"What I'd liked about the script originally was its lyricism," Pattinson said at a press conference after the debut screening. "It's like you're doing songs instead of movies."
Cronenberg, who with "Cosmopolis" has written a feature-length script for the first time in 13 years, added that adapting DeLillo was like covering a Dylan tune. "Everybody knows the words," he said, but you can change the register and the pitch. He said he wanted to remain exceedingly faithful to the book in both setting and dialogue as he composed the script, which he said took him only six days to write. As for the baggage his star brings, Cronenberg said that Pattinson's character is a “real person with a history and a past. The history and the past isn't 'Twilight.' It's 'Cosmopolis.'â€
The film's slight story line has already frustrated many filmgoers at Cannes, as has the fact that many of the ideas seem to be pretty esoteric. If there's a larger theme to "Cosmopolis" it's of a globe stretched to the breaking point by capitalism. Protesters attack Packer's car with rats while, later, Packer's poor treatment of an underling begins to catch up with him.
There's a certain prescience to these elements: Cronenberg wrote the script before the Occupy movement took hold, and DeLillo published the novella fully nine years ago. "My own work has [always] been about living in dangerous times," DeLillo said at the press conference.
The film may seem to take a bleak view of what technology and finance are doing to the world, but Cronenberg called it an optimistic movie. His star agreed. "It's about the end of the world but it's also hopeful," Pattinson said. "Maybe I'm just a depressive, but I think sometimes the world needs to be washed and cleansed ."
Whatever the film's message, it certainly allows for the flashing of plenty of actorly skills â€" more so than a movie that calls for an actor to mope around as a lovelorn vampire a la Edward Cullen, and more so than many other films, for that matter. Pattinson is on screen nearly every one of the 108 minutes of Cronenberg's surrealscape, and he is asked to pull off a difficult mix of unctuousness and nervousness, which, on first viewing, he mostly does.
Audiences will be the ultimate arbiter of whether it's a memorable turn that demands another--Pattinson would doubtless like to use this film to springboard him beyond "Twilight"--but his director, at least, believes he has. "The essence of cinema," Cronenberg said of Pattinson's performance, "is a fantastic face saying fantastic words."
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--Steven Zeitchik
Photo: Rob Pattinson in "Cosmopolis." Credit: Kinology
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