Cosmopolis is a movie about how much it sucks to be bored, passionless, and cold, even when you’re on top of the world. That’s cool and everything, but I don’t go to the movies to not give a damn.
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| Robert Pattinson, not giving a damn. |
Robert Pattinson is well-known for playing bloodless pillars built of strong chins and ennui. He’s mostly dead in Twilight but here he’s all dead here, so, as Billy Crystal would say, the only thing useful to be done with him at this point is to go through his pockets for loose change, not cast him in another movie. But here he is in Cosmopolis, in his limo, where he’s made a lot of money in the... money business (these movies always feature twenty-something billionaires with no discernible skills, which has me wondering why I’m writing this review in a studio apartment with no air conditioning and not from an office made of cocaine bricks). At the beginning of the movie, he declares that he needs a haircut, from a barber shop on the other side of Manhattan. Then, very slowly, in terrible traffic, he makes his way through Manhattan, interacting with a variety of odd characters, hearing in alarming little bursts that someone is trying to kill him and he is slowly losing his fortune. It’s a bad day in the money business, apparently. They talk about yen a lot in this movie but I didn’t really listen because damn, I hate math.
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| Robert Pattinson, still not giving a damn. |
Anyway, most of the movie takes place in Robert Pattinson’s limo, because the president is in town, a rapper has just died and the traffic is awful. Or, as this pretentious asshole of a movie puts it, “We need a haircut.” That’s Pattinson’s line. He speaks in the royal plural in this movie. Why? Because Don Delillo says so, that’s why. “You will hit traffic that speaks in quarter inches,” says Pattinson’s driver. Hang on a second -- traffic doesn’t speak. Is “speak” the word that Pattinson, Dellilo, and Cronenberg are looking for? Apparently it is, because the lines only spiral down frantically from there. I was a creative writing major in college (see preceding line about studio apartment and no air conditioning) and I heard some terrible dialogue spewed in undergrad workshops. This movie talks like the kid who wrote the worst dialogue in your fiction workshop, but only after you bought him too many drinks on the night that the other partners in his polyamorous group relationship voted him out, and several hours into his depression bender you got stuck listening him philosophize at the most overpriced bar in town bar while he tried to smoke an unlit cigarette. This movie talks like that guy. The dialogue goes nowhere, chases its tail, makes weird allusions, picks up threads, traces abstract thoughts, and abandons them quickly.
We get, for example, to see characters talk about holes. Here is the scene.
Character A: "Holes are interesting. There are books about holes."
Character B: "There are books about shit."
Is there a context in which this dialogue might be snappy and interesting? I doubt it. It definitely isn’t in this movie. And there are lines that sound smart at first listen but really aren’t, like when a character contemptuously refers to “Judeo-Christian jogging.” Judeo-Christian jogging, as opposed to -- what, secular-humanist jogging? There are lines that clip along at a brisk, breezy pace until one character utters such a dud that you have the sudden queasy sensation that the entire script stepped in a pile of dog turds.
Pattinson: “How old are you? I’m interested.”
Other guy: “How old? Forty-one.”
Pattinson: “Hm. A prime number.”
Other guy: “But not an interesting one.”
Did you hear the squish? It was a cool moment, when we see that Pattinson is so caught up in numbers that the first thing he notices about this man’s age is the fact that forty-one has no divisors. And then it’s... not an interesting prime number. Why not? What does Cronenberg have against forty-one? Is there something about forty-three I should know?
But worst of all are the characters who talk like no one you have ever met nor like anyone who has ever lived. There are dozens of examples. Pattinson’s wife calmly informs him that he “reek(s) of sexual discharge.” We learn that the “logical extension of business is murder,” which is a logic that I am not familiar with, but this is not my movie. A doctor tells us that Pattinson’s prostate is asymmetrical, which is a fact that both has massive symbolic significance and is something that every character in the movie knows and brings up repeatedly. Most obnoxious of all is a female character who monologues in what sounds like the comments on a philosophy blog if you back-translated them on Babelfish. “People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units. A box, a screen, a keyboard, are melting into the texture of everyday life. Is this not true?”
The dialogue sounds like jamming knitting needles in your ears, the characters are as bloodless as slugs, people you don’t care about keep getting shot in the head, and there is an extended motif of dead rats that is apparently important but I only remembered when I rewatched the trailer. There is nothing to get worked up about in this movie.
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| Not even Robert Pattinson's prostate exam. |
