding whatever emotions Packer feels behind a set of dead blue eyes and matinee star cheekbones.
There are a couple of times when we sense a person beneath the gloss. A memorably erotic encounter with a security worker paints Packer as a man desperate for some kind of connection, even it’s not forthcoming. When Packer finally gets to the barbershop and has his hair cut by an old family friend, a man for whom money is a tangible thing rather than ephemera to be bought and sold from afar, he comes close to cracking a genuine smile. Pattinson, known mainly as a teen heart-throb, does some very subtle acting here which bodes well for his future. Packer’s personality may be as hermetically sealed as his sound-proofed limo, but Pattinson suggests the self-destructive impulses at his core in a way that prepares us for his long walk up those stairs near the end of the film. Packer has spent his day watching his fortune fall out from under his feet, the result of a bad bet he made on the international market. His last reason for bothering to get up in the morning thus removed, he goes to meet his killer so that he can be killed.
The final confrontation between Packer and his killer, a disgruntled former employee (Paul Giamatti), boils down to a long talk about the corrupting influence of money and the consequent rot of society. It’s bold, ambitious, and intellectually stimulating, but also cold, anticlimactic, and too much a scene onto itself to complete and give meaning to what came before. As disjointed as Cosmopolis is, I can’t help but think that the material might have been better suited as a collection of essays, or hey, a novel. At the same time, it creates a mood of low rumbling dread that lingers, and may be the kind of movie that benefits from a second viewing. At the least, it’s unlike anything else currently in theaters, and for that reason alone I’m glad it’s around.
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