Cosmopolis

I was intrigued by Cosmopolis (2012) for several reasons. First of all, I am a fan of director David Cronenberg and even if I don't like all of his projects, I feel that he is often willing to challenge himself and the viewer while attempting to create something original. I have also read and enjoyed some of Don DeLeillo's fiction, White Noise and Pafko At The Wall are two works that I liked in particular. I also like the fact that he tried to adapt a difficult literary novel, which takes place in the course of a day. Eric Packer (adeptly played by teen heart throb Robert Pattison) travels across town on a tumultuous day by limo to get a haircut from his childhood barber.  It's the kind of project legendary John Huston would have been attracted to had he still been alive. But ultimately I think it falls short of Huston's well-made adaptations of Flannery O'Connor's Wiseblood and Malcolm Lowry's Under The Volcano. I'm not sure why, but it doesn't have the same urgency or sense of human identification with the main characters for my sensibility. The characters seem like abstractions and there are too many talking head scenes to maintain a brisk storytelling pace. I suppose I can best surmise it as a noble failure. This is because that although it manages to grab the viewer's attention at certain points in the film, it is ultimately unable to sustain that throughout the majority of the film.