Catherine Bray, Film4.com’s editor, has written a wonderful review of Cosmopolis on her blog and I thought I’d share a few paragraphs of it here.  You can read the review in its entirety here (it really is a wonderful read).

Cosmopolis has been assessed as a ‘cold’ film, which it is. Warmth would derail it. An immersion in the process of 28 year old billionaire Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) committing financial suicide over one day as he travels by limo to get his hair cut, David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis isn’t the critique of a social realist or egalitarian, peering in at the villain of the piece. Nor is it asking us to spare a thought for the mega-wealthy because sometimes it’s hard to be a billionaire. What it recognises is the disproportionate and urgent need to comprehend this mindset, given its disproportionate power.

And so Cronenberg’s eerily pitch-perfect realisation of Don DeLillo’s brilliant novel plugs us deep into Eric Packer’s shallow existence, allowing us to feel what he feels – or rather, and here comes that word ‘cold’ again – to not feel what he fails to feel, cold as his lifestyle renders him to the world. And how could it not? That’s the dark question at the heart of Cosmopolis – we can see that such wealth is damaging, we can see the fathomless isolation, the safety, the boredom, the affectless distance, and yet, as Packer tells Paul Giamatti’s vagrant savant, we fail to really hate the rich because in our minds, we’re all ten seconds away from becoming rich….

….casting Robert Pattinson in this role is a stroke of mad genius. Apart from delivering a very fine performance, he is arguably the star currently inspiring some of the least sane responses in our culture. When, at the film’s climax, he is confronted with a maniac insisting “I know everything that’s ever been said or written about you. I know what I see in your face, after years of study,” it’s not hard to appreciate how brilliant – and perhaps cathartic – a role this is for him, one that figuratively interrogates the fame-capital he has accrued so far, Pattinson apparently as interested as Packer in the possibility of re-setting as something else. Casting him could have been a Warhol moment, using the image of an icon to make a point about fame, but Pattinson’s participation is too active to merit this back-handed compliment.

I can only imagine how this film will be looked back on in twenty years; for me, it’s the coming together of source, director and star with a relevance that rarely occurs in cinema.

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