Watching MICKEY 17 reminded me that I should create more peace with Canada by finally watching those two movies Robert Pattinson did with David Cronenberg. Since Pattinson is Batman he counts as American now, and these fine Canadian films set in the U.S. have become a beautiful bridge of brotherhood between warring nations. Furthermore, it just so happened that they were the only Cronenberg movies I hadn’t seen. Now that I have seen his full filmography I am complete, and I cannot be stopped. LONG LIVE THE NEW REVIEWS!
COSMOPOLIS (2012) is one of those movies that gets enough exactly right about modern Capitalism ’n Shit that it seems kinda prophetic right now, but also, I’m pretty sure, plenty of other times. It depicts the world of a damaged 1%er freak whose alleged genius is only in relation to the arcane manipulation of international currencies. The way his work is discussed I’m not sure if it’s math or sorcery. As far as I can tell he contributes nothing to the world while taking everything and believing he doesn’t get enough.
Pattinson (THE LIGHTHOUSE) plays Eric Packer, a 28-year-old billionaire who spends most of the movie in his limo trying to get across town for a haircut. His chief of security (Kevin Durand, RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION) tries to talk him out of it because streets are closed for a presidential visit. I like that Eric has to ask which president, like he’s Snake Plissken, but he doesn’t give a fuck for different reasons than Snake Plissken. Also in the news: there are anti-capitalism protests going on, everyone’s on high alert because someone assassinated the head of the IMF on live TV, and there’s a funeral for “the Sufi rap star” Brutha Fez (K’naan). Eric is very sad to learn of his death because “I love his music. I have his music in my elevator.”
He doesn’t mind being in the car. It’s where he holds meetings, talks about buying Rothko paintings/has sex with his art consultant Didi (Juliette Binoche, GHOST IN THE SHELL), has his daily doctor’s appointment and makes intense lusty eyes at an associate while having his prostate examined. It’s not LOCKE, he does make stops at stores, cafes and bars, has sex with a bodyguard (Patricia McKenzie, THE PHANTOM [2009]) in an actual bed, meets with his wife Elise (Sarah Gadon, between Brandon Cronenberg’s ANTIVIRAL and Denis Villeneuve’s ENEMY), a poet from another rich family who he’s cold to, and she always smells sex on him, but he always claims it’s something else.
There’s a dead rat motif. Protesters throwing them at his car, or in restaurants. This is the only movie Samantha Morton (SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK) has done with Cronenberg, which is surprising. It’s also the only one Jay Baruchel (TROPIC THUNDER) has done with him, which is less surprising, but he does star in Caitlin Cronenberg’s movie HUMANE. I’ll have to watch that. (He’s in one scene at the beginning here as Eric’s cyber-security guy.)
I like the surprise that when Eric does get to the barber it’s not some fancy-ass place, he just goes there because the barber knew his dad. The kind of barber you can get a gun from. In the middle of the haircut he suddenly decides he has to leave, so (like Paper Boi in one of my favorite episodes of Atlanta) he goes around with his hair only half cut.
A couple people are trying to murder him, including a guy known as The Pastry Assassin (Mathieu Amalric, THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF ADELE BLANC-SEC) and a guy who lives in an abandoned building where there’s no plumbing but he can use the toilet because “There’s a hole below the fixture. I knocked a hole in the floor. And I positioned the toilet so that one hole fits over the other.”
That guy turns out to be less of a Luigi Mangione than an Edward Nygma (BATMAN FOREVER version), a disgruntled former employee who knows that Eric doesn’t know his name. He’s played by Paul Giamatti (PAST MIDNIGHT) in one of those big-name-actor-shows-up-very-late-in-the-movie-and-you-remember-yep-that-guy-is-fucking-good type roles. He had something to do with this currency speculation business and they seem to bond over the fact that they both “couldn’t figure out the yuan.” Might be the happiest we’ve seen either of them when they discuss it.
As much as I like all this I had more trouble getting involved in it than most Cronenberg films, and I think it’s down to the very stylized dialogue. Eric likes to split up his statements by putting a question in the middle:
“A haircut has what? Associations.”
or
“That I’m a powerful person who chooses not to demarcate his territory with singular driblets of piss is what? Something I need to apologize for?”
or
“Ten to the minus ninth power. This is what? One billionth of a second.”
or
“Technology is crucial to civilization, why? Because it helps us to make our fate.”
Sometimes he sounds like Yoda: “The situation is what?” “You do this why?” Every character speaks like what? Philosophers. And why? Because it’s based on a book (by Don DeLillo). It’s obviously an intentional artistic choice and it’s Cronenberg’s right as a Canadian to do it, but for me it’s too distancing, adding one too many layers of artificiality to a world that’s intentionally heightened but poetically accurate. I think this was one of the breakthroughs where people started to realize Pattinson was more than just a dreamboat, and I do think he handles the challenging dialogue pretty well, but he has been much better in subsequent roles, including a smaller part in Cronenberg’s follow-up.
I’m glad I watched these two in order because MAPS TO THE STARS (2014) was way more my speed, a worthy final-Cronenberg-blindspot. This one is the nightmarish Cronenberg portrait of Hollywood, complete with the young starstruck dreamer arriving in town by bus, finding her way into an orbit of superstars, alternative therapists and aspirers. Played by Mia Wasikowska (ROGUE), Agatha turns out to have way more going on than we realized, but she still works as a weird social-media-age perversion of that fresh-faced-wannabe-starlet archetype.
She rents a limo to tour Hollywood, and hey, whaddaya know, the driver Jerome is played by Robert Pattinson (GOOD TIME), so just like in COSMOPOLIS he gets to spend much of the movie in a limo (and have sex in it again, but not a prostate exam). He’s a completely different character, though, a mostly passive one whose expressions betray amusement or skepticism of the crazy shit people tell him, while letting it roll by without comment. He’s the movie’s face of normalcy, just a regular Hollywood dude who wants to be an actor and writer but has to work for the people actually doing it.
Agatha asks about getting a star map, and if he’s ever driven any celebrities. He thinks about it and comes up with Tatum O’Neal, Chuck Lorre and Juliette Lewis. She blurts that she knows Carrie Fisher. “I met her on Twitter. Yeah, we became, like, really good friends.” Fisher (SORORITY ROW) later shows up in the movie as herself and it’s ambiguous how much she might have been pestered on Twitter, but she does in fact know Agatha enough to ask the famous actress Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore, ASSASSINS) to interview her for the personal assistant job she has open.
Havana is worried she’s a has-been, looking for a comeback, and thinks she could even get an Oscar if hotshot director Damien Javitz (Gord Rand, Orphan Black) would cast her in his edgy reimagining of STOLEN WATERS. The original starred her mother Clarice Taggart, who she lives in the shadow of. And also the trauma of, since she says she was abused by her, and also since she died young in a fire. We see Clarice in beautiful black and white movie clips as well as in hallucinations, and she’s played by Sarah Gadon (DRACULA UNTOLD). That’s cool because Gadon played superstar Hanna Geist in Brandon Cronenberg’s debut ANTIVIRAL (but had already been in A DANGEROUS METHOD).
Agatha gets the assistant job and is better at it than I expected. It involves picking up groceries and prescriptions, and literally requires smelling Havana’s shit (talking to her while she’s on the john). I’m afraid we must face that according to the movie that part of the job might be desirable to someone – there’s a scene where a teen star (Justin Kelly, Degrassi) tells his friends what he thinks is a funny story about a teamster selling sewage from his trailer to an obsessive fan.
Agatha seems to be a pretty likely suspect to stalk somebody, and she is, but not in the same way we first assume. What we don’t know at first (SPOILER) is that she’s the sister of child sitcom star Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird, The Killing). They’re not close because she’s been in a mental hospital since drugging him and burning down their house (also the cause of the burns on her face and body). Their mother Cristina (Olivia Williams, THE POSTMAN) fears Agatha but shows Benjie love by acting as his fierce manager and embracing him as he pukes in a stylish urinal. Their dad Stafford Weiss (John Cusack, DRAGON BLADE) is a doctor/author famous from infomercials who does some kind of intense massage/regression therapy with Havana, so he finds out Agatha is in town and gets a restraining order.
I like that Cusack has this one great Cronenberg role – he fits so well, both his corny ramblings about the Dalai Lama and his sinister side. He vapes at the dinner table and during sessions wears all black including those shoes that have toes.
Cronenberg in interviews is a funny guy, but I don’t think his movies usually are. This one is a definite exception. I especially realized that when Benjie visits a dying fan (Kiara Glasco) in the hospital. When she praises his hit comedy BAD BABYSITTER he starts shooting off box office figures, then directs his producer to get her swag and an iPad Mini. He’s fresh out of rehab, filming the highly anticipated sequel and ends up having a bitter grudge against four year old co-star Roy (Sean Robertson) for stealing a scene by saying the word “vabina.” There’s something hilarious about a teenage Frankie Muniz lookalike not knowing how to let go of his fury against a little innocent freckle faced boy, and the poor kid doesn’t know how to handle it.
It’s definitely a puzzling story with much to read into it. Its motifs include dying in a fire, stolen rings, being haunted by ghosts and, for some reason, brother-sister incest. I really don’t know what to make of that last one, but overall this makes perfect sense as a portrait of Hollywood through the eyes of David Cronenberg.
Like COSMOPOLIS, MAPS TO THE STARS fits right into Cronenberg World while being the distinct work of its author, Bruce Wagner, the novelist who also wrote Wild Palms, both the graphic novel and its mini-series adaptation. More importantly he co-wrote an early draft of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS with Wes Craven, and shares a story credit for it. That also led to him playing the executioner in SHOCKER. He failed to kill Horace Pinker, but he succeeded in giving Cronenberg something perfect to work with 40 years into his career.
April 11th, 2025 at 2:48 pm
Cronenberg’s weirdly clinical and alienated style is a good fit for sci-fi/horror movies. I’m less sold on the use of this approach for a more realistic drama, especially when the subject matter seems to demand a more seething, aggressive, Scorsese-esque approach. So I found COSMOPOLIS a bit of a chore. To me Paul Giamatti was the only cast member who managed to seem like a real person rather than a robotic authorial mouthpiece.
But I appreciate that it was weird, so at least I remember it. MAPS TO THE STARS is the only Cronenberg movie that I genuinely remember nothing about despite being pretty sure I’ve seen it. I don’t think I’ve ever much liked “Hollywood criticizes Hollywood” satires and I don’t have much interest in celebrity culture anyway, so this movie might simply have had nothing to connect or stick with me.
However I remember John Waters liking it – his pull quote said he loved it as much as his own mustache – and that plus this review would seem to suggest that I should maybe give it another try.