Don DeLillo at 90: Cosmopolis (2012) with Ben Rivers (15)

Discussing Cosmopolis afterwards, with host Gareth Evans, will be award-winning artist and film-maker Ben Rivers, whose own recent film Mare's Nest features a full adaptation of DeLillo's play The Word for Snow, here performed entirely by children.

This Friday (20th November) marks the remarkable American novelist Don DeLillo's 90th birthday. Since his 1971 debut Americana, across 18 novels, 10 plays and two dozen short stories DeLillo has crafted a singularly prescient, unsettling, darkly humorous and stunningly written guide to the contemporary world, in all its paranoid, conspiratorial, commodified and yearning manifestations. The startling lyricism of his prose style has made books like White Noise, Libra, Mao II and Underworld masterpieces of insight and awe.

Cosmopolis (2003), one of his six books written since the turn of the Millennium, is a kind of chamber-drama distillation (but no less potent for that) of the huge themes he explores elsewhere in his oeuvre. In this case, however, the chamber in question is the interior of an almost completely insulated stretch limo, one that is transporting 28 year old billionaire and fund manager Eric Packer (a pitch-perfect Robert Pattinson) in almost 'real time' across a gridlocked Manhattan to get a haircut. He makes his way via a presidential motorcade, a Sufi rap funeral and an anti-capitalist protest, while being visited in the vehicle by advisers, his doctor, wife, sexual partners and more. As the day progresses, and as his funds collapse, he faces a 'credible threat' and things go from bad to worse...

Working with his key long-time collaborators, composer Howard Shore, and cinematographer Peter Suschitzky (who will be in conversation after their shared earlier film Spider at The Garden on 9th November), Cronenberg vividly translates DeLillo's cool and expansive world-making to the screen, borrowing his distinctive dialogue straight from the page. While some were sceptical, astute critics could see that the meeting of film-maker and novelist had resulted in a striking outcome, one that, 14 years on, feels more relevant than ever, in this age of oligarchic ascendancy. For Justin Chang, writing in Variety, the film is "an eerily precise match of filmmaker and material, Cosmopolis probes the soullessness of the 1% with the cinematic equivalent of latex gloves. ... Pattinson's excellent performance reps an indispensable asset." Meanwhile, here in the UK, Robbie Collin, tellingly in The Daily Telegraph, observes that "it's a smart inversion of Cronenberg's 1999 film eXistenZ: rather than being umbilically connected to a virtual world, Packer is hermetically sealed off from the real one. At its heart is a sensational central performance from Robert Pattinson as Packer. Pattinson plays him like a human caldera; stony on the surface, with volcanic chambers of nervous energy and self-loathing churning deep below."