Colin Farrell and Marion Cotillard are attached to an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s pre-9/11 day-in-the-life profile of a millionaire Master of the Universe, to be written and directed by David Cronenberg.
The Wrap calls Cosmopolis a “thriller.” Um yeah, a “thriller” as only being stuck in Manhattan traffic all day can be termed “thrilling.” A heckuva lot does, ahem, go down in the back of that limo though, so if anyone can wring a thriller out of Cosmopolis, Cronenberg’s the man.
DeLillo’s novel follows a multimillionaire asset manager (Farrell) who loses all of his wealth during a 24-hour odyssey across Manhattan. Cotillard is set to play his wife. The duo make an intriguing foreign pairing and Cronenberg’s involvement behind the camera makes this a must-see movie.
Cronenberg’s next movie, “A Dangerous Method,” stars Viggo Mortensen, Michael Fassbender and Keira Knightley as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and a disturbed young patient who begins a passionate affair with Jung, respectively. It begins filming later this month in Germany.
No book by DeLillo is ever bad, though I wouldn’t say Cosmopolis ranks among his best. Excerpts from two of the good reviews:
San Francisco Chronicle:
“There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time,” Levin scrawls in his unhinged diary. “Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?”Lovely, paradoxical, slightly paranoid: The line’s vintage DeLillo. The same goes for “Cosmopolis,” a disjointed, episodic parable about a “foully and berserkly rich” asset manager, Eric Packer, riding slowly across Manhattan in his white stretch limo…
More than anything, this picaresque trajectory recalls the great road movies of the late ’60s and early ’70s, loosely structured shaggy-dog stories like “Two-Lane Blacktop” or “The Last Detail” or “Bye Bye Braverman,” where the fundamental unit of measure wasn’t the act or the shot but the scene.
The Telegraph: If I say that Cosmopolis is a serious and absurd book about capitalism, futurity, human agency, symbolic violence, actual violence, sex and death, I worry that you won’t believe me when I say that it is genuinely, consistently funny; that it is minimally pretentious; that it has charm.
