My God, this movie was weird. And, yet, I kind of loved it. It made me want to write a novel.

A few years ago, I was reading Don DeLillo’s Libra, a speculative novel about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and I remarked to a literary critic that none of DeLillo’s characters spoke like recognizable people, and they all spoke alike in their staccato pretentiousness. But there was one exception: Oswald’s wife, Marina, had brilliantly authentic monologues about her life with Lee. And the critic told me that Marina sounded so real because DeLillo had simply taken her Warren Commission testimony and pasted it in his narrative. DeLillo, whatever his philosophical acuity and structural innovation, doesn’t write believable characters; they’re all simply puppets for his ideas and word play. And that word play can be seductive. David Cronenberg, in adapting DeLillo’s 2003 novel Cosmopolis, was clearly taken in by the language, reproducing DeLillo’s dialogue almost word for word. And that means that nothing that the characters say is believable as a human utterance. This is the main reason – but not the only one – that Cosmopolis is such a weird, discomfiting, ultimately entrancing cinematic experience. Continue…