Cosmopolis, review

15 cert, 108 min
Dir: David Cronenberg; Starring: Robert Pattinson, Sarah Gadon, Juliette Binoche, Jay Baruchel, Paul Giamatti

Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel Cosmopolis is about as verbose as a 200-page book can get, pondering the soul-death of late capitalism from the vantage point of a billionaire’s stretch limo. DeLillo’s protagonist, Eric Packer, crawls across Manhattan, meeting associates, having sex with some of them, keeping tabs on his vast wealth using the glowing screens by his side, and talking. Talking a great deal. All he really wants is a haircut.

David Cronenberg could hardly have adapted the book more assiduously or made more of a sleek, purring vehicle out of it, choosing a star – Robert Pattinson – whose sullen charisma and android beauty are ideally tailored for the task. He’s like a robot rebelling gradually against his programming.

It’s only when you begin tiring of DeLillo that the movie starts to feel like an inertly perfect organism, lacking a crucial element of surprise. Cronenberg, in the years since his last self-penned film, eXistenZ (1999), has become a canny translation machine for other people’s ideas, but the success of every movie depends too much on his source material.

Every internal decision, from cameo casting to the eerie quiet of the sound design enclosing us in this air-conditioned luxury coffin, is just about unimprovable. There’s no one we’d prefer to see writhing atop Pattinson and slyly interrogating him about his new marriage – a merger with a glassy blonde poet (Sarah Gadon) – than Juliette Binoche. No one could be better-equipped to play an anti-globalisation protester than Mathieu Amalric.

If much of the creepily stilted discourse feels interchangeable, that’s DeLillo’s deliberate fault.

The climax is mesmerisingly scored, even by Howard Shore’s standards, drawing us inside a derelict tenement that would suit a one-act play. Here Packer meets a disgruntled proletarian homunculus wielding a gun. The framing sets them up as opposites. Cronenberg, the clever thing, has found Pattinson’s opposite: Paul Giamatti, whose fervent, scabby performance introduces real torment in the nick of time.

There’s not much more a master director could have done, except challenge the wisdom of his book purchase.