Pattinson and Pitt face off at Cannes

A Hollywood master and a young pretender go head to head for Cannes’ top prize tomorrow, as films starring Brad Pitt and Robert Pattinson had their premieres this week.

In Canadian director David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, Pattinson is a ruthless billionaire on a journey to self-destruction in a searing attack on capitalism.

In the movie, based on a Don DeLillo novel of the same name, capitalism is corrupting, characters cannot communicate, and people joke that rats could be the new currency. The film is competing for the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, to be awarded tomorrow.

The slick but stilted critique of the financial industry managed to capture the zeitgeist that erupted last year with the Occupy Wall Street movement, protests in Manhattan that occurred even as the film was being shot, Cronenberg said.

“We didn’t think we were making... a prophecy, when we started making the movie, but suddenly that was the case,” said Cronenberg. “For some reason our movie is capturing the moment. It became a documentary instead of a fiction film.”

Twilight heart-throb Pattinson plays high finance wonderkid Eric Packer, obsessed with the idea of crossing New York during heavy traffic and roadblocks to get a haircut. It is never clear why the perfectly groomed lead actor wants a haircut, but along the circuitous route across town in his white stretch limo he appears in every scene of the movie — usually sitting in a throne-like black leather seat.

Pattinson told reporters he was initially intimidated by the prospect of working on the film, acknowledging that: “I can’t explain what the movie is about.”

“I kind of spent two weeks in my hotel room worrying and confusing myself,” he confessed.

Since Pitt last collaborated with Andrew Dominik, he has starred in the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading, David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, and Bennett Miller’s Moneyball.

It’s arguably the best stretch of his career, one vacillating between comedy and drama, and defined not by blockbusters but by provocative director-oriented fare.

The bookends to the period are Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and now Killing Them Softly, which had its world premiere at the festival this week.

Things are going great even as Pitt insists that movie-making is not his top priority. “Right now, I’m just attracted to being a dad,” said Pitt in an interview in a hotel penthouse in Cannes. “Filmwise, we get to do this thing and I feel very fortunate to get to do this. So I want to contribute to the art form. I think the films have to speak to our time and be authentic in their approach.”

Killing Them Softly is adapted from George V Higgins’s 1974 crime novel Cogan’s Trade. It’s a stylised, ruthless noir with a host of fine performances by James Gandolfini, Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn, and Ray Liotta, all set in a brutally violent criminal wasteland.

Meanwhile, Kristen Stewart, Garrett Hedlund, and Sam Riley, are the three young actors who play the central love triangle in Walter Salles’s adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s Beat Generation novel On The Road.

The tale of wannabe writer (and Kerouac surrogate) Sal Paradise and his friend Dean Moriarty crisscrossing the US in search of freedom and the elusive “it” was published in 1957.

The actors felt the weight of expectation from the book’s millions of fans, but say it helped them form a bond. “We were the only people there who really know and understand what it feels like to be gifted, or burdened, with the responsibility of playing these characters,” said Riley.