2012. Dir: David Cronenberg. Starring: Robert Pattinson, Sarah Gadon, Kevin Durand, Emily Hampshire and Paul Giamatti. ●●●●○
In interviews David Cronenberg has repeatedly admitted that Robert Pattinson (or R.Pattz if you're down with the YA lingo) was not his first choice for the role of Eric Packer, investment banking billionaire and master of the universe. If memory serves me correctly Colin Farrell was originally linked to the role before the Twilight alumni got the role. It's an unlikely casting choice Cronenberg passes off as being for the investment Pattinson brings or for the right age and yet the baggage that he brings, the undead persona serve him well reminding us that Pattinson has significant promise as an actor as well as a star. Perhaps I'm being unfair starting a review of Cosmopolis adapted from Don DeLillo's 2003 novel on the merits of casting Pattinson, but on the other hand the 108 minute film comprises of duologue's with Pattinson usually in the confined space of the back of his stretch limousine so if the central casting had failed the whole film would have failed with it.
Normally I would now make a stab at summarising the plot, but this opaque curiosity barely has one, the limo crawls across New York to where Packer wants to have a haircut and as this odyssey progresses acquaintances, employees and lovers all provide prospective to the journey and what the future holds for our mysterious hero. All the while the Yuan is collapsing, Packer's marriage is disintegrating and society itself seems to be imploding. We see few of the supporting players arrive in Packer's bubble and none of them leave and only a tiny minority even consider the existence of each other, yet they all have a unique perspective on Packer's future and his character.
So if Cosmopolis (universal city Greek fans) isn't about the plot what is driving it? It's about mood, a foreboding atmospheric intensity that clings to Pattinson and it's about intellectual ideas some characters talk but many more pronounce - Samantha Morton especially spews out a collection of statements rather - and it's about the cult of money, the nameless celebrities who criss-cross Manhattan and London in their Prousted vehicles - isolating themselves from the populace around them, but when invited into their gleaming cars we see individuals as emotionless and vapid as the imposing exteriors.
Packer has lost the ability to feel. His vast portfolio, incomprehensible to the audience, has eaten away at his soul so sex, art, politics, family and even violence no longer elicit a response. And so Pattinson is perfect for the role, there's an emptiness in the eyes, so exploited in his casting as Edward Cullen, that invites us to believe this playboy desperate for any high. Finally his alt-Twilight career is paying off and I very much hope to see him stretch himself, working for other auteurs that play with his image.
The rest of the cast do a great job, however many of them are simple ciphers, they appear for single conversations and almost represent emotional states. Morton is detached, Juliet Binoche slutty, Jay Baruchel nervy, Paul Giamatti angry. Only Emily Hampshire as his assistant, called in on her day off and clearly in awe of his talents and sexuality (even during a prostate exam), gets the chance to show any range, something she grabs with both hands becoming a beacon of characterisation in the centre of the movie.
Cronenberg does a fantastic job of boiling down DeLillo's novel and capturing the relevance of the anti-capitalist sentiment. Whilst this is another film that fits in his later canon of movies that shoot for the audience's intellectual reactions rather than their physical ones - there's a gunshot wound at one point that stays remarkably un-Cronenbergian - there is a glimmer of his earlier work in the otherworldliness of it's leading character and the acceptance that society is balanced on a knife-edge and one slight tilt either way will inevitable lead to anarchy.
Overall Cosmopolis is divisive and dense, but although many viewers will want to escape from it's bleak ramblings a few will find it's black heart is worth the ticket price.
Thursday, 21 June 2012
Cosmopolis
Thursday, 23 February 2012
A Dangerous Method
2011. Dir: David Cronenberg. Starring: Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortensen, Vincent Cassel and Sarah Gadon. ●●●○○
Right now I'm resisting a terrible urge, you could almost say I'm repressing a desire to sneak out a dreadful pun. I want to avoid bringing up the title of Christopher Hampton's play on which this psychoanalysis themed movie is based. Oh, but that urge is so strong. Why should I stifle my emotional needs, why should I risk damaging my id by holding back it's darkest aims, back in 2002 Hampton wrote a play about the shifting relationships between Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and Sabina Spielrein and he called it after the method they developed on their patients "The Talking Cure". So with a flourish I have to dub David Cronenberg's A Dengerous Method the "talky cure".
We open with Keira Knightley's Spielrein, a Russian Jew with pronounced hysteria, transported to the sparse mental health hospital in part run by the emphatically repressed Jung (Fassbender continuing his impressive run of star-making performances). In a series of short scenes we investigate the background to Spielrein's neurosis, with Jung coaxing out her emotional turmoil through a programme of one to one sessions. Knightley's performance has been the subject of huge debate both for and against her severe, jaw-clenching work in these early scenes. Personally I can't speak for the veracity of her work, but when contrasted and taken with the delicate almost blank work from Fassbender, the two of them make a compelling duo. As we see the methodology and results of Jung's technique the film both draws the audience in and shocks with the disturbing sexual fantasies plaguing Spielrein's past.
It isn't long though before the films derails, highlighting it's stage origins we then follow multiple duologues between the two main characters, Viggo Mortensen as the paranoid, pompous Sigmund Freud, anarchist and anti-psychiatrist Otto Gross (Cassel) and Jung's unfortunate slightly dull wife played by a winsome Sarah Gadon (who you might, but probably won't, remember from Dream House last year).
The most important relationships that develop are the father(figure)-son pairing between Freud and Jung, focussing on the similarities in their approach until their mutually exclusive theories concerning the future of psychoanalysis irrevocably splitting the two minds. We also see the coupling between Jung and Spielrein escalate into sado-masochistic physical and emotional relationship with Jung taking up the crop from Sabina's foreboding father.
That said whilst all of these individual scenes see some excellent performances and insightful dialogue regarding the competing ideas of the main players that is very much all they are. Each scene trips along giving another opportunity for two thesps to face off but without any of it really adding up to anything. They slow down too, each scene coming more ponderously than the last. At one point the film virtually stopped whilst characters wrote to each other then read these letters on their own, utterly tedious film-making.
What's worse is the subject could be really interesting, psychoanalysis is by it's very nature imperative to our understanding of our very souls, the discussions between Jung and Freud that confront the fundamental differences in their approaches should be extreme clashes of personality, philosophically engaging, dissecting theories that tore up societal norms up to that point. Instead we have broad pronouncements of medical scepticism, cheap shots at the fringe or over-simplified elements of their divergent theories, interminable discussions about dreams and - finally - an apparently true but still totally incomprehensible discussion about Ancient Egyptian civilizations and how that reflected their own situation.
The craft work on the film is, as I'm sure you can imagine in early 20th century design, impeccable and I'd especially like to call out the functional and character driven set decoration by Gernot Thöndel (although I understand Viggo Mortensen provided all his own props and the books in Freud's study).
Ultimately this film fails, Cronenberg is unable to lift the script from it's stage origins or add any spice to the proceedings once we leave the confines of Sabina's cure. I can recommend it only for the performances or - if you're a fan of Keira - the first 30 minutes.
Saturday, 8 October 2011
Bzzzzzzzzz (Film News - 08/10/11)
I thought we might be back to decent levels of news with last week's onslaught of great projects, however I was clearly mistaken as this week we drift back to virtually nothing taking my fancy. Admittedly the sad passing of Apple founder Steve Jobs has dominated the headlines, and apart from a brief flurry of biopic rumours most of Hollywood has been respectful in it's simple response. A couple of potential stories had surfaced over last weekend though, and these form the backbone of this weeks breakdown.
The Fly 2
Back in October 2009 I first reported that David Cronenberg was interested in revisiting his classic 80's creature-feature The Fly updating it with the best of modern special effects techniques. Two years on and David's now on post for his Robert Pattinson in a limo movie and is talking up the possibility again. Only now with a completed script it's looking much more like a sequel, a continuation of the original's story.
The script is apparently sitting with Fox right now, awaiting for either the green light or whatever else studios do with screenplays these days. Great news for anyone who's missed the King of Venereal Horror's most excessive flights of fantasy, although I have to admit I have my doubts whether Fox are prepared to go with it and wouldn't be surprised if we get a complete re-boot first.
The final stage of Goldblum's evolution gets it's own back on Cronenberg.
Casting News
And that's pretty much it, with the main news, although there are a couple of casting coups that may be curious. First up is the news that Halle Berry doesn't care what films she makes as long as she's working, as proved by her signing up for Joel Schumacher's The Hive as a emergency phone operator who answers a call that connects her to a murderer in her past. I also read that Schumacher might squeeze in an indie before filming starts in February, although the fact that I'm not headlining with that is somewhat telling. The surfing biopic Of Men and Mavericks has expanded it's cast by adding Abigail Spencer and Elisabeth Shue as subject Jay Moriaty's mother. Finally the cast of Ron Howard's Formula 1 movie Rush is picking up players, tracing the legendary on-track rivalry between Niki Lauder and James Hunt as well as the personal tribulations of the drivers whose personas were on the opposite end of the scale. Hunt, pictured below, was the rock star of the sport, making the celebrity headlines as much as the sports pages, Chris Hemsworth has been set for a while to play Hunt and now Olivia Wilde looks close to signing on as his supermodel wife Suzy Miller and Russell Crowe may cameo as Hollywood icon Richard Burton, who stole Suzy away from Hunt. 
Friday, 21 January 2011
20 for 2011: 8 - A Dangerous Method
No need to analyse why A Dangerous Method is in at number 8.
David Cronenberg reteams with Viggo Mortensen for the third consecutive film only this time we're in a period setting and there's likely to be less little Viggo than we saw in Eastern Promises. Or will there?
Based on Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons) award winning play about the birth of pschoanalysis and the two schools of though posed by Sigmund Freud (Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) above. The film also dramatises the relationships the men had with patient, and later pioneer herself, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley).
That's a powerhouse cast and enough reason in itself to watch the film, but with Cronenberg delving into the inner workings of the mind expect some dream sequences less coherent than Inception dared to show us.
