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. 

Mank (David Fincher, 2020)

Wank

Not here to bury Mank; I defer to Welles specialist Joseph McBride's demolition job which may be angry but also densely authoritatively detailed-- he knows of what he speaks. Me? Just here to put my two centavos in.

Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

Happy together

David Fincher's Gone Girl is the kind of film that (once the theater lights go up) makes you want to take your wife into your arms and say: "I love you, I want to take care of you, I will never leave you. I promise." 

Something's inevitably lost in the translation from print to screen,  in this case Flynn's cut-gem comic prose, the witty way she arranges the chapter titles ("Nick Dunne The Day Of;" "Amy Elliott January 8, 2005;" "Nick Dunne The Night Of;" "Amy Elliott Dunne April 21, 2009"), interleaved so that you quickly grasp the structure: Nick's story (his wife Amy's disappearance, what happens after) told in present time, Amy's (her introduction and marriage to Nick, what happens after) told in flashback. Fincher does approximate the leisurely rhythms of Flynn's story, captures how the plot blooms like an origami swan being slowly unfolded, revealing how it all comes together--a lovely piece of prestidigitation, in print and on the big screen.

Of course most of the film involves that process of unfolding, which if we're to deal with in any substantial manner we need to talk about explicitly, plot twists, surprise ending and all. So for those who haven't seen the film yet--here there be tygers.

The first half I'd call the more resonant: Amy and Nick's marriage disintegrating under the double blows of the internet revolution (where print media and its writers and critics (particularly in film) either moved online or are laid off en masse) and the '08 recession. Flynn had lived through those times, and the despair captured in her pages feels real--may be one of the better portraits of the period in recent pop fiction. 

Fincher's film doesn't do as vivid a job, but much of that anxiety can be found on the face of Ben Affleck's Nick. As in Hollywoodland, Affleck draws on his insecurities as an actor too smart and self-conscious to be comfortable with his bland handsomeness (don't you get the sense that what he really wants to do is comedy?) to create a sharp, funny portrait of a man too smart and self conscious to be comfortable with his too-perfect marriage. Every public fumble, every faked smile he flashes at the camera confirms his innocence--only someone with no idea what's really going on can be this obviously guilty.

By contrast Amy's diary entries are the very definition of fairy tale, from the meet-cute (standing near a bakery, sugar swirling round like a Hollywood-style snowfall, Nick wipes the powder from Amy's lips preparatory to kissing her) to the marriage proposal (in a scene not found in the novel Nick points out to reporters at a book launching party the central flaw in Amy's life, and promptly corrects it). 

Gone Girl is really Nick's story--the matrimonial dolt who ultimately realizes that the resolution of his direst problems and realization of his dearest dreams do not necessarily result in perfect happiness--but the motor driving the story is Amy, who when all is said and done doesn't make much sense. Would a schemer so meticulous in planning every detail be so careless as to stuff her moneybelt under a motel mattress--allow it to drop at the most inconvenient moment? Would she risk arrest and a murder charge to avoid a man she didn't love (wouldn't she rather marry him, keep him under her capable thumb--maybe enjoy Nick on the side as a lover?)? Both novel and film--the film more than the novel--are a satire on the media, but isn't her dramatic return to her husband too much to swallow, even for TV news hosts? Sure the twists exist within the realm of possibility (roughly), but every turn of events has the narrative's front fender corners grinding excruciatingly against concrete.

Fincher's choice of Rosamund Pike as Amy goes a long way to addressing the problem--as Amy, Pike embodies the character's contradictions with an enchanting enigmatic grace (Fincher in an interview admits that what intrigued him about her was his failure--despite a self-declared ability to decipher others' expressions--to read her face). The character still doesn't make sense, but that quality of Pike--that you can look at her as often and hard as you like (Fincher begins and ends the film with a closeup) and still not feel you know her at all--makes the lack relatively inconsequential somehow. 

Fincher takes his cue from Amy and creates an elegant, vaguely menacing visual style--not just the open McMansion doorway Nick confronts before walking in but also the grubby motel where Amy hides (when someone comes knocking you know the outcome won't be good), and the superluxurious lake home where Amy's former lover Desi (Neal Patrick Harris, in a hilariousl creepy-pathetic supporting role) keeps her as guest/prisoner, complete with unblinking security monitors (nice Fincher touch--fact is, the various onscreen habitations effectively fill in the cracks in their owners' respective personalities). The novel might be Nick's story but the film tells that story as if Amy sat in the director's chair, marshaling every element (must mention Jeff Cronenweth's velvety cinematography) with confident ease.

Is it Fincher's best work? Don't think so--despite the stylishness, the clever plotting, the wonderful cast (Tyler Perry as a cunning Johnnie Cochrane lawyer, Carrie Coon as Nick's twin sister Margo, Lola Kirke as a cunning Ozarks girl, Missi Pyle as a grating Nancy Grace parody); despite the devastatingly filmed and scored finale (also need to mention Trenton Reznor and Atticus Ross' unsettlingly discordant music) that both cynically parodies and bitterly affirms boy-stays-with-girl romantic endings, the film doesn't have the sprawling true-life messiness and mystery of Zodiac, (arguably Fincher's masterpiece) recognizably grounded in '70s San Francisco; it doesn't have the methodical step-by-step, piece-by-piece investigative process memorably depicted in Fincher's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo remake (while Rooney Mara doesn't hold a candle to Noomi Rapace's fire-breathing original she's still more persuasive than Pike's Amy). Gone Girl after all is said and done is the hollow shell of an art film; that said, it's one hell of an entertainingly seductive shell. 

First published in Businessworld, 10.9.14

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher, 2011)

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Once more with feeling

David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is less a remake of the 2009 Niels Arden Oplev movie than it is a 'reinterpretation' of the Stieg Larsson books, for better or worse. Have not read the books myself (I know, I know; should step out of the cave I stay in more often), but from what I've seen of the Oplev movie and its sequels, seems to me Larsson is driven more by passion than by any real skill at storytelling, more concerned at following some fixed agenda (a kind of ad hoc campaign against female victimization, with maybe just a whiff of exploitation) than churning out a well-reasoned, well-paced story.

We know of the initial impulse that led Larsson to write his novel--the girl whose assault he had witnessed at the age of fifteen, the intense pity and self-disgust it inspired in him. You get some sense of the emotional impact in the way he writes (or the way Oplev channels Larsson's feelings to the big screen) of the assault on eponymous protagonist Lisbeth Salander--and let's be honest, that scene is one of the big draws of the story, on paper and onscreen. Powerful scene, too, almost as powerful as Salander's subsequent and no less violent response. You have to admire the way Larsson pushes our buttons--we see the girl brutalized, we see her get a bit of her own back. Feminism with a considerable dose of sadism, magnified by a man's adolescent trauma.

My problem with the scene (at least my biggest among many) is that it occurs too early--after something like this you expect the story to ratchet up the intensity, which it never really does: the rest of the picture is a somewhat plodding procedural where Salander and disgraced journalist Mikael Blomvkist slowly and painstakingly piece together the clues leading to a serial killer. The relationship between Salander and her rapist, actually her legal guardian, is sidelined just when it seemed to be gaining momentum; instead of said guardian functioning as the film's putative villain we get another far more vague antagonist (a former Nazi, this being an always-convenient label to hang on someone you want to present as the bad guy). For the rest of the movie you wonder if Salander is planning to pay her rotten legal guardian any more visits, give him any more additional grief; as for the story's main mystery--well, I'm not exactly paying attention, are you?

That's pretty much what the movie boiled down to for me: Oplev's chilly evocation of wintry Sweden, Larsson's erratically effective storytelling, Noomi Rapace's larger-than-life rendition of Salander. Rapace in my book is the best reason to see the movie: her fire-breathing performance takes over the picture like napalm on jungle growth and keeps one watching, no matter how attenuated and overly complex the plotting gets.

Fincher, I suspect, knew he couldn't find anyone who could match Rapace's intensity, and went in a whole other direction. You get a different vibe from Rooney Mara; she's altogether more frail, more delicate--a deliberate choice, I'm guessing, as one is likelier to worry about a heroine so evidently vulnerable than a heroine ready to kick ass. Instead of a flawed, mostly tedious procedural upended by one actor's larger-than-life presence, we have a more balanced effort where all the elements come together in graceful harmony.

That's the official agenda; Fincher's secret agenda, or at least the one I saw (and enjoyed) watching this, is to modulate every element--screenplay, cast, lead performance--so that the directing will shine. Fincher was reportedly given the chance to adapt this film, back when it was a relatively unknown Swedish thriller; now he intends to do the right thing, and if not exactly wipe the memory of Rapace off our collective minds, at least offer an alternate version of what should have happened had he accepted the offer in the first place.

Oplev's film comes across as a bleak view of Sweden by one of its native sons; Fincher's film comes across as no less bleak, but with the unmistakable taint of beauty. The bridge; the falling snow; the opaque, unyielding mansions housing opaque, unyielding people are all there, yet somehow aestheticized. There is a color scheme--gray and white for the wintry outdoors, warm fireplace glow for the indoors and nostalgic past. And yet the scheme can be deceptive--in the aforementioned past a young girl flees from her unknown tormentor; in the cozily lit and heated house (Fincher uses vast panes of glass to keep us aware of the surrounding cold), you hear a random sound and the house-owner is forced to excuse himself, ostensibly to check on some unfinished business...

That unfinished business is of course a secret soundproofed chamber, lit a clinical fluorescent white. Fincher quietly employs his lighting scheme to illustrate one of the film's themes: inhospitable environment besieging snug homes--said homes, in turn, housing hidden corners of chilled corruption.

Against this precisely constructed background Fincher presents his favorite activity: intelligent men and women, indulging their obsessions (the hunt for a serial killer). Fincher does what Oplev couldn't quite manage: he makes the process of piecing together every news article and photo, every interview and archival search, compulsively watchable. He's pulled off this trick before on a larger scale, and that 2007 film happens to be his masterpiece; repeating the trick within the confines of an internationally best-selling story may seem redundant...well, is redundant, but fascinating, nonetheless. Far from Fincher's best work, but in my opinion superior to the Swedish original, and worth watching.

First published in Businessworld, 2.2.12

The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)

Connect the dots

David Fincher's The Social Network (2010) is based on a clever script by Aaron Sorkin which is based, in turn, on what is said to be a factually unreliable book by Ben Mezrich (The Accidental Billionaires) which is based (loosely or accurately, depending on who you talk to) on the life of the world's youngest billionaire, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher, 2008)

Out, out, brief candle

David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) is a beautifully stated film, easily one of the loveliest I've seen last year. The near-three hour running time didn't bother me; felt I could have sat through a hundred twenty minutes more, easy.

It wasn't meant to be experienced that way, apparently. Based on a slight short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, scriptwriter Eric Roth must have wanted to do a prequel to his Oscar-winning project Forrest Gump (1994), complete with Gump figure (Brad Pitt as the eponymous character), love interest (Cate Blanchett, gorgeous no matter what age she's playing), a panoramic view of the twentieth century (both World Wars, the moon shot), and a quotable bit of dialogue that Roth must have hoped would hit big among viewers, the way "life is a box of chocolates" did in Gump (a distortion, by the way--in Winston Groom's novel Gump says "bein' an idiot is no box of chocolates," a more honest statement than anything said in the movie).

Out of Button and his ability to sail through most of the 20th century unscathed Roth has fashioned the most passive protagonist imaginable--Ben waits for his adopted mother Queenie (Taraji P. Henson) to save him from falling down a stairway, waits for a Captain Mike (Jared Harris) to take him to a brothel and initiate him into the mysteries of sex, waits years for Daisy (Cate Blanchett) to finally come around on her love for him. When something awful finally happens, when say Captain Mike's boat encounters a German sub in the open seas, Ben conveniently drops behind the boat's wheelhouse while the U-boat's anti-aircraft gun shoots the vessel full of lead. Hank's Gump at least suggested something alert and astringent (the only such figure in an otherwise sticky movie) with his erect, ugly-duckling posture--a wide-eyed wariness that knows the world hates the unintelligent, knows it has to be ready for anything, at any time.

Worst of all is Roth's bon-bon of a philosophy. "Nothing lasts, and what a shame that is." The shame is that they gave Roth this project--Gump was about the stickiest, most softheaded film of the '90s (it arguably encapsulates the cockeyed optimism of the Reagan '80s); if Roth completely had his way Button would have been the Gump of the new millennium.

Thank Fincher then, for taking the script and fashioning something darker and altogether more fascinating. In the previous year's Zodiac Fincher gave us the decade-and-a-half-long hunt for the Zodiac killer, complete with a brief sketch of the people investigating and being investigated (roughly a dozen characters), plus a startlingly comprehensive (if not definitive) summary of all the dates and events and facts involved; more impressively he gives us a distilled feel of the process needed to finally reduce the number of suspects down to a single man, leading to a confrontation between protagonist and murderer in a hardware store.

That climactic confrontation was almost a side issue for me, and in fact Fincher shoots it with almost zero fuss or emphasis--I’m guessing it's a side issue for him, too. What ultimately mattered (and I suspect was what he was aiming for all along) was the overwhelming sense of time passing, the weight and mass and heft of weeks accumulating into months accumulating into years accumulating into decades. It was Zodiac's great unspoken, unforgettable theme, and it delivered considerable emotional force--all those years passing before the protagonist finally (if not conclusively) arrived at the truth.

Zodiac focused on a single task (the uncovering of a criminal), and felt more like a focused, intimate portrait, despite the outsized scale; Benjamin Button widens the canvas, taking in an entire life as it plays out against the background of a century. This is the true subject of Button: not Roth's wimpy "nothing lasts" (an insulting truism), but that time passes, slowly, magnificently, irrevocably over us all. Dialogue in Zodiac was an adornment, a distracting chatter that masked the preternatural calm lying beneath the film's surface; dialogue is as unimportant in this picture--this is a hundred and sixty-five minute feast for illiterate senses (imagery and music and sound engineering, not to mention the moments of silence).

Fincher's seductive style (not a big fan of Se7en (1995) or Fight Club (1999) or Panic Room (2002), but he did develop a dark, velvety texture from each of these earlier films that he now wields authoritatively) is the true star of this film, Brad Pitt merely an effectively used mannequin (or as Alfred Hitchcock liked to put it, cattle) that personifies the film's main character. If I've never been a fan of early Fincher, I'm even less of Hollywood star Pitt: he was ludicrous in Interview with a Vampire (1994) (despite Neil Jordan's gorgeous visuals), hilarious in Legends of the Fall (same year), petulant in Troy (2004), unthreatening in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)--you get the picture. He's most effective in comedy, when asked to make fun of his pretty-boy looks (the Coen brothers' recent Burn After Reading comes to mind). Here the prettiness is hidden under prosthetic makeup aging him thirty years, and the results are becoming; he acquires a reticence, a becoming modesty that runs counter to the self-absorbed quality of his showier parts. When he smiles as a seventy year old there's a preternatural brightness to the smile, an inconsistency that makes you want to look twice; Pitt seems to enjoy himself immensely playing Button (he's gloomier when he takes off the makeup and plays his boringly handsome self), and we in turn enjoy his pleasure in the role.

Fincher elaborates on time's passage though various chronometers in the picture (mantelpiece, wrist, digital, even a giant station clock); marks its progress by the changing seasons, fashions, cityscapes (from New Orleans to Russia to Paris to New York); announces its advance through the roar of a motorcycle, the chug of a tugboat, the fateful glide of a car through narrow streets (on its way to crush a dancer's leg); demonstrates its bloom through nighttime encounters between two lovers; even in one bravura passage defies that relentlessness with a shot of soldiers leaping out of shell craters, their shrapnel wounds miraculously closing, their legs pumping back towards the trenches from where they came.

Best of all the effects Fincher creates is Benjamin's face, how (like the soldiers' backward run) the camera gazes in rapt attention as creases vanish and the hair thickens into brown tufts; in a parody of aging Benjamin lets go of memory, intelligence, and bladder control on his backward dash towards the tomb (interesting how Fitzgerald and Fincher equate the extremities of life with each other--both require the wearing of diapers and rinsing of bottoms; both involve endless helpings of helplessness and humiliation). It's as if Fincher had installed this elaborate time-motion sculpture of a human countenance deteriorating, then set it in reverse--by focusing on that, and not on the sentimental history-lesson of a script, Fincher manages to suggest by some small measure the poignant majesty of time.

First published in Businessworld, 1.9.09

Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)

Compulsion

Perhaps the single most surprising fact about Zodiac is that David Fincher directed it--one might think that Alan J. Pakula had been raised from his grave and given a far larger budget than when he did All the President's Men (1976), or that Sidney Lumet had been asked to remake his Prince of the City (1981) with a hunt for a psychopath at its center, or that Curtis Hanson--an excellent thriller filmmaker who raised the stakes mid-career when he made his epic L.A. Confidential (1997)--had suddenly developed a taste for serial killers. Fincher, a music video director turned feature filmmaker, showed such taste early on; he first became famous for the grotesque Se7en (1995--about a man who staged his killings around the Seven Deadly Sins), but had already made an earlier film about a nonhuman killer (Alien³, 1992) and later, a film about a serial terrorist prankster (Fight Club, 1999). Whatever the story, Fincher's camera seems to constantly seek out and focus on the character living or even temporarily thrown outside the norm (of society, of humanity) looking in, his actions dictated by his needs or obsessions.

A quick comparison of the two filmmakers should be instructive. I've always admired Hanson's attention to detail, storytelling skill, and gift for characterization, something that's kept him in good stead in films from L.A. Confidential to 8 Mile (2002) to his latest this year, Lucky You; overall, he makes clearer, more coherent films than Fincher. But with Fincher I've always had expectations, often disappointed by his not exactly disciplined approach--Alien³ was a shaky-camera mess, Se7en's plot was preposterous (genius killer who slays to make a philosophical point?),   Fight Club was brilliant satire that degenerated into comic-book ludicrousness (a worldwide conspiracy of bomb-planting waiters?). That said, there's a look to each of his films that often varied in tone and palette (from the ambers of Alien³ to the murky grays of Se7en to the sumptuous sheen of Fight Club), but was almost always ringed by an encroaching, ever-present gloom. Few recent Hollywood filmmakers made shadows as menacing as Fincher, and you suspect that if you ever opened up his cranium and peeked inside, you'd find the world viewed through similarly darkened lenses.

Then came Zodiac, where Fincher successfully trains those lenses on a script (by James Vanderbilt, based on the books by Robert Graysmith (played here by Jake Gyllenhaal)) that either Pakula or Lumet or Hanson might have been happy--might have killed--to direct. The film covers the nearly ten years starting 1968 during which the Zodiac Killer terrorized San Francisco, and during which the police force tried to hunt him down; it goes on to trace Graysmith's investigations of the killer, past the publication of his book on the subject in 1986, and some time after that. It deals with roughly twenty characters (portrayed by a cast of excellent actors, from Gyllenhaal to Robert Downey Jr. to Mark Ruffalo to Brian Cox to Chloe Sevigny, John Getz, Candy Clark, Elias Koteas, Charles Fleischer, Philip Baker Hall), at least half a dozen of them major, and ranges all over San Francisco (and some cities nearby), from the murder sites to the police precincts to the newsroom of the San Francisco Chronicle to even the apartments and houses of various people involved.

It's a huge, sprawling project, and a viewer might be forgiven for not getting all the particulars straight (this film, if any recent mainstream film ever did, demands additional viewings); more, there's so much story to tell, so much detail to wade through, that Fincher barely has time to illuminate the motives of anyone involved (the killer himself exists mostly as a glimpsed-at shadowy figure, a few brief scenes, and a quick climactic confrontation). Critics have cited this as a major flaw, but I see it as a change in Fincher's point of view, a change of heart, almost. Ever a man to glory in the surface, even texture, of his pictures, Fincher here is using surface--what a man does in killing, and what people do in trying to capture him--to suggest the mystery of what goes on underneath (the surface of things, of one's cranium), in this particular case the extremes to which a man will go to obey his need to kill, accomplish, explore, question, believe; beyond that, the film's surface suggests that truism with which any ambitious artist must eventually come to grips, the ultimate unknowability of things, the sense that final solutions or answers are rare, or false, or often impossible.

Actually, Fincher seems to have been straining to evoke this throughout his career. In Se7en, for example, we hear the killer's rationale, but we barely understand it, much less accept it at face value (as a detective so callowly put it: "You're a movie of the week. You're a fucking t-shirt, at best"); in The Game (1997) the nightmarish circumstances in which a man suddenly finds himself turns out to have (after two hours of chase and anguish) an all-encompassing explanation (and even when the credits roll, you wonder if that IS the final explanation); in Fight Club we never get a clear reason for the protagonist's split personality. In each of these near-fantasy settings, however (Fincher's films almost always seem to be set a few years in the future, or in some alternate reality), the mystery seems more like a conceit to get an unlikely premise rolling; they're easy to accept because they seem so shallowly conceived--gimmicks to help a gimmicky director.

Zodiac is different: thoroughly grounded in the San Francisco of the '60s and '70s, it creates a familiar, even banal everyday world, one we've seen and come to take for granted after years of films and TV shows, here presented to us--thanks to Harry Savides' use of the Thomson Viper FilmStream Digital Camera--in all its larger-than-life glory (the inspiration was American photographer Stephen Shore's '70s pictures). Occasionally Fincher would cut loose--an overhead shot of Paul Stine's taxicab, from killer's pickup to driver's death; a hilariously creepy visit to film projectionist Bob Vaughn's cavernous basement--but these moments seem more like baroque curlicues, to frame the essential realism of the film, a realism with slightly deeper shadows than one might normally expect.

The effect is unsettling, to say the least--like Blue Velvet, David Lynch's vision of small-town life (Zodiac would be Fincher's vision of big-city life), we're given a glittering shell, and can't help but be aware of the void beneath; more, the portrait of obsession (the film isn't so much about the killer as it is the effects the killer has had on those hunting him) uncannily mirrors Fincher's own obsessive qualities in making this film (aside from the painstaking work of recreating '70s San Francisco, Fincher and his collaborators spent an additional eighteen months conducting their own investigation into the Zodiac case). The two hour-plus film (the running time is roughly a hundred and fifty-eight minutes, and word is the DVD release will have an even longer director's cut) is arguably Fincher's Dorian Gray painting--a source of dark power, and Fincher's best chance yet for artistic immortality.

(First published in Businessworld, 6/1/07)