Last night Seema and I saw perhaps our last film for 2012; Cosmopolis directed by David Cronenberg.  In essence, Cosmopolis is a film about the crisis of identity within the fallen capitalist society we live in.  Based on a novel by Don DeLillo, this dialogue heavy film centers around Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson).  Travelling across town for a haircut, he episodically drifts from person to person in his stretched limo imparting various insights about the human condition.  Each episode loosely explores the theme of existential angst within a society of greed and culminates in  its excellent verbal climax with Benno Levin,  played by Paul Giamatti in a tour de force performance.

Despite this superb ending I found Cosmopolis flawed in a few areas.  I found the dialogue to be too stagey.  I felt I was watching a screenplay of a novel and there seemed to be an integrity that was missing.  There was no suspension of disbelief and it preached to me in a way that I found quite detaching from the motives of Cosmopolis‘s  inhabitants.  Perhaps this was deliberate but I can’t for the life of me figure out why, and it did not strike a chord with me.   Cosmpolis is a film that bites off more than it can chew.  It  is full to over flowing with clever dialogue that, frustratingly, is too much to take in.  It could have, instead, just explored more thoroughly any one of the episodes that Packer encounters.