Slant Magazine's Top 25 Films of 2012!
13. Cosmopolis. In the end, it’s mere gravy that David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis unfolds in a world that eerily, and almost blatantly, reflects our modern headlines, its Occupy themes and global-capital woes perpetually looming. What’s truly depicted in this gorgeous adaptation of Don DeLillo’s prescient 2003 novel is the whittling down of the poster boy of individual, millennial anxieties, sparked by the deadly, rampant elixir of privilege, apathy, and telecommuting.
From his rolling command center of a white limousine, the WiFi hot spot of the obscenely rich, billionaire Eric Packer (a revelatory Robert Pattinson) is at once linked up to the world and maddeningly removed from it, his personal, untried revolving door granting equal access to wisdom and delusion, personified by the limo’s parade of guests. Evoking its director’s past aesthetics and bodily interests with cool restraint, Cosmopolis is a wry, stylish nightmare of contemporary disconnect, and an audacious charting of all that crumbles when reality seeps in.
With much dialogue lifted verbatim from DeLillo’s text, the film’s dizzying verbosity may be challenging to swallow, but in a cinematic year teeming with lone protagonists clawing for ways to survive, it has more to say—and to mull over—than maybe 100 movies.
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