Robert Pattinson and Cosmopolis proves an early indication of his talent

Phillipa Snow from New Statesmen discusses Rob and Cosmopolis in today’s world: “The dystopian thriller offers both the soothing image of a billionaire capitalist brought to heel by riots, and one of the earliest indications of Robert Pattinson’s talent.” Below is an extract from the article:

When Cosmopolis first screened in 2012, the movie’s buzz centred around the fact that Robert Pattinson – lately of the blockbuster teen romance series Twilight – would be playing Eric Packer, who in Don DeLillo’s original novel utters the immortal line, “I want to bottle-fuck you slowly with my sunglasses on.” Pattinson was known primarily for being pretty, and if he was known for much else it was for exasperated interviews about the films that made him famous. “I want to do a movie with [Jean-Luc] Godard so badly,” he told the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles a few months after the release of Twilight: Breaking Dawn – Part 1, a declaration that led to some merriment from those who saw themselves as being above the kind of culture loved by adolescent girls. I remember seeing Cosmopolis in 2012, and thinking that his casting was a masterstroke – an empty vessel, as gorgeously inexpressive as a statue, to be filled with DeLillo and Cronenberg’s ideas about the ruling class.

When viewed in 2020, Cosmopolis is exhilarating in two ways. The first is that it offers up the soothing image of a billionaire capitalist brought to heel by riots. The second is that Pattinson’s work as Packer, thorough enough that it looks like natural blankness, has since turned out to be one of the earliest indications of his talent.

At present, Robert Pattinson is utterly believable as someone who might work with Godard; he is no longer a heart-throb, but an unpredictable star of the arthouse. Watch him talking about vomiting on himself while masturbating for The Lighthouse, or extolling the delights of sexual spitting, or inventing a disturbing childhood memory about witnessing a clown’s death at a circus (he later admitted the anecdote, told on the Today Show, was fabricated) and the general impression is not of a gorgeous, inexpressive statue, but of a man who at any moment might reveal himself to be an actual lunatic. As is true of Joaquin Phoenix, there is something faintly feral in his best performances – a loss of sense, of sanity, of dignity. He is still beautiful, but unsettlingly so, age hollowing what were already unreal cheekbones into caverns. (In another 20 years, he may look like his co-star in The Lighthouse, Willem Dafoe.) What he has done is let a fine machine – his bankable image as a boring cutie meant for kids – degrade in public. It might be a scandal if he had not proven quite so popular with, among others, directors such as Claire Denis, the Safdie brothers, Robert Eggers and James Gray. It might be scandalous if he were not so good.

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