On Narrative in Cosmopolis

Dialogue that makes almost no sense; a narrative that lacks any recognisable conventions; a limited setting and an actor best known for sending teenage girls crazy. This is David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, an often nonsensical allegory of the recession in America. Cosmopolis is based on a novel by Don DeLillo and stars Robert Pattinson as Eric Packer, a billionaire financier trapped in his limousine and considering the fiscal consequences of the fall in Chinese currency.

That is about as understandable as the dialogue gets as Cronenberg uses, in verbatim, DeLillo’s extreme financial jargon. Despite this, what we need to understand about the story (Eric’s financial and personal breakdown) is clear, in spite of the piecemeal narrative that remains largely in the back of a limousine, but takes in eateries, bookshops and run down apartments to stage the destruction of a young financial genius.

Cosmopolis is a marked departure from Cronenberg’s recent, conventional narrative films such as A History of Violence (2005), Eastern Promises (2007) and the disappointing A Dangerous Method (2011). It is in fact a return to the type of cinema he was creating in the 1980s and 1990s and what for what he is most famously known; Naked Lunch (1991), Existenz (1999), Videodrome (1983).

The question remains, are the frustrations and difficulties we experience when watching Cosmopolis a perfect metaphor for the economic crash or is it simply frustrating cinema, adapted from a frustrating book that isolates rather than stimulates.