Director: David Cronenberg
Year Released: 2012
Rating: 1.5
Ultra-wealthy billionaire (Robert Pattinson, trying to be taken seriously) decides he needs a haircut from his barber across town and on the way there has to endure protests in the streets, his frigid wife and an attempted assassination by a disgruntled recluse (Paul Giamatti). Cronenberg can match novelist Don DeLillo in the area of icy abstraction - this is sleek and shiny - but I'm not sure it's possible to empathize with the Pattinson character (at least on screen; I never read the novel), whose malaise at being so rich and so empty inside is irritating: when Giamatti's loon wants to take him out, it would be No Great Loss to the World. There are some amazing insights and observations scattered about (Samantha Norton's character is particularly compelling), but the majority of this is didactic and (intentionally) cryptic - people 'speak' to each other but no one seems to 'listen'. It tries to be timely in its message about the problems with capitalism - and comment on the Occupy movement - but I'm positive this isn't the movie to really skewer the "1%."
