Water for Elephants (2011)

Romantic drama directed by Francis Lawrence. 

Robert Pattinson stars as a young veterinary medicine student, Jacob Jankowski, who joins a travelling circus in 1931. He meets the sadistic ringmaster (Christoph Waltz) and falls in love with his wife (Reese Witherspoon). 

It’s compelling. The circus crew live and travel on a train, and their micro-world is conveyed well. Waltz is convincingly multi-faceted and menacing. The love story is touching without being schmaltzy. And the CGI animals seem completely real. 

The one flaw – and it’s a big one – is the slightly cheesy framing device in which we see Jankowski as an old man (Hal Holbrook), looking back on his life and narrating the story. Why was this considered necessary?

Also, the title makes no sense. Maybe it works in the novel (by Sara Gruen), but it jars a little for this adaptation.

Cosmopolis (2012)

A super-rich, super-powerful businessman in search of a haircut travels across New York City in a hi-tech limousine. Strange, scary, violent things happen. He’s joined at various points by expert advisors – on financial markets, on modern theoretical thinking, and (by Juliette Binoche) on buying art.

This disturbing film is David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s short novel from 2003. It’s difficult to work out if it’s more Cronenbergian than DeLillo-esque. The former’s deliberately ugly visuals and horror elements are distinctive. The latter’s ultra-dry, play-like dialogue is also prominent, although it’s less funny here than it is on the page – even though (or perhaps because) the film adaptation is fairly faithful to the novel.

Robert Pattinson stars as Eric Packer and Sarah Gadon plays his “wife”, although their marriage is more of a farcical abstraction than a reality – another of the deliberately absurd elements that push the narrative into surreal and existential territory.

The problem with the film is that it succeeds so well in its aim to be cold and cerebral that you wonder what you might actually gain from watching it. If the characters don’t care about anything, why should we care about them? And therefore it starts to feel as shallow and empty as its subject matter.