We want to like this movie, "Cosmopolis." David Cronenberg fills his movies with concepts and ideas, then turns them into something stupendous and horrible. Sigmund Freud is finished, Don DeLillo is next. But his cinema is losing its narrative quality the same way that painting did once upon a time. We don't want just another movie; we want two hours that will stop the world.
This is the kind of thing people write in reviews. (Or novels, ha ha.) But what are reviews other than a half-baked collection of personal bias and subjective impression, laced with the occasional populist groveling? Real information lies elsewhere.
"We're speculating into the void." We know that, because "Cosmopolis" tells us so, as its hero — a Wall Street weasel, the kind of guy who voted Republican because all his friends are smug, insincere, filthy-rich asset managers — is driven around a city not unlike New York in his pimped-out, bulletproof, soundproof stretch limo, his face as blank as any model in a Dolce & Gabbana ad, his encounters — sexual, financial, medical, philosophical and otherwise — taking place almost entirely in this hermetically sealed environment. He gets cream-pied by Occupy-ish anarchists; he pleads with his trophy wife to have sex with him; he places a gazillion-dollar bet on the Chinese currency; he has sex, or tries to, with just about every female he meets; he asks his bodyguard to tase him for kicks; he quotes St. Augustine ("I am an enigma unto myself"); and he is stalked by a mysterious assailant.