Cosmopolis director David Cronenberg and star Robert Pattinson rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange this morning. There is meta and meta-meta — this is the latter. Cosmopolis is about an utterly rancid, soul-less and sell-loathing Wall Street guy coming to the end of himself. The metaphor is obvious, and so naturally the NYSE gave Croney and RPatz a big hand.

The Cosmopolis guys can do this stuff all day along and it doesn’t change the fact that the film is airless and suffocating.

“The non-stop chatter in Cosmopolis is so compact and persistent and airless your ears will eventually fall off,” I wrote last May. “With the same determination that Eric Packer — played by Pattinson with his usual glum, shark-eyed passivity — takes himself down, Cosmopolis talks itself to death.

“I was dying for a little silence, a little quiet outside the limo…a sunset, an empty, wind-swept boulevard at pre-dawn, an encounter with a friend or two. Oh, that’s right — Packer hasn’t any.

“Cosmopolis is too familiar, too regimented, too claustropobic, too obvious. Yes, you’re constantly aware of Cronenberg’s fierce behind-the-camera talent, his determination to stay with his apparently quite faithful screenplay of Don DeLillo‘s book and to not cop out by making a film about how Pattinson’s Eric Packer used to be human but is now an alien although there might be a way out. That’s not the Cronenberg way. He gives it to you his way, and you just have to sit there and take it.”

They have a wall phone with a coily cord on the floor of the New York Stock Echange? A wall phone with a cord?