This is basically a cover song of Cronenberg playing a Lynch piece of art. It at times, is very self-referential and self-conscious of its abstractions, and veering towards the Avant Garde. The film, Cosmopolis is a vehicle for Twilight’s Robert Pattinson to test drive.
He plays stock-mogul Eric Packer, away from the market collapse and in his limo driving through what appears to be Occupy Protests hunting down a rat in its midst. Pattinson is a caged rat indeed, sniveling at the lower class Proletariat that he encounters—always looking for a good lay which he sniffs through the maze of women, purposeful secretaries, like the vixen played by Juliete Binoche in a delectable cameo.
In the beginning he chats stoically with his young male associates who are plugging away at technology—devices which mark the distance in your hands that attain and retain information, a theme of the movie like the steel to mark and imprison this caged rat. “There is a vulnerable point of entry”, says one of his startup associates.
A lady friend muses, “I think you acquire information and turn it into something stupendous—awful”, Technology like the make and devices of his limo are the very antithesis of destruction, but as an executive, Pattinson is playing the cup and wire telephone game with his underlings. Ultimately he plays a singular vessel to the stereotypes of corporate head honchos who behave drastically indifferent and dead pan to the rest of the company and its geographical make-up.
This independent film is adapted from a novel by Dan DeLillo. One wonders about the themes that were represented in the original work and whether the dialogue of the original was as self-conscious and satirical as the film. “Time is a corporate asset now” says another associate and the distance between Pattinson’s executive and company bureaucracy grows. She adds, “Destroy the path; make the future.”
Is this screenplay a narrative experiment to show the distance between the corporate aristocracy and the low-income wage earners like Paul GIamatti;’s character explores. When he faces Giamatti’s Benno, Eric comes up short with the violence he has wreaked in a Patrick Bateman like lunacy. Benno struggles with his own access to technological arms, here represented by a gun that has a seeker on it. Therefore, he is a point and comparison to Eric who self- destructs in the face of Giamatti’s seemingly benevolent proletariat. Violence here is used to surprise or provide a resounding beat which is quite different from the shock value types of contemporary film
