I…you know I don’t know what I think of it. It is like a JG Ballard story brought to the screen, seeing as how the main character seems to live out of a limo and is kept prisoner by his billions.
I probably need to watch it again, but I’m not looking forward to that. Very odd movie both in setting and dialog, the dialog is VERY unnatural and sounds like a cross between stilted scientists and people on some sort of drug. I take it there is some elaborate back story, for instance a IMF official is killed on a live North Korean talk show?! They have North Korean talk shows?
Oh and he hires a doctor to give him a full exam every day, including a ten minute rectal exam?!:dubious: (there is a rather silly scene between him and another character talking for ten minutes while he is having a rectal exam.)
It’s very unfortunate that Cronenberg decided not to use voice-overs to give more insight to Packer’s mental breakdown. I really think it detracts from the “making sense” part of the story. I highly recommend reading the book before watching the movie. It isn’t a really long book, either.
I’m glad you touched on the dialogue and its weird cadence and syntax. I read that Cronenberg adapted the screenplay by taking almost all of the dialogue word-for-word from the book. Obviously a lot of the book is left out, but from what I remember (I read the book once when it came out almost 10 years ago and then once again before the movie came out as a refresher) he was pretty faithful to the phrasing. I actually really like the way the language flows.
Back to my only real criticism, the lack of explanation. I realize David Cronenberg is used to (and likes making) odd movies which sometimes don’t make a ton of sense, but I think a few well placed voice-overs (think Christian Bale’s explanation of his daily routine in American Psycho) and I think the movie would make much more sense to his audience.
The main character is rich beyond measure at a very young age and has slowly begun losing his grip on reality and what “real life” is like. His ride across town and his demands on his staff show his willful charge into self destruction. The book really lays out how he destroys not just himself and his wife but also (because of his wunderkind status as an asset manager) several parts of the global economy. It’s eerie some of the parallels between the destruction the author imagines in 2003 and what ended up happening a few years ago on Wall Street.
I’ll be honest I did not get the sense so much that it was a story of one man’s descent into madness, because every other character is just as strange as him. It isn’t one person losing a grip, its a bunch of oddballs.
I do agree a few well placed scenes would have made the whole thing clearer, it was hard to tell at first how to take the movie(or how Cronenberg wanted the movie to be taken).