Cosmopolis

Cosmopolis is a quintessential realization of all the dangers of the auteur theory in filmmaking. Were this film not directed by the great David Cronenberg, not only would nobody praise it, no one would even sit through it. However, because this pretentious, simple-minded exercise is directed by someone who, based on his past work, we have all declared to be a master, those of us who respect the filmmaker had to sit through it--even though, for me, it chipped away enormous chunks of that respect. The movie is based on a novel by Don DiLillo about the limousine voyage of a 28 year old billionaire asset manager (Robert Pattinson), whose journey to get a haircut is interupted by several trafic jams and other encounters with humanity. The ideas in DeLillo’s novel might be interesting, but we’d never know that from watching Cronenberg’s movie. The provocative director simply uses the source material as fodder for an experiment in digital filmmaking, that results in a smug, tedious, and empty viewing experience.  Cosmopolis is a narrative film without a narrative. Unlike literary prose, which can be fascinating, even riveting, to read even if the story is about nothing more than a rich guy driving across town to get a haircut, narrative cinema is meaningless without an engaging story and a relatable main character.

When reading a novel, our imagination can float off and mingle with the words and themes of the writer.  In a movie, we rarely have that luxury. Mostly, we are stuck with just the filmmaker’s imagination. The filmmaker (or filmmakers) must convey all ideas through astute imagery, artful dialogue, subtle subtext, and dramatic story construction. Cosmopolis does not present its ideas--specifically its generic riffs about the evils of capitalism--in a dramatic form with vivid narrative power nor visual imagination. In writing this “script,” Cronenberg seems to have simply cut and pasted all the dialogue from the source novel into his screenwriting program, added some stage directions, and put it in screenplay format. This method of composition constitutes neither screenwriting nor adaptation; there is no art or craft to this exercise. Cronenberg could have skipped the screenplay stage of this project and simply copied the dialogue from the novel onto one of the D.I.Y animation videos on YouTube in which pre-drawn characters speak the words you type. He wouldn't have been able to call it a film, but he would have achieved much the same result as he did in this picture. For although this is a live-action movie, the listless actors and artificial settings make the film look like one of those pre-visualization videos that special effects houses make before generating the actual sequences.

Cosmopolis epitomizes the major downside of digital cinema. While new, affordable, easy-to-use technology enables hardworking amateurs to make legit movies and reach a mass audience, it also empowers legit filmmakers to act like amateurs and inflict their lazy, half-baked whims on art-house audiences. Like DeLillo’s novel, Cosmopolis the film takes place almost entirely inside the main character’s limousine. Cronenberg intentionally makes the limo look and sound like a stage-bound set, with green screen windows and no ambient noise of street or engine. It is clear that the car is not actually driving or even moving (or even a car, for that matter). I’m sure there is some kind of pretentious justification for this choice; maybe it is a statement about fantasy vs. reality, or the ways in which the ultra-rich conceal themselves in anonymous cocoons of privilege that are part of the real world but also separate from the real world. Whatever the point behind this choice, it gets overshadowed by how fake, cheap, and silly it looks.

Cosmopolis is the kind of movie that can be written in one day and filmed in five, with a handful of famous actors (in this case, Juliette Binoche, Paul Giamatti, Samantha Morton, Mathieu Amalric, and more) coming in for cameo roles that are shot in a couple of hours.  We the audience, on the other hand, have to devote as much time to watching it as if it were a real film that a crew of artists and craftsmen devoted months or years to. If one is to make a film from a book, one must create something, an experience that has more life to it than just the people mouthing the author’s words. I can think of several excellent films that, in terms of plot, are about little more than characters driving around in a car for two hours. (Abbas Kiarostami has practically made a career out of such films.) But, like any other movie, the success or failure of these films depend on the artfulness with which the ideas behind the actions are conveyed. Cosmopolis contains plenty of ideas, but holds no insight.