He's crazy handsome. He really is. It stuns me time and time again. This smirk dimple kills me.
*giggle* This is like sexy disgust. That slight sneer.
And this is just HandsomeRob. *sigh*
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M&C: Your character’s relationship with Eric Pattinson) her husband, is oddly straightforward – it’s love/hate. It’s brittle, combative and sexual. What's your take on it?
Gadon: So often as a female actress you’re accustomed to reading material where the male character projects onto you exactly what you’re feeling and exactly what you’re working in and exactly what your actions are in a scene.
What I thought was so hilarious about the two of them is that he spent the entire time trying to project onto her – “I want to fuck you, I think you’re sexy, I want this. That, you’re sad, you’re happy”.
And she spends the whole time saying “No, no” until the end of the arc when he says “I’m not going to be the man you want me to be” and she says "Okay well, I’m out”. It was so refreshing to me to read that also terrifying. There is a charisma to the way she does it. But there is no blazing moment where the screenwriter is saying “fall in love with this woman” because she’s a woman.
M&C: Was your purpose was to dominate the indomitable guy?
Gadon: I think that’s why women are so responsive to the character. Men say to me “So she’s really cold” [laughs] but that is what is so great about David is that as a filmmaker, he leaves so much open to interpretation and he allows for the female and male spectator.
He’s not assuming all audiences members are young men. He’s saying “I'm going to give you a guy like this or a girl like this and then a woman and a sex scene like that”. That’s what I find so stimulating about his work. I'm speculating into the void now but I think he really does account for audiences that are both men and women.
M&C: He has a strong wife and daughter. He’s interesting to see him grow over the years; he seems to have relaxed as a director now, perhaps less of a control freak now.
Gadon: But he is not a lax director. Everything is so defined. He spent a lot of time getting the script to get to that point. So often, as Rob Pattinson says, you get material that is not fully developed and just because of the nature of the industry now, you don’t know what’s going to get green lit.
It has nothing to do with the script and everything to do with the casting, director, financing, so an actor may go to camera with a script that is not going to be developed anymore.
It creates a different kind of role for an actor. So often you’re trying to figure out a scene, the action, intention, emotion with the director on the day and it’s just a lot messier. With David it’s already there.
There is that difference, but on the day. He’s there watching and listening and he comes up and says something, even a word, “comprised”, not composed”, and you’ll say it and it will change your whole performance.
Rob and I had breakfast, lunch and dinner in the movie and he wanted us to sit side by side. He asked us to sit outward until the end of the scene when we face each other. Things like that that change your performance. He likes to play like he’s laid back!
In this realm, it's obvious why Pattinson has become Cronenberg's new Viggo: he has the aquiline profile of a Cronenbergian protagonist and a certain feral cunning in his cold, dark eyes. More importantly, there's nothing standing in the way of the script. Pattinson is a vessel, a piece of glass. In between delivering his lines of dialogue, he is so still that one questions his existence. It's a quandary magnified by the introduction of a parade of employees connected to the billionaire.Excerpt from dorkshelf.com:
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In and out of the limo they go, each more emotional than the last, while Packer crawls toward his destination. At one point, the limo is enveloped by rioters waving rats and spray-painting its windows. Even as the protesters rock the car on its chassis, Pattinson rides out the storm, sipping his vodka with a repressed smirk.
In the film, Eric is played by Robert Pattinson; a wise and prescient choice for DeLillo’s leading man seeing that he comes from a style of new money made up of pretty boys described at one point by one of Eric’s numerous, long suffering assistants as being so dreamy they’re practically on life support. Stymied in his efforts to reach his status symbol goal by global anti-finance protests and losing millions by the second due to the rise of the Yuan he heavily leveraged against, Pattinson’s Eric serves as the viewer’s eyes and ears throughout this world. We’re seeing the world exactly as he sees it and not how it actually is since there isn’t a single scene in the film that Pattinson isn’t in. It’s the true starmaking performance that the actor has probably long hoped for and he carries the film wonderfully.
Eric isn’t detached from his world despite how aloof he must seem. He’s a workaholic and cursed with the downfall of great intellect and wealth. He is the embodiment of DeLilo’s seemingly Marxist philosophy that at some point capitalism will begin to move so quickly that no one will be able to keep up. With his boyish good looks and ability to turn his character on a dime, Pattinson shows how Eric is tormented by his ability to see all sides to an issue and how his own knowledge makes him equal parts paranoid and reckless. Even his own wife that he barely has any relationship at all with (played by Sarah Gadon) remarks that Eric has a great deal of science and ego combined.
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The arguments will be made back and forth that the film still isn’t a “return to form” for the director or that it’s a masterpiece that will be heralded for its prescient nature given the current state of the global economy, but what makes Cosmopolis brilliant in its own way is that none of those arguments matter when the film itself is allowed to be scrutinized on its own merits. It’s a hard and challenging film for casual viewers to ever hope to have in “in” with, but for those willing to follow along and let the film wash over them in the same way a great book can take over the imagination, Cosmopolis is a heck of a ride. It’s an impossible film to sum up with a full critical analysis in less than 1,000 words, but it will lead to some great discussions amongst those who see it.