Director Retrospectives- David Fincher Part 3

This is part three of a now four part retrospective of David Fincher's work. Next installment with include Fight Club, Alien 3, and the first two episodes of House of Cards.

Part Three- Working in different genres- The Game & The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

The Game (1997)- In a dark, dangerous San Francisco lives Nicholas Van Orten (Michael Douglas), a very rich businessman and a total loner. He doesn’t come across as pathetic, but as rather as stern and cold, and blatantly unhappy despite the lap of luxury in which he lives. Sensing Nicholas’ unhappiness, Nicholas’ wild and über ostentatious brother Conrad (Sean Penn) appears and presents Nicholas a birthday gift, a gift that is sure to add some excitement to Nicholas life, and lift him out of the depressive fog that he carries around everywhere.

Along the way we learn some little bits of information about Nicholas’ life, but not much, which is nice because his past doesn’t really seem to matter anyway. Fincher takes the character and forces him to deal strictly with the present time. All past regrets, misdeeds, and sins fall away when you are literally fighting for your life.  

Conrad’s gift is a game. A set of real life, role-playing scenarios designed and executed by a company alleged called CRS. We don’t know what CRS is, and neither does Nicholas, so when bizarre happenings start to occur, such as the nightly news anchor breaking character and speaking directly to Nicholas in his living room, Nicholas cannot tell what is really happening. Is this part of the game? Or am I hallucinating?

Soon the puppet masters at CRS crank up the intensity of the events. There are numerous attempts on Nicholas’ life. At one point he wakes up in Mexico after having been buried alive in an underground tomb. The occurrences are so extreme, that as an audience, we are just as confused as Nicholas. It is real? Or is it a game? It is impossible to tell, and this is what makes this film so much fun to watch.

The world that CRS tailors to its clients is very cool and well put together. Even though Nicholas is told distinctly that the CRS game will begin, and it is not until after he is told this that strange and dangerous things start to happen, we are still unsure if it’s game or reality. Fincher is essentially blurring our understanding of the common philosophical conventions of cause and effect.

The Game is a good thriller, and an entertaining watch. The production value of the film is excellent. It projects on screen in dark, shadowy tones, mixed with diverse textures setting one scene to next to a another composed completely different. The film is full of interesting settings from Nicholas’ mansion, to a Mexican border town, to meetings in coffee shops, to cabins in the woods, but despite the actual events taking place being very entertaining to watch, the film never really establishes what truth it is trying to convey. The ending is disappointing. We are not left with any kind of substantial meaning. 

The CRS experience is meant to be a massive, over-the-top shock to the nervous system. This shock forces one, Nicholas in this case, to decide whether he wants to fight to stay alive, or let go and die. Maybe we are supposed to take the hint and choose to live now, even though we don’t have CRS to break us out of our depression and lethargy, as individuals, or as a whole society. But this might be pushing the limits of interpretation. Despite the absence of the deeper themes, such as investigating the pointlessness of existence as in Fight Club, or the proving the worthlessness of humanity as in Seven, The Game is still great watch. Once the film ends, it doesn’t linger for days in the front of your mind like the best thrillers, but while your watching it you’ll be on the edge of your seat, never knowing what it going to happen next.

8.5/10

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)- As an elderly woman lies on her deathbed she recounts the peculiar story of Benjamin Button, a man whose life is inexplicably tied to a mysterious backwards-running clock. After Benjamin’s mother dies in childbirth, the father abandons baby Benjamin because of his stark physical defects. Luckily Queenie, a black woman who manages a senior’s care home, finds newborn Benjamin and raises him herself. For the rest of his life Benjamin calls Queenie mother.

When Benjamin is born, he emerges prematurely aged. Medical tests show that he has the physical characteristics of a person in his eighties. Originally penned by F. Scott Fitzgerald, makes Benjamin Button tells a peculiar life story that forays in the world of the fantastic: the crux of the story is that, just as the clock ticks backwards, Benjamin too ages in reverse. He gets younger and younger over time.

The task of dealing with this massive disconnect between his physically aged exterior, and his inner infantile self, forces Benjamin to attempt to act like an adult (to match his aged exterior), but no matter how hard he tries his true inner child shines through, especially whenever it comes to booze and women, areas where he has zero experience. Benjamin wins the adoration of most every character he meets, and along the way he breaks through the prejudicial barriers that age and race typically erect.

This film is a diversion for Fincher. Many of the defining qualities of David Fincher’s films are not so very present in Benjamin Button. This charmed, almost magical tale shares none of the characteristic of other Fincher scripts. It is not filtered through the darkened lens of hyper awareness; there is none of the desolation and bleak deconstruction of modern culture that fills Zodiac, the most recently released Fincher film before this one. 

Benjamin Button seems to be the only film in Fincher's body of work that is not a dark, psychological thriller. Here, Fincher proves that he can work in drama just as well as he can work in action and suspense, however he does have expert help.

The director of photography Claudio Miranda, who had worked on a number of Fincher’s earlier pictures, sets the tones and temperature of the images so they project like a thriller, dark with shadows, slight, almost sepia toned. A highly refined picture quality.

Once again, this film features Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter, the brilliant editing team that would go on to win multiple Oscars for best editing in The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. They brilliantly let visuals alone tell as much of the story as possible. As with Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Benjamin Button has tons of shots and locations. The exact opposite of Panic Room.

 

Eric Roth & David Fincher

The technique of recounting the story through recollection as a series of flashbacks, as well as Benjamin’s unexpected success despite his handicap, make Benjamin Button bear an off-putting resemblance to the structure of Forest Gump (1994). This is no coincidence. 

The same writer who won an Oscar for his Forest Gump screenplay, Eric Roth, is also the writer of Benjamin Button.

As characters both Forest and Benjamin worked on boats, both took part in World Wars, and both perpetually pursue women from their childhood. What is great thought is that Fincher is able to divert this potential redundancy. While Forest bumbles along, simply falling into phenomenal situations, Benjamin paves his own way. It’s existential drive versus dumb luck.

9/10

Director Retrospectives- David Fincher Part 2

This is part two of a three part retrospective of David Fincher. Future instalments with discuss Fight Club,The Game, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and the first two episodes of House of Cards.


Part Two- Setting and Place- Panic Room, Zodiac, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Panic Room (2002) - In slasher flicks like Scream (1996), break-ins are single scenes. Heist flicks like The Bank Job (2008) or The Score (2001) spend most of the films planning out the break-ins, and then only a scene or two actually carrying them out. So the fact that aside from the very beginning, Panic Room is just really one long break-in scene always made the film seem like a silly waste of time. I mean, it gives the whole plot away right in the title. A couple of thieves arrive and tear up the place, the family hides, problems occur. Hurray.

The coincidence of everything just-so-happening to be available at the exact right time: the happenstance of the break-in coinciding with the idea that the house just so happens to contain a panic room, this seems too much to handle.

Yet all the mighty forces align and provide the viewer with an experience that is actually quite satisfying. Although not an overly complicated plot, the script is very well written and includes explanations for exactly why these happenings occur as they do.

For skeptic viewers like me, who usually find unexplainable exceptional coincidences a deal breakers, David Keopp’s logical, explanatory script (Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible) provides answers, and an excellent foundation for David Fincher to build his dark mess. (IMDB says Keopp got 4 million bucks for the script, so….).

Seemingly, this film takes the primal fear of invasion, bad people coming into our homes in the night and doing bad things to us. But rather than exploit the concept a has been beaten to death, Panic Room does not rely on the traditional fear of invasion. It adds dimension, reason, even a kind of logic explaining how this whole event could have turned out right for everyone, if only it could have unfolded just a single day earlier.

It is in considering the film’s simplicity that the profound difficulty of this film’s production is most realized. The decision for the director and crew to call “that’s a wrap” must have been murky one.

Unlike any of Fincher’s other films, Panic Room is shot entirely on only one set, in linear time, and deals with only with a single event. It is minimal in its approach, like a play. It is essentially all based on the interaction of the actors stage together, almost.

Forest Whitacker, Jodie Foster and even Dwight Yoakam all crank out great performances, but Fincher’s dark, perfectly influential shots, using unusual angles, intercoms and video cameras, small vs. open spaces, and of course, darkness and rain are what make this cinema, and not theater. Aligning open frames with great musical peaks, the score by Howard Shore (Lord of the Rings) intensifies the single track plot of Panic Room, pushing it along as a series of arcs, suspensefully running up and down, each arc increasing in intensity, until the film hits the peak, and even though we knew all along what was coming, we are still very satisfied with when it finally does.

7.5/10

Zodiac (2007)- Now that the criminal mastermind flick has become a set type, widely overdone, this film tends to get easily shrugged off as yet another film about an ultra-intelligent serial killer who is always one step ahead of the cops, yes just like Seven. Still though, this film is quite different. Zodiac has nowhere near as much internal darkness bursting from its seams. 

But Zodiac is dark, just not Seven dark. Even though Zodiac is still a murder-thriller, it’s tone compared to Seven, is a like a lovely ray of sunshine. Being that this storyline is all loosely based on actual events, enacting the film out in the time period during which it occurred, the late 60’s-early 70’s gives the film a freshness, a nostalgia that seems to come with those decades.

The plot: In an age before mail bombs and anthrax scares, a killer toys with his pursuers by leaving complex clues just above their tracker’s radars, just out of reach of their capabilities, the chase then becomes perpetual, the madness wide spread- reporters, cops, victim’s families, all exposed to the madness. Society engulfing.  

The lighting, the darkness, the shadows, the string dissonance, and the rain of course: all hugely important to Fincher’s work, perhaps his most important set of tricks, perhaps they could even be called Finchinian, or would it be Ficheresque? They pop up in all this films.

In the real tense bits we get close, claustrophobic shots, bare-bones dialogue, tense body

language, the potential victim’s fear seeping almost literally thought the screen, then BAM! Scene complete. No sentimentality.

None of Fincher’s tactics in creating suspense come across as clichés. These are textbook lessons in how to frame a successful suspense scene. In a thriller the actor is a part of the puzzle. Like a part of complex musical arrangement, all the players need to play their parts perfectly.

In thrillers the character is thrown into an extreme situation, an abyss created by the filmmaker, and Zodiac, unlike Panic Room, is a bottomless abyss. Great performances are made by the actor’s that find the rawest, ravenous ways to claw their ways out, even if the character fails.

During Zodiac, Jake Gyllehaal was still coming up in the ranks. He had not fully moved on to the badass action hero roles he plays today and in his underling position in the film, as a cartoonist constantly getting in the way of the “real” reporters, he becomes an interesting underdog of a main character, even though he’s not supposed to be the main attraction. A pleasure to watch, we know, and he knows, he is in a subservient role and he never breaks out of it .

Thrillers are the king of film as the symphony is king of music. Great symphonies are difficult to execute. So many elements, so many moving parts, everything must align perfectly, so when that moment of suspense is created, in both thriller and symphony, whether scene of movement, we stand in awe.  

Zodiac has those moments. 

8/10

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)- Thanks to David Fincher, the world now has Rooney Mara to admire (and stare at). She plays the Goth misfit Lisbeth in this film, her first lead role, and she’s actually pretty good. She does revenge particularly well. A fierce character, while not dominating every scene, Rooney dominates the film. She is the one we think a hour later.

I will not try and compare her performance with Noomi Repace's, whom I also love to watch. Both do Lisbeth their 
own way.

When Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) gets into some political hot water and needs to get out of Stockholm, he takes a job as an investigator in the Swedish countryside trying to solve the mystery of a disappeared girl, but there are people that do not want him to to find the answers. Eventually he teams up with Lisbeth and they work on the case together.

In the first part of the film, the intersecting story lines between the two main characters are done with skill. Many scenes are not action or dialogue based (they are just visual), yet all they all add to the story. The decision to film this version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in Sweden, as opposed to swapping it out for some American city, was a well made one. 

Since so much of the story is told in images, kudos goes to the editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall. Both are long time collaborators of Fincher, and they’ve both won multiple Oscars, including one for this film. I get the suspicion that they worked extra overtime on this movie; there are just tons and tons of scenes, a complete 180 from the style of Panic Room. 

 
The chemistry between Rooney and Craig really builds throughout the film as the two work great together. The irregularity of the pairing makes it much more interesting and intriguing to follow than most typical, on-screen romances.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is not the most depressing of all Fincher productions, but it’s still pretty low down there, and I mean this in the best way possible. It’s either always raining or cold outside while sometimes this envorinment is contrasted against interior scenes that are pristine, white, clean. Tension. Clean rooms don't seem to apear often in Fincher films, and as expected there are many others that are dark and dirty. 

The film ends in a reasonably satisfying way leaving us hanging, waiting for the sequel. 

8.5/10

Errata: I could have gone without the final Stockholm scene when Lisbeth is riding her motorbike through the streets as it snows. A similar situation occurred in The Wolverine (2013) where Logan rode a motorbike through the mountains in Japanese winter. These situations would never occur. Motorbikes and snow are never a very convincing combination (for me anyway).