Movie Review: Gone Girl

Gone Girl
Directed by: David Fincher.
Written by: Gillian Flynn based on her novel.
Starring: Ben Affleck (Nick Dunne), Rosamund Pike (Amy Dunne), Neil Patrick Harris (Desi Collings), Tyler Perry (Tanner Bolt), Carrie Coon (Margo Dunne), Kim Dickens (Detective Rhonda Boney), Patrick Fugit (Officer Jim Gilpin), David Clennon (Rand Elliot), Lisa Banes (Marybeth Elliott), Missi Pyle (Ellen Abbott), Emily Ratajkowski (Andie Hardy), Casey Wilson (Noelle Hawthorne), Lola Kirke (Greta), Boyd Holbrook (Jeff), Sela Ward (Sharon Schieber), Scoot McNairy (Tommy O'Hara).

There has always been a dark, comedic edge to much of David Fincher’s work. As far back as Seven (1995), there have been comedic moments in all of Fincher’s films that can make certain audiences uncomfortable – asking themselves “Is it okay that I’m laughing at this?” For as much as he reputation is based the dark subject matter of his films, Fincher has found the undercurrent of comedy in almost all of his movies. His latest, Gone Girl, is probably his most overtly comic film. A.O. Scott says the film is structured like a romantic comedy – and he’s right – and Matt Zoller Seitz says the first half of the film almost plays like Everyone Love Raymond who May Have Killed His Wife – and he’s right as well. The film is dark in many ways, and tackles some very serious subject matter –but Fincher also knows that there is something comedic here. Working off an excellent screenplay by Gillian Flynn – adapting her own novel the right way – which is essentially paring it down to its essentials, which means that while it doesn’t cover all the same ground as the novel, it translates the spirit of the novel to the screen – Fincher has made a very dark comedy masquerading as a thriller – or perhaps vice versa. Either way, it’s one of the best films of the year.

The film features the best performance of Ben Affleck’s career as Nick Dunne – who seems like a stereotypical, sitcom type husband – a basically well-meaning oaf, who keeps screwing up, but has a wonderfully patient wife who just shakes her head at his shenanigans. The film opens with the disappearance of his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) – and for the first half flashes back in time to show their lives up until that point, through the events described in Amy’s diary, and Nick’s current predicament, as the evidence against him seems to gather force. He cannot seem to do anything right in the eyes of the police – and one thing after another makes him look horrible. It doesn’t help that the case has become a media sensation – drawing the attention of Ellen Abbot (Missi Pyle) – a Nancy Grace clone, who hammers Nick nightly on TV for every mistake he makes. Nick tries to convince everyone that he is innocent – but it sure looks like he’s guilty, doesn’t it? The film then twists at about the half-way point, and turns everything upside down – and becomes a much darker, more sinister movie that examines marriage in the most cynical way possible. Yet, through it all, the movie never ceases to be the pitch black comedy that it truly is.

Affleck is perfectly cast as Nick – I’m not sure if it’s his performance in the film, or just the fact that he is the perfect embodiment of the character that makes him work so well in the role, but no matter – he is perfect. Like his performance in Terence Malick’s To the Wonder – Affleck is perfect physically for the role, and you almost get the sense that all he had to do was show up, and he would perfect. But Affleck does a lot of subtle things in the role that make him perfect. I’ve never thought he was the best actor in the world – but there are some roles that are made for certain actors, and this is one for Affleck. Pike is just as good as Amy – without giving too much away, let me just say that she makes what in many ways could have been an unrealistic role completely relatable – you may just be surprised by how much you identify with her, or at least recognize her as a type. She is in some ways a twisted feminist hero – rallying against the expectations that popular culture thrusts upon women. Debra on Everyone Loves Raymond may have grown frustrated with Raymond, but she always accepted him for who he was. Amy will settle for nothing less than what she thinks she deserves – and if that’s just a fantasy, no matter – it’s what she wants.

Fincher has always had a gift for casting – even when he casts actors you would never suspect in roles. The supporting cast of Gone Girl features a perfect performance by Tyler Perry as Affleck’s lawyer, who it would have been easier to turn into a Johnny Cochrane type showboat, but actually becomes one of the more grounded characters in the film (with the films best laugh line – his last in the movie). Neil Patrick Harris is quietly creepy as a mysterious character out of Amy’s past – Fincher has described him as a type of Claire Quilt (from Lolita) character – and he’s not wrong. Kim Dickens does subtly impressive work as the lead detective – so subtle you may not notice just how good she is. Patrick Fugit says little, but is wonderful as her partner. Cassie Coon is a kind of audience surrogate as Margo – Nick’s twin sister – who wants so desperately to believe him. My favorite supporting performance may well be by Pyle as the Nancy Grace clone Ellen Abbot – seen mostly only on TV – and she does a dead on impression of Grace, while actually dialling it down a little bit (as if doing precisely what Grace would do would be too much comedy for the film) – and she has a great scene, in person, near the end.

The filmmaking by Fincher is, as always, impeccable. The film is dark and violent, and although it runs two an d half hours, it moves at a rapid pace. The score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross once again redefines what a score can do in a movie. The film is very funny, but Fincher never overplays his head, turning this into an abject farce – but something even darker. And the film has some real things to say about marriage and relationships – dark things that people most often do not talk about.

 
I know some will pick on Gone Girl – they already have. They’ve already described Flynn’s novel as trash or an airport novel (if Gone Girl is trash, what they hell does that make Dan Brown) or pick on the plausibility of the story. But Gone Girl isn’t really concerned with plausibility or realism – it’s got bigger, more important things on its mind. The film is disturbing – and like all great black comedies sometimes it makes you laugh out loud, and other times those laughs stick in your throat. I walked out of Gone Girl having had a hell of good time at the movies – but the longer I get away from it, the more disturbing it becomes.

Movie Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ****

Directed by: David Fincher

Written by: Steven Zaillian based on the novel by Stieg Larsson.

Starring: Daniel Craig (Mikael Blomkvist), Rooney Mara (Lisbeth Salander), Christopher Plummer (Henrik Vanger), Stellan Skarsgård (Martin Vanger), Steven Berkoff (Frode), Robin Wright (Erika Berger), Yorick van Wageningen (Bjurman), Joely Richardson (Anita Vanger), Geraldine James (Cecilia), Goran Visnjic (Armansky).

David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo suffers a little bit – just a little bit – from coming so close on the heels of the Swedish version of Stieg Larsson’s best selling trilogy. After all, it’s barely been a year since the original trilogy was released in North America, and for those of us who read the books before seeing those movies (and judging for the bestseller lists, that’s practically everyone) the story has become familiar – perhaps even overly familiar. But that doesn’t change the fact that Fincher’s version is in every conceivable way a far greater film than the original films. That’s rare for an American remake of a foreign film, but Fincher’s film is the exception that proves the rule I guess. As much as I enjoyed the original films, they did kind of feel like Swedish TV movies, and lacked a great director’s strong vision on the film. They were very faithful, very well acted (especially by Noomi Rapace) movies, but there was definitely more that could be done with the material. Fincher, one of the greatest directors in the world, does that.

The story is well known to just about everyone at this point. Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) has had to resign from his magazine job after losing a libel case brought by an industrial magnate. That is when he is approached by the mysterious Frode (Steven Berkoff) who represents Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) with a job offer – come to his isolated island in Northern Sweden and try and discover what happened to his beloved niece Harriet over 40 years before. One day, she just disappeared, and everyone assumes she was murdered. The island was cut off from the mainland that day, which means someone in the family did it – and they have been mocking Henrik every since. The Vanger’s are an exceedingly rich family, but a disturbed one. Violent alcoholics, Nazis and other assorted depravities run through them. The run is good, but Mikael isn’t sure he wants to take the job – until Henrik says that at the end of the year, he’ll give him the information needed to sink the man who ruined his career. So Mikael starts digging, and finds disturbing details, and realizes this job is too big for him alone. Frode has a suggestion – the very strange woman who did the background check on him. This is Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara).

Lisbeth Salander is one of the greatest literary characters in recent years, and she is what elevates the entire series above the level of a normal thriller. She is a character who has had a hard life, and as a result, has walled herself away from everyone – she trusts no one, is brutally honest and blunt, and is more comfortable behind a computer than talking to people. Her Goth look and abrupt manner keep people at bay. To understand Lisbeth, it helps to know that the original Swedish title of the book translated as “Men Who Hate Women”, which is in essence what the entire series is about. It is about men who hate women, who abuse women, who try to control and possess women. Through her experiences, which are only hinted at in this movie, much like the book (but will make up the narrative for the second two novels), she has learned to hate men like that. So when Mikael comes to her with his offer to have her help him catch a “killer of women”, she cannot resist. But she holds Mikael at arms length, only gradually allowing herself to have feelings for him, as he slowly earns her trust. She is not a lesbian who is turned by Mikael, as some have suggested, but a bi-sexual, who until she meets Mikael simply hates men. The pitch perfect end of this movie shows just how hurt she is by what she considers to be Mikael’s betrayal of her. She allowed herself to feel something for someone else for the first time in years, and she gets hurt. Mara’s performance is one of the very best of the year – she suggests depths to Lisbeth that are key to her character, who could very easily come across as an emotionless psychopath if not played correctly. Like Noomi Rapace in the original series, she does a lot of acting with her face, in silent moments, that lets you see beyond her exterior designed to keep people away. In essence, she wants what everyone else wants, but her experiences make it difficult if not impossible to truly open herself up to them.

The film is also a triumph for Fincher himself. The previous versions, as good as they were, lacked the visual look and feel that Fincher brings to this material. He burrows deeper into the mysteries of the novel, so you always feel you are in the hands of a master storyteller. The cinematography by Jeff Cronenweth is darker than before, the scenes where horrible things happen hit you harder this time around. Once again working with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (as he did on The Social Network), Fincher’s film once again has the best music of any film this year. Reznor and Ross don’t do a traditional score, but rather come up with one that is strangely perfect for the film. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo operates as the flip side to Fincher’s masterpiece Zodiac (still his best film). Both are about a decades long search for a serial killer, but while Zodiac offered a bleak outlook – the more you dig, the more you know, but you come no closer to catching the killer – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo offers a more hopeful, more traditionally satisfying narrative. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is very much a mainstream thriller – but one made with more skill than we are used to seeing Hollywood come up with. It is, in short, the best mainstream, adult thriller of the year.

Movie Review: The Social Network

The Social Network ****
Directed by: David Fincher.
Written By: Aaron Sorkin based on the book by Ben Mezrich.
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg (Mark Zuckerberg), Andrew Garfield (Eduardo Saverin), Justin Timberlake (Sean Parker), Armie Hammer (Cameron/Tyler Winklevoss), Rooney Mara (Erica Albright), Max Minghella (Divya Narendra), Joseph Mazzello (Dustin Moskovitz), Rashida Jones (Marylin Delpy), Brenda Song (Christy), Malese Jow (Alice).

The Social Network has already been compared to Citizen Kane, and while most of the time, I would dismiss this as critical hyperbole, in this case the critics who have said this actually have a point. Not because this film is as good as Welles masterpiece, but because thematically the two movies are linked. Both are about the American Dream gone wrong - about a man who has accomplished everything that he should have longed for, but is still desperately alone. And when his one true friendship ends, because of his own actions, it signals that he has finally gone too far to come back. The difference of course is that when Citizen Kane ended, Charles Foster Kane was dead. But when The Social Network ends, Mark Zuckerberg is still in his early twenties, and has most of his life ahead of him. While it was too late for Kane, it’s not for Mark Zuckerberg.

The Social Network opens which is perhaps the best opening scene of any movie this year. Zuckerberg (Jessie Eisenberg) is sitting in a bar with his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara) telling her about the Harvard Final Clubs, and how great it would be to me in them. Their conversation moves at light speed - as most in the movie do, in classic Aaron Sorkin style, who has perhaps written the best screenplay of the year - but it essentially boils down to this - Zuckerberg is smarter than almost everyone else, especially his own girlfriend, and he wants to be cool. But he never will be cool - he will always be a nerd. When Erica finally has enough of being insulted she stands up and tells him “You’re going to go through your whole life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. But that’s not the reason. The reason is that you’re an asshole”. Everything Zuckerberg does for the rest of the movie is essentially done to both disprove and prove her argument.

Zuckerberg is one of the smartest guys at Harvard, which is saying something. But he is still a loser, who hangs out with his loser friends, and when Erica dumps him, he decides to get some revenge. He hacks into multiple Harvard databases, all in one night, and pulls out a picture of every undergrad girl on campus and creates a website called “Facemash”, where you can vote on which one of two girls is hotter. He not only does this all in one night, he also live blogs it. The site is an instant hit, but collapses almost right away, and when the girls in Harvard find out who is behind it, he is even more of a pariah than he was before. But then he decides to create another website - this one called The Facebook, which allows users to find out what their friends are doing, who is single, who is available. His essential idea is to take the college experience and put it online. This becomes an even bigger hit.

The film is structured in flashback, looking at how Zuckerberg and his friends built site, and then flashes forward to depositions being given in not one, but two, lawsuits against him and Facebook. One is filed by the Winklevoss twins (both played by Armie Hammer). The Winklevoss are spoiled rich kids, who row crew for Harvard, and say that they had the idea for Facebook first, and that Zuckerberg screwed them over. The other is by Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), who was Zuckerberg’s best friend, and original financial backer - and first CFO of Facebook - who Zuckerberg will also screw over.

Zuckerberg, as written by Sorkin and acted by Eisenberg, is one of the most fascinating characters of the year. They don’t take the easy way out and portray Zuckerberg either as a misunderstand rebel genius, nor as an unrepentant asshole. He is neither and both. What he really seems to be is someone who has no real clue at how to interact with other people. He doesn’t understand what he said wrong to Erica in that opening scene - even though he implied she was stupid because she was only going to UB (“why do you need to study”) and that she should be grateful that Zuckerberg is willing to date her at all. Later, when he clearly screws over his best friend, he again doesn’t seem to realize why he is so mad at him - the fact that he essentially tried to screw him out of hundreds of millions of dollars doesn’t seem to enter Zuckerberg’s mind.

David Fincher is a little more subdued than normal in his direction of this film - although there are some virtuoso sequences in the films, and his use of Trent Reznor’s music is the best it has ever been in a Fincher film. This is a more straight forward film for him - one that follows the lead of the great screenplay by Aaron Sorkin that captures college life perfectly, is full of whip smart, rapid fire dialogue that actually works, and creates vivid characters., not just Zuckerberg. The Winklevoss twins are a perfect example of spoiled, rich kids who as Zuckerberg correctly says is only suing him because “for the first time in their lives things didn’t work out how they were supposed to for them”. Andrew Garfield’s Eduardo Serverin is perhaps the only truly sympathetic character in the movie - he is the only one comfortable in his own skin, the only one who truly likes Zuckerberg for who he is, not for what he can do for him. Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) represents to Zuckerberg what he wants to be - a cool nerd, who can get any girl, and walks around like he owns everyone - even though as the founder of Napster, he actually has no money. For his part, Timberlake plays the role brilliantly - that of the nerd with no self confidence who has tried so hard to be cool, that he has fooled everyone, including himself, into think it’s actually true. His best scene is when he is being arrested for drug possession, and has to admit that what is in his pocket is his epee pen and inhaler. No matter how cool everyone thinks he is, he will always be a nerd.

And that’s true of Zuckerberg as well. He hates being a nerd - and that is perhaps why he screws over the Winklevoss twins. He is good enough for them to want to work for them, but when it comes to their Final Club, they won’t invite him past the bike room because he isn’t a member. And maybe that’s what angers him about Eduardo as well - that he was invited to belong to a Final Club, and he never was, and because he gets some of the credit for creating Facebook, when to Zuckerberg, it was all him and everyone else just tagged along behind him. He comes across as an asshole, but as one character observes “you’re not an asshole. You’re just trying really hard to be one”. No matter what Zuckerberg accomplishes, no matter how much money he has, he will always be the guy who hesitates before inviting the girl he likes to be his friend on facebook - and then constantly hits refresh to see if she has accepted.

God and the Cinema Part VIII: David Fincher

David Fincher is one of my favorite directors working today. His first seven films have all been visually stunning, and with the exception of his first film, Alien 3 (which I will pretty much ignore for the rest of the post), they have all been dramatically interesting as well. I think that Fincher’s career has, to this point, had two distinct sections that are connected by certain overreaching themes. Seven (1995), The Game (1997), Fight Club (1999) and Panic Room (2002) represent the first segment, and are essentially about the hollowness of modern life. While these films differ wildly in terms of story, when you boil it down to their essentials, that is really what Fincher is getting at. His two most recent films – Zodiac (2007) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), are more about the passage of time, and the cold inevitability of death. Zodiac acts as Seven’s mirror image – one is a typical, albeit brilliant and hugely entertaining, movie about a crazed serial killer and the cops chasing him, and the other is a movie that drains the thrills out of the same story. I think Fincher had to make Zodiac in order to be able to move onto to the next phase in his career.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back and look at Seven before we deconstruct the rest of his filmography. Seven is a film about two cops – one old (Morgan Freeman) and one young (Brad Pitt), dealing with a psychopath who is killing people by using their sins against them. The killer views this as his masterwork. He uses the sins of the victims against them, and kills them in unorthodox ways. For gluttony, he makes an obese man literally eat himself to death. He makes a greedy lawyer take off a pound of flesh – no more, no less. He makes a slothful drug addict lie in bed for a year slowly starving him to death. He kills a lustful prostitute by making a client wear a brutal strap on. He cuts the nose off of a prideful woman, and tells her glues a phone to one hand, and a bottle of pills in the other – she can either be alive, but deformed, or dead – she chooses death.

Yet the movie is only partly about the murderer and his crimes. What it really is about are the two detectives, at opposite ends of their careers, with differing outlooks on life. Freeman plays a man who has been beaten down by life. His wife has left him. He is sick and tired of seeing all the brutal ugliness that he comes across in his day to day life. He simply wants out. Pitt has just recently become a big city detective, and has moved with his wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) to New York, so he can pursue his dream job. He loves his job, but she is miserable. When she gets pregnant, she turns to Freeman for advice, who tells her a story about the time when his wife got pregnant, and because of all the ugliness in the world, he convinced her to have an abortion. He remains convinced that he made the right decision “but not a day goes by when I wish I had made the other one”. He concludes by telling her “If you decide to get rid of the baby, don’t ever tell him. If you have the baby, spoil that kid whenever you can”. She breaks down in tears.

Seven is, in many ways, about the breakdown of the family and traditional “values”. John Doe’s mission to punish the people who have committed the seven deadly sins is interesting, because while at some point in time, they were looked upon as deadly, over time they became par for the course. People today are lazy and gluttoness, sex permeates society, vapid celebrities as famous because of their looks, yet feel they have actually accomplished something, and people sitting at home envy their empty lifestyles. As we seen in the past little while, greed is par for the course in the business world. The only thing left that we still really look down upon is the wrath. In his way, John Doe is bringing back “traditional values”, even if he’s looking back further than most would for those values.

The comforts of marriage and children don’t seem very comforting in this film. Freeman abandoned his wife long ago, and aborted his child, and now Paltrow is going the same thing. Marriage isn’t about a partnership between two people taking on the world – it’s about grasping to your only lifeline in a world full of shit. In short, the world has gone to hell, and you can either strike out against it (as Pitt does in the finale), or passively accept it, like Freeman does. True, he does decide not to retire, and staying on “fighting the good fight”, but he knows he is fighting a losing battle.

Fincher followed up Seven with The Game, his most underrated film. In the film Michael Douglas plays what on the surface seems to be the typical Michael Douglas role – high powered executive, dressed in pricey suits, who exudes charm and sophistication. He has it all. Or does he? For a birthday present, his brother (Sean Penn) gives him a membership in something we only know as The Game. Throughout the movie, Douglas, and the audience right along with him, is tossed back and forth, never knowing if what is going on is a game, or just a group of people deadest on destroying Douglas’s life. What are we to make of Penn, who shows up periodically, but who we can never get a read on? When his brother’s life is falling apart, is he trying to stifle a laugh, or is he crying? Throughout the course of the movie, Douglas’ life completely and totally falls apart, until he is on the brink of suicide. He still doesn’t know if it’s all real of not.

The Game makes an interesting lead in to Fincher’s next film, Fight Club, as both films deal with a character who seemingly has everything, but is really hollow, empty shells of men. Douglas isn’t truly happy in The Game, he just thinks he is. The Game, whether real or not, wakes up him to makes him see the world around him for what it is. When he jumps off the building at the end, he is willing to accept any consequences that come with it.

Fight Club represents the apex of Fincher’s films on the hollowness of modern life. In the film, Edward Norton stars as an insurance adjuster whose job it is to figure out if it will cost more money to do recalls on dangerous products, or settle the inevitable lawsuits. He is paid well for his work, and he lives in an expensive high rise, and has all the latest in technological gadgetry. But he is empty and miserable. He doesn’t enjoy his life, he doesn’t enjoy his possessions, he doesn’t enjoy much of anything. He needs to break out of his rut – and that’s precisely what Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) allows him to do. Durden lives in a world that is foreign to Norton’s narrator – one where chaos is more important than anything else. When the two get into a fistfight, they discover who liberating it is not only to hit someone else as hard as you can, but also to be hit. They represent a generation of men raised by women (because of skyrocketing divorce rates), who have never had to go to war, and never dealt with any real hardships. Everything they have ever wanted has been handed to them – and they are miserable.

At this point, everyone knows that Tyler Durden is really Edward – that Brad Pitt was simply a figment of his imagination – his subconscious coming to the surface telling him that he was miserable he needed to break out of his routine. What he finds is a generation of young men willing to follow him into depraved violence – first by beating the crap out of each other, then gradually upping the ante more and more until things get way out of control. These young men were mindless zombies following what they were supposed – getting the right job, the right apartment, the right things, the right wife – and when they come over and follow Durden, it doesn’t have the same impact it did on Norton. Instead of being freed from their zombie-like existence, they simply trade one for the other. The reject the “institutions” of modernity, but instead simple follow Durden like mindless drones. This generation of men have lost the ability to think critically, and will follow anyone who claims they have an answer.

The final film is this cycle for Fincher is the least interesting – the thriller Panic Room with Jodie Foster. Panic Room is an extremely well made thriller, and contains some great performances – not just by Foster but also Forest Whitaker, Kristen Stewart, Jared Leto and Dwight Yoakum. Essentially, Panic Room is a well made thriller, but it does have of the same undertones of the previous films. Leto’s robber thinks that by getting the bonds locked in the panic room, he will have money, and therefore be able to buy happiness. Whitaker, a generation older, doesn’t see it that way, and by the end – when the bonds are lost – he seems resigned to his life of terminal unhappiness.

After Panic Room, it took Fincher five years before he would return with his – and in my mind best – film Zodiac. Zodiac marks a departure for Fincher in that it is set in the past, and doesn’t really look at the hollowness of modern life, but rather at the passage of time, the inevitability of death and how obsession destroys you. The film does for Seven what The Godfather Part II did for The Godfather – it flips it on its ear. The original Godfather was entertaining, and dare I say it – fun. You may want to be a gangster like that. In The Godfather Part II, Michael Corleone had gone from an ambitious kid, to just another gangster, who had lost everything – including his soul.

Zodiac does something similar to Seven and all the other serial killer dramas we have seen in the years since silence of the lambs. Most of those films start slow, and build to a shattering, violent, cathartic climax, where at the end, everything is okay again (which, because it didn’t end quite like that, already marked Seven as different). But Zodiac frontloads all the violence in the movie. We don’t know the people getting killed in the film’s first half hour – instead we are struck by the thunderous gunshots, the screams of the victims and all that blood. This isn’t cathartic – it’s painful.

The four men, who take it upon themselves to discover who the Zodiac killer is, pay for it in different ways. Robert Downey Jr.’s reporter sinks deeper and deeper into depression, paranoia and alcoholism, eventually losing everything. Anthony Edwards’ cop has to drop the case before it destroys him. The healthiest is Mark Ruffalo who maintains at least a semblance of a hold on reality and his life, but it still costs him. Saddest of all perhaps is Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), who before the movie even opens has already had one marriage fall apart. He meets a woman (Chloe Sevigny) and falls in love, and the two seem happy together sitting around the table eating dinner. But as his obsession with the Zodiac killer grows, and his wife and kids leave, they are replaced around that dinner table with boxes of files that he pours through every night. He has essentially traded his family for his obsession with death.

One critic described Zodiac as like “being trapped in a filing cabinet for nearly three hours”. They didn’t mean it as a criticism, and neither do I. The film pays painstaking attention to detail, just like its hero, and watches as time passes slowly by. Obsession takes its toll on everyone, and time brings them no comfort.

Which brings us to Fincher’s latest film, last year’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Is it possible for a film that was nominated for 13 Oscars, and won 3 to be underrated? If so, than I submit that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is such a film. The reviews were largely respectful, but once the film landed all those Oscar nominations, a vitriol of hate seemed to pour out towards the film. Why? I think it has to do with the fact that Benjamin Button is seemingly unlike all of Fincher’s other films. There is no violence in the film, and to the internet fan boys, for whom Fincher is a God, violence equals seriousness. But just because The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is not a violent film, and at is seemingly an old fashioned love story, that doesn’t mean it really is all that different from Fincher’s other films. The film ultimately, is about death. It is a three hour movie in which death hangs over every scene – from the beginning when Benjamin is seemingly close to death at his birth, and ends up in an old folks home, where death happens on a daily basis, to the films’ end, when Pitt as a senile old man trapped in a child’s body, death is the only constant in the film. Yes, it is a love story, but it certainly is not an upbeat one. It’s one where the happiness of the couple – Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchatt – is fleeting, because biology has made it impossible for them to be together. At first it’s because he’s a child in an old man’s body, and as they grow closer in age, they also grow farther apart, until they finally meet in the middle for a few brief years of happiness. But it is a happiness that is not sustainable.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a technological marvel. Every scene is a masterwork of film construction, blending pitch perfect art direction, costume design, cinematography, music and special effects. Yet oddly, all these elements are used to support the story, not in place of it. Like Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is really about the passage of time, and how at the end of everything there is the inevitable death. You cannot fight it, you just have to let go.
So, bringing it all back to what this series is supposed to be about – God and the Cinema, does God exist is Fincher’s cinematic world. I’m not sure. What is undeniable is that God offers no solace to the characters in the movies. If there is a God in Seven, he has long since abandoned humanity and the world they created. In The Game, Douglas has replaced God with money and success, and is empty as a result. But when he learns to be alive at the end, does he accept God, or is he just exhilarated? Fight Club also seems to be a movie where the absence of God has made it necessary for Norton to create his own God. Tyler Durden may be a “false God”, but he provides the Norton with something more tangible then the real one. Panic Room doesn’t really address the issue at all. In Zodiac, again, it seems like perhaps God has abandoned us to our own devices. We created the world full of evil, now we’re stuck to rot in it. But perhaps there is a God in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Yes, there is a false healer in the movie, who “cures” Benjamin and lets him walk for the first time in his life, but this has nothing to do with God, and more to do with biology. When the characters find happiness, it is all too fleeting for them. I’m not sure what the ultimate answer is, but I sure enjoying pondering the questions put forth in the films of David Fincher.