COSMOPOLIS (2012)

No movie director has as much control over what people see as prose writers have. The writer's universe is made of words; the reader only sees what's written. Adapt the writing into film, into images, and inevitably the viewer sees more than the original writer or the adapter intends. That's when people start asking questions. The writer's control is a slippery thing. Each reader can imagine Eric Packer, the protagonist of Don DeLillo's novel, looking a particular way, since DeLillo isn't too particular about describing him, but how you visualize Packer doesn't compel you to question what DeLillo tells you about him. Put Packer on film, however, and have Robert Pattinson play him, and some folks will begin to wonder. How is this guy so rich and powerful? What do the other characters in the story see in him? Watch him move through the envisioned rather than the written world, even in as controlled an environment as David Cronenberg crafts for him, and you question all kinds of things readers might not have questioned in the novel. Above all, you question the words themselves.

Cosmopolis should have been a perfect novel to make into a movie. The main idea -- Packer takes a long ride through Manhattan in his armored limo, constantly detoured due to riots, funerals, outbreaks of street art, and constantly stopping to pick up consultants, cronies, wife and girlfriends, just to get a haircut at a favorite old barber shop -- sounds like something that might have been thought up during the golden age of Hollywood. If someone at the studio had thought it up, it might have been a screwball masterpiece. Cosmopolis is comic at times, but not Hollywood funny by any means -- not the way you'd expect with its picaresque, day-from-hell plot. Cronenberg's Cosmopolis is more often unintentionally funny -- though you can't go wrong with a running gag about an asymmetrical prostate -- but the problem with it isn't that Cronenberg wasn't trying for belly laughs. The problem is that the writer-director is too faithful to his source.

 

"A specter is haunting the world!"

The Cosmopolis movie reminds me more than anything else of Robert Rodriguez's Sin City, the adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novels. Both films fairly slavishly attempt to reproduce the cadences of dialogue composed for media other than cinema. It was a bad idea in Sin City because dialogue designed to occupy one panel of many on a page doesn't translate smoothly to the flow of frames on a screen. With Cosmopolis the problem for Cronenberg is that Don DeLillo doesn't write in the realist or pop-realist tradition. His characters often talk in aphoristic statements that read more like the author's exercises in style than imitations of conversation. He can get away with that because a prose writer is master of his universe the way few film directors can be. Read Cosmopolis and you go in understanding that you're reading for style and ideas, and you judge accordingly. Watch Cosmopolis and you see people talking to each other, and that creates an expectation of realism, or the movie equivalent, that Cronenberg doesn't do enough to fulfill or dispel. Some might complain that the movie is overly stylized, but to do justice to DeLillo, to make him not look like a writer who simply can't write normal dialogue, it probably had to be more stylized than it actually is. It was up to Cronenberg to create a cinematic universe for which DeLillo's dialogue would seem like the natural language, or to make his screenplay more naturalistic, adapting rather than simply illustrating DeLillo.

Visually, Cronenberg often succeeds in conveying Packer's privileged alienation and staging the crowd scenes surging around the limo. It's too bad that he couldn't stage one of the novel's most memorable episodes, a Spencer Tunick style mass nude photo shoot, but the limo gliding slowly through an anti-poverty riot, Packer and another passenger nattering away on some abstract subject without acknowledging the mayhem banging on the car windows, is one of the film's best scenes, striking the right note of deadpan absurdity. Too often, however, the dialogue sits like lead weights in the actors' mouths. Cronenberg did poor Pattinson no favors casting him as Packer. Few will find him credible as a captain of finance, and many will blame bad acting for the artificial feel of his dialogue. But when not just Pattinson but Paul Giamatti also, playing a disgruntled employee out to kill Packer, sound like they're simply reciting it's unfair to blame any actor for the screenplay's limitations. DeLillo's dialogue lives on the page because that's its environment; putting it in people's mouths requires a different kind of life that Cronenberg can't create. His Cosmopolis is an act of admirable ambition -- he had already adapted a graphic novel to most people's satisfaction -- and there shouldn't be as much shame in its failure as some reviewers wanted to inflict. At age 70, Cronenberg should still have enough of a career left to make use of the hard lessons learned here.

On the Big Screen: A DANGEROUS METHOD (2011)

David Cronenberg is an exemplary case of thematic evolution in a movie director, having gone from grindhouse-ready horror to his latest lavish historical drama without really changing his creative identity. Known for his emphasis on "body horror," there is a clinical attitude in his work that makes the early days of psychoanalysis an ideal subject for him. That those early days include a lot of transgressive sexuality and human grotesquerie doesn't hurt, either. The Cronenberg touch comes through most clearly in Keira Knightley's performance as subject turned scholar Sabina Spielrein, and in a scene portraying an early sort of polygraph test. In the latter, Cronenberg focuses on the equipment and preparations as if the word-association test Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) performs on his wife (Sarah Gordon) were a mad-science experiment. As for Knightley, apparently a star pupil at the Natalie Portman Academy for Portrayals of the Disturbed, she contorts herself in such a convulsive, jaw-jutting manner while pantomiming Spielrein's hysterics that you expect her to turn fully into a werewolf.  Knightley's performance is over-the-top but needs to be, I suppose, to demonstrate the danger in the method for the subject and the analyst. It also fulfills Cronenberg's purpose to disturb, and on that score Dangerous Method is a disquieting film on many levels. In a way, it's another horror film, but the subject is intellectual horror subtly expressed, the suspicion raised that no great good has come or can come from the methods of Jung and his erstwhile idol and eventual enemy Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortenson) -- that Freud is right in joking that he and Jung are bringing a "plague" when they first visit America. I can imagine the psychoanalytic community disliking this film quite strongly.

What's dangerous about the method is the intimacy it requires between analyst and subject, given Freud's founding emphasis, which Jung finds increasingly dogmatic, on sexuality. A worst-case scenario confronts Jung in the form of Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), a Freud protege for whom psychoanalysis has enabled a sex addiction resulting in the serial seduction of his patients. Jung rebels against Freud's monofocus on sex, in part because he entertains notions of parapsychology, but also because he'd like to rebel against the sexual urges building during his treatment of the virgin masochist Sabina. Despite giving in frequently to kinky temptations -- Sabina likes to be flogged -- Jung will continue to rebel by denying his relationship with Spielrein, which means hiding it unsuccessfully from his wife and lying about it to Freud. In time, just as Jung grows out of Freud's shadow, so Spielrein will grow out of Jung's -- but he'll just take up another mistress, living by the classic Victorian double-standard off his wife's wealth while still hoping to find a method to change people for the better.

Pessimism pervades Cronenberg's film of Christopher Hampton's script. By recounting the follies of a century ago, Dangerous Method also recalls the doomed optimism of the more modern sexual revolution. The film seems certain that neither sex itself nor any objective frankness about it will save the world or any individuals. Jung's hope that psychoanalysis (he pronounces it "psyche-analysis" to Freud's disappointment) can help people become what they're supposedly meant to be butts against Freud's almost conservative feeling that the best it can do is tell us why we are the way we are. The film's Freud is a condescending conservative if not a suspicious reactionary -- it's a great performance by Mortenson -- more concerned with defending his gains and fending off expected attacks than in pushing forward toward the greater discoveries Jung hopes for. The script is subtle enough to let us judge Freud either way. When he dismisses Jung's interest in telepathy and related subjects, it could simply be commonsense materialism or it could be closed-minded dogmatism. We see how factors of class and religion complicate the doctors' intellectual relationship. While Freud's home looks like a comfortable oasis of civilization to us, it can't help but look cramped and cheap compared to Jung's luxurious quarters. Is Freud jealous? Perhaps not, but in one of his last scenes he confides to Sabina, a fellow Jew, that ultimately gentiles like Jung can't fully be trusted. An epilogue confirms this to some extent, reminding us that Freud barely escaped the Nazi occupation of Vienna, and that Spielrein did not escape when the Nazis invaded Russia. There's no suggestion that Jung himself is anti-Semitic, but the inescapable awareness for Freud of widespread anti-Semitism is one of the factors that complicated and possibly compromised his thinking, just as Jung's was compromised by innumerable forces in his life. Were they really any better for their discoveries? The most the film can say is that at least Spielrein isn't having screaming fits like she used to, but Knightley undermined that message somewhat through her inability -- faithful to life or not -- to relax. But it's the film's own idea that a certain madness -- the pedantic-seeming Freud notwithstanding -- is necessary to the method. The film's moral could easily be: Analyst, heal thyself.

For me, the fact that the movie has me thinking of getting books on Freud and Jung is probably proof of A Dangerous Method's success. I confess to not knowing enough about the two, not to mention Spielrein, to know whether Hampton and Cronenberg have been fair to them. But I found the movie intellectually stimulating as well as disturbing in the characteristic Cronenberg manner. Right now I don't feel that I can just leave the things it brought up behind at the theater. I thought the film succeeded visually as well, apart from the CGI rendering of the doctors' transatlantic voyage, while Howard Shore's score was, if you can imagine it, subtly Wagnerian. The acting was impressive all around, Mortenson truly proving himself in a non-action role, Knightley fulfilling her purpose to disturb through excess, and the much-hyped Fassbender giving the best performance I've seen from him yet -- the moustache practically makes him a different man. The film got lost in the awards shuffle, perhaps because of its implicitly skeptical attitude toward psychoanalysis, but I'd have no problem saying it's one of the best 2011 films I've seen so far.

In Brief: FAST COMPANY (1979)

You'll please forgive a lack of screen captures for this one. The Albany Public Library DVD behaved a little hinky on my living-room player, so I didn't want to put it in my computer's drive. As you see from the trailer, it's a car racing film with a stalwart-looking 1970s B-movie cast. It's better known now as an early film from David Cronenberg, and it's definitely the most cartoonish film he made until A History of Violence. It's also a film sure to touch the heartstrings of auteurs and their fans everywhere for its opposition of the pursuit of excellence to the corporate obsession with the bottom line.

Fast Company is the story of Lonnie "Lucky Man" Johnston (William Smith), something like a living legend among fuel-car drag racers. He drives for the FastCo fuel company team, and answers to corporate scumbag Phil Adamson (John Saxon). Adamson flies around in his own helicopter and likes the perspective it gives him. "They crawl, we fly," he tells Candy Allison, the new Miss Fastco (Judy Foster) as they hover above the Fastco caravan, "but sometimes the hired help don't like to be reminded." The race team exists only to promote the Fastco brand. Whether they win or not doesn't really matter to Phil. In fact, "Winning is too expensive." He's content if the cars are just competitive, but Lonnie and teammate Billy the Kid don't agree.

When Lonnie's car explodes (he luckily survives unhurt), Phil wants to cut a replacement dragster out of the budget and make Lonnie race the funny car, bumping Billy out of his spot behind the wheel. Facing both men's discontent, Phil schemes to replace them with Gary "the Blacksmith" Black, an ambitious driver who resents Lonnie's fame and apparent complacency. Gary is often obnoxious, but his mechanic, "Meatball," is downright vicious. Phil manipulates these people to the point where he has them plotting sabotage, if not murder, when Lonnie, Billy, Candy and their mechanics all quit (or are fired) and form an independent race team. The climax comes at a nighttime meet where Lonnie's luck may mean Billy's death unless Gary acts on his suddenly conscientious suspicions of the people around him....

It may be the late Seventies, and it may be Cronenberg behind the camera, but apart from some topless scenes (Billy pours a can of Fastco on a hitchhiker's boobs; she says, "My boyfriend will kill me, he hates Fastco!") this tale could have been told pretty much the same way in the Thirties or earlier. This is pulp cinema, with none of the ambiguity you'd expect from Seventies cinema. Lonnie and his pals are the good guys, and Phil is vile and evil. The heroes win and the villains get a hot dose of what they deserve.

You would have gone to Fast Company to see the racing or the stars. William Smith again proves that he's more a character actor than a leading man. He has a certain innate charisma, but I don't think he ever figured out how to project it apart from playing crazy brutes (see my review of Piranha, Piranha, for instance). He's pleasant enough here, but notice that Cronenberg has the Billy character carry most of the romantic load. That leaves third-billed Claudia Jennings with little to do in her final film role. She plays Lonnie's loyal wife, and that about sums it up. It's a disappointing coda from one of the pioneer action heroines of the decade, whom I know more by reputation than from seeing her major works. The mighty John Saxon is obliged to give a one-note performance as Phil and succeeds in making him thoroughly hateful. He can project his charisma, however, and he dominates everyone else whenever he's on the screen, except when Smith punches him down a flight of stairs for calling Lonnie's truckborne living quarters a "goddamn whorehouse" and "an insane asylum."

The Saturday matinee storyline is an odd fit on Cronenberg's atmospheric portrayal of the racetrack milieu and the details of fuel car racing. The more documentary moments have the vibe I was hoping for from the film as a whole. I don't mind a movie having a silly story and solving all its problems with fiery violence, but Fast Company is ultimately a little too mundane. I may be jaded for faulting a film that ends with a man on fire and a chopper crashing into a truck, but there was something perfunctory about the finale. Cronenberg did not take the story to "eleven" the way an exploitation film needs to, but with the story he was given he had no choice but to try, since the melodrama had surrendered any claim to realism. For that matter, going over the top may have been too expensive for the producers, just as winning was for Phil. Having said this, if you like redneck cinema in general, albeit set in Canada and just across the border, this show should push enough of your buttons to get by.