The Killer (David Fincher, 2023)

David Fincher's The Killer hit Netflix recently and depending on where you're sitting it's either the least provocative thing he's ever done or the most evocative thing he's ever done. 

The film begins with the eponymous anonymous character's constant mantra: "Stick to your plan. Anticipate, don't improvise. Trust no one. Never yield an advantage. Fight only the battle you're paid to fight." Over those words we watch the hitman (Michael Fassbender at his most android smooth) in his empty WeWork rental space using his sniperscope to observe the street below, do excruciating yoga stretches, execute fingertip pushups, buy cheap protein from the nearest McDonald's. For this stretch of not much significant happening we wander with him through his various random thoughts: "amazing how physically exhausting it can be to do nothing," "Of the many lies told by the US military-industrial complex my favorite is still their claim that sleep deprivation didn't qualify as torture." "Every second 1.8 people die while 4.2 are born into the very same second. Nothing I've ever done will make any dent in these metrics."

That's his character literally in a nutshell: the first statement a metacommentary on his condition, the last an oblique justification for what he does-- bad but not irredeemably evil, he implies, and pegs its importance in the larger scheme of things as trivial. He continues attempting to pin his place in the larger world even after he's fucked up his latest job, a request to stalk and shoot down some unspecified Paris-based diplomat, presumably American. 

Fassbender's hitman is the Dante wandering relatively unscathed through Fincher's circles of hell; he even has his Beatrice in the form of Magdala, a girlfriend in the hospital because she was tortured before she managed to escape.  

Call this Fincher's John Wick with overtones of The Divine Comedy; the hitman visits the various people who ordered his death and metes out justice according to their natures, after observing them in their natural habitats either explaining, battling, or even just begging a favor before their respective deaths. The taxi driver offers information (who he drove, what they looked like); the lawyer exposition (the why, mainly); the brute is given the respect of his abilities with a brutally extended fistfight involving anything within reach, nearby bottles and vases and furniture included-- the hitman even spares his dog; the expert (Tilda Swinton) is allowed her last meal, a flight of whiskies and tapas and even a bowl of Haagen Dazs (not bad not great ice cream but de gustibus est non disputandum) and even a moment of unacknowledged recognition (she equates him to her and he doesn't contradict).

The client (Arliss Howard) is granted arguably the hitman's greatest indulgence-- his life-- but not respect; that is saved for the expert (perhaps the brute). The secretary iss granted her request, which may be the most mercy the man has shown anyone in the film (well there's the dog). If the hitman respects anything it's the client's money, which he recognizes with weary wary realism puts the client out of his reach, if not his regard, if-- big if-- the hitman is to have his life back in any reasonable degree. 

This ticking off of obligations spurned and met is basically the length and breadth of the film; any subtext one may find in just how judgment is parceled out to the various figures met along the way of of this epic accounting run.

But that Fincher seems to say is the hitman's method, and by implication Fincher's own: to record, tick off, put away as neatly and dispassionately as possible the various aspects of a working man's-- maybe working craftsman's, god forbid we actually use the word 'artist's'-- life, things picked up, considered coldly, put away in its proper shelf or box or drawer, the whole process being the craftsman's statement on the way things are. Fincher sticks to his plan. He anticipates, doesn't improvise (at least not visibly). He trusts no one,  never yields an advantage. And he fights only the battle he's paid to fight, though one may wonder who's paying and what Fincher would consider valid payment. Also, what fight we're talking about, the one freshly unreeled onscreen or the presumably metaphoric one we saw offered without fuss or comment. You pick the fight or film you want to see.