Cosmopolis; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Non Sequiturs

About a quarter of the way through Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco, released way back in 1998 and centered on the social politics of a group of budding twenty-somethings in the throes of success, you come to realize that the characters are much more intelligent than they should be, much more articulate than they should be, and much wiser than their years in the astute observations they pronounce.  Yet the oblique plot in that movie stands out because Stillman's script gives the characters an inertia to move through their narratives with a sense of purpose, reaching a somewhat conclusive transcendence, a heightened consciousness that the next day is the first day of the rest of their lives.  Call The Last Days of Disco a thinking person's The Breakfast Club, if you will, or the movie that St. Elmo's Fire wishes it could have been if its characters hadn't languished on superficialities.  Disco's protagonists were also more or less obsessed with superficial questions, to be sure, but at least they spoke more artfully of it and allowed a transformation to occur.

Image courtesy Cosmopolisthefilm.com

Not so in David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis, which is not identical to the aforementioned film in either subject matter or plot.  The characters of Cosmopolis are immersed in their self-involved, hopelessly hyper-aware, almost private language clamoring for attention such that it quickly outpaces and puts off the audience, leaving everyone to wonder (1) just what the fuck are the characters talking about, and (2) why should we care?  That never happened in Disco; no viewer was left behind.

Almost as if Cronenberg senses the audience's waning inattention, a periodic sex scene is thrown into the visuals of Cosmopolis to remind us that the pseudo-intertextual material is grounded in the visceral, the literal push and pull which connects us all to each other.  But I tended to see the sex scenes for what they were: visual wavetops in an otherwise inert and ultimately unsatisfying movie that loitered backstage, too self-absorbed with how best to deliver its lines and ending up missing its cue to walk onstage, so that by the time it does, no one is interested enough to notice or care for the message.

And the movie does have a message, but it is wrapped around the axle of its convoluted speech-making and characters' overly intricated declarations.  Make no mistake, the dialogue looks compelling in print, but when you roll out the full phonetics of it aloud, it doesn't quite taste like chicken anymore.

The few action scenes feel air-dropped in the middle of lengthy dialogue like visual rescue packages intended to allow the audience to survive into the next act.  For example, roughly at the middle of the movie, Pattinson's Eric Packer commits an act of extreme violence out of what appears to be nothing more than idle curiosity.  Later, he abandons his high-tech stretch limousine and wanders the streets at night like a common criminal brandishing a gun, and even has a brief shootout.  We are meant to feel that this is a person in mental slippage who is slowly realizing that he has lost it all, but we don't empathize with him one bit because the narrative ground game didn't prep us for those scenes.

Robert Pattinson in the polar opposite mood of his role in Cosmopolis...(image courtesy Gage Skidmore: Wikimedia Commons CCA:SA 2.0)

I had high hopes for enjoying this movie.  After all, the film's source material is Don DeLillo's insightful but short novel of the same name.  I watched the movie recently, but I had read the book years ago, and it was interesting to see how much of the book I remembered when the visual translation gave me, at times, a jarring shakedown of my intellectual curiosity.  The lesson here for writers and directors is that lifting whole extracts from the book and slapping them onto a screenplay do not preserve the profundity of the ideas they attempt to present and dramatize.

Even a line written brilliantly in the book can be bungled in the locution of the spoken word -- and in Cosmopolis, nearly every character is a CrossFit instructor for the English language, making all those poor nouns and verbs twist through prepositional phrases and subordinate clauses with the grace of a roller-coaster ride.  In fact, one of the few characters who appears to be able to maneuver the dialogue in an effective manner is Eric Packer's bodyguard, played by the excellent and underused veteran actor, Kevin Durand, delivering his lines with a pitch-perfect precision.  The other standout actor is Paul Giamatti, who does not act a scene so much as consume it and give it a holistic dimensionality in an as-told-by-Giamatti vibe.

David Cronenberg looking Cronenberg-ish.  (Image courtesy of Alan Langford: Wikimedia Commons: CCA:SA 2.0)

These adaptational hurdles are not Cronenberg's fault; at least, not entirely.  DeLillo's novel, like many of his others, offer a thematic mediation on the nature of consumption and disposal -- it's among his most popular dynamic, and it surfaces perhaps even more pointedly in the book compared to his previous title, Underworld, where the political realm had an equally viable role to fulfill and its sheer size qualified it to pass inspection as a Tom Clancy tome, at least back when Clancy was in his research-as-orgasm-as-novel heyday.  Perhaps Cronenberg wanted to transmit the author's message in its pure and unchanged form; perhaps he felt the rawness of the text would be preserved in spoken form; but some vital pieces went missing on the way to the editing room.

For example -- and this is the only example I'll pull from the book -- listen to this crafted piece of DeLillo's prose:

He felt the street around him, unremitting, people moving past each other in coded moments of gesture and dance. They tried to walk without breaking stride because breaking stride is well-meaning and weak but they were forced sometimes to sidestep and even pause and they almost always averted their eyes.  Eye contact was a delicate matter.  A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.  Who steps aside for whom, who looks or does not look at whom, what level of umbrage does a brush or a touch constitute?  No one wanted to be touched.  There was a pact of untouchability.  Even here, in the huddle of old cultures, tactile and close-woven, with passersby mixed in, and security guards, and shoppers pressed to windows, and wandering fools, people did not touch each other.

Packer at this point was standing on the street for just a moment before retreating into a bookstore to meet his cultured, shrewd, and slightly kooky wife.  So basically, to watch a movie based on Don DeLillo's book is to miss half the sense impressions that move across the printed page.  A director who attempts to distill the work into dialogue and visuals had better use the precision of a surgeon's fine-bladed skill.

Cosmopolis's shortcomings aren't entirely lead actor Robert Pattinson's fault, either; he was tasked with carrying a very difficult and unlikeable character for a majority of the movie through the simple utterance of extended observations as elliptical and incisive as DeLillo's prose.  But his delivery is somewhat off and it sounds often like he's reading the lines off cue cards with that uncertain awkwardness.

As is the case with all adaptations, the challenge was in the presentation, and here I place chief blame on the scriptwriter -- who also happens to be Cronenberg.  This is material that begs for transitional realignment of dialogue, for shortened sentences rendered more pleasing to the mechanics of the human ear, and for imagery and action that does not appear so random and disconnected from the narrative that its effect jars the senses, unless that was the artists' intent.

DeLillo's book has to be set aside for its own criticism, and I'm trying to not conflate the faults of the book with the movie, but when reading the book, you get the impression that idea was king and the vehicle that Packer rode around in was just a, pardon the pun, vehicle for those ideas to be littered in its wake.  The book was different in its readership expectations; you are meant to chase after the detritus and divine meaning from the discarded Styrofoam cups and recyclable carton containers of sushi; you are still on your own, but DeLillo is your spotter, the introspection giving you just enough cerebral momentum to move to the next paragraph.

Don DeLillo looking every bit like the literary author that he is.  (Image courtesy of Thousand Robots: Wikimedia Commons CCA:SA 2.0) 

Maybe it was a matter as simple as length.  DeLillo's reimagination of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy gave readers effective signposts and more approachable prose in Libra.  And his "airborne toxic event" in White Noise rendered an autopsy on the disconnectedness of Americana across generations which was as entertaining as it was academic.

If the book Cosmopolis had flaws in the dramatic arc -- and it has them because DeLillo doesn't like to play to the traditional model of the dramatic arc -- those flaws are magnified in the movie.  Here, Cronenberg did mess with the sequence of events in the book, and it made the film a more impoverished experience as a result.  A slow beginning, an erratic middle, and a confusing ending: this is what the audience experiences.  Who knows what diatribes babbled in the middle of DeLillo's brain when the vision of this work took hold -- or what vision was birthed in Cronenberg's brain, for that matter.

Passages of the book develop an introspective soul that is detached, landing glancing blows at capitalism, technology, and the constant need for wanting more without understanding what more precisely represents.  This wanting escapes even the monetary value that society imposes on everything known to our daily lives.  We recognize this as readers, and even though, as with Disco, we know there are no people alive who talk like that or think with such discordant imagery, we forgive the work because we see the book's soul.

The movie lacked such a soul, however.

Giamatti's character may have inadvertently become the most prophetic in how the film would generally be received.  He emotes at times to the scripted point of self-caricature, exclaiming, "All those people...how did they get to be who they are?"  This is actually a powerful question that can propel the most successful stories to a satisfying conclusion, but the images, the dialogue, the building of scene upon scene, they all have to work in concert to achieve a satisfactory answer -- or, at least in our minds, make an attempt, since some presentations of these answers are never answered, and in the non-answer lies the answer.  (Wow, I've been watching this movie way too long myself, apparently).

Near the end of the movie, Giamatti's character, Benno Levin, implores to Pattinson's Eric Packer that he is frustrated because all the people who he observes around him "lay helpless in a system that makes no sense to me."

Two notable things occur in that quasi-showdown scene: the dramatic underlayment is that Benno represents DeLillo's outrage over modern consumerism and he voices it to Packer, who is a walking embodiment of hyperacquisitive capitalism, the very golem who was both created by and feeds off such consumerist gluttony.

But the next layer is that Benno also becomes the audience's reaction to Cronenberg's visual think-piece, the sense that we have come along -- literally -- for a ride, and now we are stuck at the end, still not quite sure what it is all supposed to mean.  This latter effect had to have been entirely unintended.

Despite the talented cast and the rich source material, I don't think a movie can commit any greater sin.