Cosmopolis (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

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B+ Sound
A Extras
A
starring
Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Sarah Gadon, Paul Giamatti
screenplay
by David Cronenberg, based on the novel by Don DeLillo
directed
by David Cronenberg

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by
Walter Chaw David Cronenberg's North by
Northwest, his adaptation of Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis
functions as a difficult, arctic précis of the Canadian filmmaker's
career-long obsession with the insectile nature of, and indulgence in,
hunger. Cronenberg's proclivity for parasites, after all, is
essentially the admiration of creatures defined by their hunger. His
latest is Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), a voracious sexual predator
who lives in the dark cocoon of his stretch limo as it inches its way
across Midtown to a barbershop that would be more at home in the
bucolic small town of A History of Violence than
in the metal canyons of Manhattan. Its existence, like a little diner
along the way, like a bookshop with paper- and leather-lined walls, is
further evidence of infestation–pockets of disease on the glistening
skin and sterile surfaces of industry. No wonder the filthy rabble
protesting in Gotham's streets have as their unifying symbol the rats
that are the true inheritors of man's work. Cronenberg recalls his
own Crash in these ideas–and not just in
his desire to adapt literary properties considered unadaptable. He
recalls his Naked Lunch in the idea that language
is a neurological contagion, and he recalls most of all both
his Videodrome (in his
identification of screens with every intercourse) and his eXistenZ (in
the erasure of any meaningful line between our interiors and
exteriors). Cosmopolis is dense and
multifarious–the absolute pinnacle of pretentious, too, in its desire
to explain not only its creator, but all of the world at this moment in
time in our age of missing information.

Eric wants a haircut. To get there, he's willing to brave
street closures from a presidential visit ("Let me be clear, which
president?"), protests from an anti-capitalist group angry with the
consolidation of wealth in the United States, a public
funeral-procession for a Sufi rapper with a heart condition ("Did he
disappoint you for not having been shot?"), and the firm protestations
of his bodyguard (Kevin Durand) and driver (Abdul Ayoola). A credible
threat is made on Eric's life, see, and during the day Eric gambles his
commodities-trading fortune (billions) on the value of the Yuan
(changed from the Yen in the book, because the irony of books like
DeLillo's is that although they're prescient, they can't predict the
details), and losing. Eric is married to wealthy poet Elise (Sarah
Gadon), who won't fuck him, and visited by a couple of women, like Didi
(Juliette Binoche) and Kendra (Patricia McKenzie), who will. This
causes the frigid, fascinating Elise to constantly declare she can
smell sex on Eric. Eric, at one point, announces that "it's my peanuts
that you smell." Evidence of Cronenberg's sense of humour, sure, but
also the kind of Charlie Kaufman wordplay Cosmopolis holds
as its stock-in-trade. (The mind boggles at what a film actually
written by Kaufman and directed by Cronenberg would look like.) At the
end, Eric confronts disgruntled Benno Levin (Paul Giamatti) in another
of those biological pustules festering in the naked city–Benno
shrouded eternally in a dirty towel as Eric sprouts stigmata.

Cosmopolis is about disconnection. Its
lens is a microscope's lens and its director is an alien
anthropologist. The sex is as clinical as the interactions. The most
disturbing scene in a film full of them is a quick shot of Binoche's
hand touching Eric's foot as she slithers on the floor of his limo
immediately post-sex. She talks about how she doesn't understand how
the world works anymore (when reminded that she once said "talent is
more erotic when it's wasted," she responds, "What did I mean?") and,
later, another woman, Vija (Samantha Morton), Eric's staff philosopher,
expounds at length about disjointed narratives before offering that she
doesn't know what she's saying. It gives the quality that external
forces–writers and a director–are driving the characters and a
narrative, such as it is, that is completely beyond their control.
These people are marionettes in high-Absurdist style, reciting
expositions and theories without any real connection to them. Aren't we
all? It confirms Cronenberg's disavowal of a Romanticist sublime: For
him, there isn't an "each-to-each" beyond the animal mechanism of
function and motion. Eric's world is divided into cycles of
consumption; Cronenberg makes no distinction between eating, shitting,
fucking, making money, losing money. Communication, too, is a
mechanical function–ideas are a virus that interferes with systems.
Eric at one point tries to purchase a chapel designed by Mark Rothko
and is told it belongs to the public. He responds that if this were so,
let the public buy it. Capitalism as ritual and rite, no different than
religion. Accordingly, Cronenberg gives his parasite a sanctuary.

Yet Cosmopolis isn't a political film.
It covers the Occupy movement in the same detached way it covers the
captains of finance that inspired it: both syndromes as impersonal and
insidious as a cancerous tumour, and identical in their metastatic
progression. It's an existential film, in other words, offering that
there are no souls to call at the Rapture–that we are all automatons
programmed to acquire, to stake out our plots of land and our little
conquests before our motor winds down. I love the scene where Eric
receives a prostate exam while engaged in a business meeting like a
prize steer at the fair. The revelation that the organ in him is in
fact asymmetrical is, to Cronenberg, like blood in the water. Remember
the twins in Dead Ringers? The fungal growths and
water spots that form the opening credits of Spider?
Cosmopolis suggests that if biology tends towards
symmetry, we are now, as a species, trending towards
artificiality–that we have, through our creeds and credos, pushed
ourselves into the realm of the biomechanical. We've forced evolution
upon ourselves not into higher beings, but into shrunken things ("I
fear my sex organ is retracting into my body") closed into a throne
girded with technology and information fatally unfiltered. It suggests
that we've invited a mortal virulence into our system–that, as one
character says, we've lost narratives in favour of volume. It is,
finally, a summary of Cronenberg's work to this point, as well as a
statement of absolute fear and loathing. A lovely post-modern work,
it's killed God by discovering there never was one to begin with. I
wonder if anyone could bear a double-feature of it with Kaufman's Synecdoche,
New York. Originally published: August 21, 2012.

THE
BLU-RAY DISC
by
Bill Chambers eOne brings Cosmopolis
to Blu-ray in
a 1.85:1, 1080p transfer that is rough-going at the start as the eyes
adapt to
a conspicuously artificial look–shot with the ARRI Alexa, this is
David
Cronenberg's first fully digital production–complete with greenscreening I will
charitably describe as mediocre. (It's the fact that the exteriors are
in the
same razor-sharp focus as the interiors.) But then something happens:
Robert
Pattinson seamlessly steps out of the vehicle and into a digital
background
plate, instantly teaching our eyes to reconcile the flat depth of
field. Then
again, this is a work of surrealism that defeats most technical
criticism
("I wanted the [background] to be…not quite realistic…like a movie
playing outside the world of the limo," Cronenberg says on the audio
commentary),
and I only really take issue with those times where the image goes from
slickly
synthetic to merely electronic, with light noise and black crush
cropping up now and again. Cosmopolis meanwhile
boasts
one of Cronenberg's
more dynamic mixes, the accompanying 5.1 DTS-HD MA track
brilliantly
reproducing the sterile quiet of the limo (Cronenberg took inspiration
from the
highly-subjective sound design of Das Boot), the
ear-splitting gunshots,
and every ambient fleck in-between.

A second track houses another sterling
feature-length yakker from Cronenberg, during which he likens the
across-the-board
sameness of the dialogue to the way that everyone at Apple talks like
Steve
Jobs: Eric Packer's thought and speech patterns dictate the corporate
hive-mind
to which most of the film's characters belong. Alterations to the book
are duly
accounted for, with the change of the Yen to the Yuan–which isn't yet
a
convertible currency as the movie portrays it–chalked up to
"futurism."
Although Martin Scorsese once told Cronenberg he shouldn't talk about
his own
movies
because he misrepresents them, there are few filmmakers so
open to
and
adept at explaining themselves, even if the language sometimes borders
on
self-parody.

Next comes Citizens of Cosmopolis (120
mins., HD), from
Julie Ng, who previously gave us a great longform doc about the making
of
Cronenberg's A History of Violence. A mix
of fly-on-the-wall footage and
on-the-spot interviews with above- and below-the-line talent, it
provides the name and job title of virtually everyone who appears on
screen.
(Some players are additionally identified by how long they've
worked with
Cronenberg, underscoring the extended-family aspect of his crew without
belabouring it.) Running 11 minutes longer than Cosmopolis
proper, the
piece ultimately transcends Cronenberg hagiography–A
Dangerous Method
actress Sarah Gadon admits that getting to work with the director a
second time
was a bigger personal thrill than getting to work with Pattinson (who's
charming here) once–by showing palpable interest in Cronenberg's
working
methods, as well as a patience for documenting them that justifies the
running
time. I love the segment where Cronenberg sits in his trailer studying
a video
tap of the bookstore set and radios long-time DP Peter Suschitzky to
include a
set of
Stalin books in the shot, leading to a little comedy routine about the
propriety of a Stalin reference. Observing Cronenberg in the act of
observing
is ludicrously entertaining; I could watch him watch things all day.

Lastly, "Interviews with Cast and
Crew" (27 mins., HD) assembles talking-heads with Cronenberg, producers
Paulo Branco and Martin Katz, Pattinson, Gadon, and co-stars Kevin
Durand, Jay
Baruchel, Juliette Binoche, Emily Hampshire, Samantha Morton, K'Naan,
Mathieu
Almaric, and Paul Giamatti that feel like outtakes from Citizens
of
Cosmopolis. The origins of the project are recounted for
maybe the third
time on this disc and the actors are prompted to discuss
their
unconventional characters in the most conventional terms, though I
confess I
didn't exactly give these a fair shake because major Cosmopolis
fatigue
was setting in by that point. HiDef trailers for Starbuck
and Special
Forces cue up on startup, while the trailer for Cosmopolis itself,
in HD, rounds out the platter.