'Cosmopolis' movie review, trailer: 'Twilight' star Rob Pattinson can't save this one

BY MIRIAM RINN

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

Put a dreamy looking young actor in a white stretch limo and send him across Manhattan during a presidential visit to try to get a haircut from his father’s barber. Sound interesting? It’s not.

David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel “Cosmopolis” is as tedious and essentially meaningless as any frustrating trip crosstown, albeit with a lot more violence. The actor Robert Pattinson of “Twilight” fame plays the mega-wealthy currency trader Eric Packer as if he was still one of the undead.

Sitting in his tricked-out limousine, glancing at computer screens built into the seat arms and various pop-up screens, he conveys the machine-like qualities of the film’s vision of the man of the future. He’s almost a robot, devoid of emotion, of reflection, of thought.

Although he is with several women in the film, he’s clearly devoid of desire also. This is the least erotic coupling imaginable. Everything for Packer is a transaction. What turns him on is the patterns he sees in the reams of data that cross the screens. But something’s gone wrong — Packer’s big bet on the Chinese yuan isn’t working out as he expected, and he’s about to lose millions.

DeLillo is reputedly renowned for his dialogue, and according to the press notes Cronenberg lifted most of the film’s dialogue from the novel. Maybe it’s better in print, but as spoken by Pattinson and most of the other actors it’s just awful: portentous and silly, but not in a good, funny way. Samantha Morton, who plays Packer’s idea officer (whatever that is), spouts a lot of nonsense, interjecting after every sentence that she doesn’t understand what she’s saying.

She’s not alone. If the point is that we now live in a world that technology has made incomprehensible to most of us, that we feel isolated and alienated, that’s not exactly breaking news. Perhaps the film’s theme of the disastrous intersection of technology and capital seemed more visionary in 2003. Now, we read about the catastrophic results of fast moving market manipulations in the newspaper every day. In any case, Packer hardly seems to care that he’s losing money. He doesn’t care about anything except getting his haircut.

The New York City seen outside of Packer’s limo is at times violent, at times in revolt, and at other times, just weird. Packer is married to a chilly blonde poet (Sarah Gadon) from a hugely wealthy family who he keeps running into while his limo inches along the way.

First he jumps into her cab to her polite dismay, then they meet for lunch in what looks to be an old-fashioned deli, a place these two would never set foot into. Their feeling-free conversation focuses on their not having had intimate relations in the months they’ve been married. For some reason, this bothers Packer (although he’s had several encounters in what seems a few hours), and his constant nagging irritates his wife. When she learns of his imminent financial ruin, she kindly tells him she’s happy to help but the marriage thing is definitely over. Among this set of characters, this response makes her the most sensible and the most humane.

Gadon isn’t much of an actress, but even the better actors (Juliette Binoche, Paul Giamatti) struggle to find some humanity in the film’s robotic characters. Binoche’s lascivious art dealer has a mischievous sparkle but Giamatti overdoes the despair of Packer’s nemesis. He’s all uncontrolled feeling to Packer’s unfeeling control.

Packer tells someone that he has had his limo “Prousted,” meaning that he’s soundproofed it with cork as the French writer Marcel Proust supposedly lined his bedroom so he could write “Remembrance of Things Past” undisturbed. This may be the only amusing remark in “Cosmopolis.” Nothing could be further from the densely personal and deeply reflective vision of life in Proust’s work than this shallow and cold film.