Search found 1 match: Paul Giamatti

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by AFlickering
Sat May 11, 2013 6:57 pm
Forum: Full Reviews
Topic: cosmopolis (david cronenberg)
Replies: 0
Views: 965

cosmopolis (david cronenberg)

a dystopia built of shields against "natural causes". technology and language conceived to conceptualise and compartmentalise all of existence, break it down into quantifiable pieces easily controlled, easily micro-managed. offices overlooking an ocean of information, towers fit for omniscient deities. fortified limousines drifting between them like glaciers, "contemptuously oversized". doctors appearing daily for check-ups. the world's most corporate vampire, pale as he's ever been, re-cast as a personification of wealth and knowledge, a delusion of immortality. his information processing system based on the patterns of nature, understanding and anticipating so as to conquer, master, evade. "people will not die. isn't that the creed of the new culture? people will be absorbed in streams of information".

problem is, pattinson's been taking the more introspective of his two elevators just recently. he's developing a weakness for the "philosophical pause". most of all, dude needs a haircut; a haircut at the barbers of his childhood, specifically, which requires a dangerous cross-town excursion through streets littered with protestors, ideological pranksters, funeral processions, even those who wish him dead--and of course, plenty of amorous lovers, each as much a symbol of his endless, ever more suffocating hunger as his wealth, each increasingly giving him nothing but a temporary distraction. he'd rather be loving his wife instead, though he understands nothing of love, and she's less than impressed with his spree of erotic encounters ("you reek of sexual discharge"). he needs to fly his airplane, get tased right in the goddamned ribs. mostly, he needs to face the reality of death, so as to live.

like a certain other limo-cruising protagonist from 2012, pattinson is in search of a contextual framework for his life, but it's not because the cameras are too small and the beholders too remote; it's because "money has lost its narrative quality." "money has started talking to itself". he needs to escape this vicious cycle of his own design, this cruising fortress that looks so very much like a tomb, this micro-existence of details and jargon. he needs to re-connect with whatever awful truths capitalism was created to expel from his consciousness.

his prostate reveals itself as malformed, a pie slathers his face, a water bottle crumples; an empire begins falling to ruin. old money is sabotaging itself, devouring itself, and the rats eat the rats eat the rats. pattinson shoots his bodyguard, maintainer of order and safety, in the head; an act so completely in violation of society's very fabric that the victim gives him the gun's password without a second thought. he has his hair cut down one side but not the other; just another juvenile, synthetic gesture against the oppressive symmetry of the system he's built this world around.

of course, it's not enough. all that's left is to confront the assassin that's shadowed him since the journey's beginning; a representation of the working classes, perhaps, but also little more than a projection of his own mortal fear ("even your gun is a fantasy"), played with erratic, pent-up rage by paul giamatti. they indulge in a bitter, anxious, curious dialogue - a monologue if you like - a bullet is fired, no real understanding is reached. pattinson can't change ("want a cigarette?" asks giamatti, "want a drink?" comes the business-savvy trader's reply).

“when he died he would not end. the world would end.” said delillo. cronenberg also cuts before the resolution; he knows that COSMOPOLIS is just another example of money communicating with money, another thread in the fabric of our religion at the altar of the dollar; to watch pattinson die would be to watch our world end. even so, every moment of this dense and wretched work has a thousand things to say about "the spectre that's haunting the world", and more importantly, it pulsates with a whole generation's vague terror and surpressed longing.

COSMOPOLIS is undeniably ours. it's a sad, monstrous, pathetically hilarious little monument to our times, anticipating criticism ("this isn't how people talk." "how would i know?!") while spitting out criticisms of its own at a hell of a speed. it's undeniably cronenberg's, too, in the way its existential crises uneasily clear the path for an attempted, failed reconnection between physical and psychological, feeling and concept, in a society that simply won't cater for it - not to mention the way every space, every environment, every screen (think VIDEODROME) operates masterfully as a reflection of pattinson's caged, yearning self. it may be the best of his career, and i don't say that lightly. it's sure as hell my favourite film of 2012.