Mindhunter

Why is popular culture so fascinated with serial killers? There are all kinds of reality television shows and their fictional counterparts dedicated to examining their perverse methodology. What compels these murderers to kill several people in all kinds of horrible ways? There are as many reasons why as there are serial killers as each one has their own unique motivation. Our fascination comes from the morbid speculation that one’s next-door neighbor may have a bunch of severed heads in their fridge. It’s rubbernecker syndrome – an interest in the gruesome details of the murders. It is also the relief in the knowledge that you’re still alive and safe and not the murder victim, that in some way you’ve cheated death.

In 1995, David Fincher directed Seven, one of the best films about serial killers. With the commercial and critical success of that film, he was careful not to get pigeonholed in the genre and didn’t return to it until Zodiac (2007), which was a very different take indeed. His fascination with serial killers continues with Mindhunter, a show created by Joe Penhall, based on the true crime book of the same name by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker, that he is executive producing and directed four episodes for Netflix.

Set in 1977, the show focuses on the FBI’s nascent Behavioral Science Unit with two agents – Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) – fighting against internal resistance – their superior (Cotter Smith) thinks they’re wasting the Bureau’s time – and external ignorance – local law enforcement doesn’t understand what they’re doing. We meet Ford working as a hostage negotiator as he unsuccessfully tries to defuse a situation involving a man armed with a shotgun and holding a woman hostage.

After failing to calm the man down, which results in his death, Ford is ordered by his superior to continue teaching his hostage negotiator course at Quantico. It is here that we get the first inklings that Ford is different. He’d rather settle a hostage situation peacefully than through excessive force by reasoning with the criminal and the way to do this is figuring out what motivates them…but how?

After his latest class, Ford overhears a lecture in a nearby classroom. The instructor is talking about David Berkowitz (a.k.a. The Son of Sam) and offers up this observation: “You could say that the guy is crazy or that he’s pretending that he’s crazy but if we’re looking for a motive we can understand we suddenly find there is none. It’s a void. It’s a black hole.” He points out that in Hoover’s heyday, criminals like John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson were easy to figure out because they did what they did for personal gain.

Someone like Berkowitz is completely different. “Where do we go when motive becomes elusive?” the instructor says. It is this line that hits Ford like a thunderbolt and serves as an epiphany. He and the instructor have a fascinating discussion that is really the show’s thesis: if the world no longer makes sense, then neither does crime. They both agree that they don’t know what to do about it, which Ford wonders, “But we’re supposed to, right?” to which the instructor replies, “Sure. But here’s the troubling thing – no one’s even asking the questions.” This is just one of many well-written, masterfully acted conversations depicted over the course of the ten episodes of Mindhunter. This scene also sets the tone: this is going to be a character-driven show that eschews traditional cop show heroics in favor of dialogue-heavy explorations into what motivates serial killers.

The first half of episode one focuses not just on Ford’s professional life but his personal one as he meets a witty, attractive woman named Debbie (Hannah Gross) at a rock concert that is just as smart as he is if not more so, much to his surprise. Their initial meet-cute turns into a first date where she takes him back to her place and gets him to take a bong hit in an effort to loosen him up. They even go see Dog Day Afternoon (1975), which he is so impressed with that he shows it to his class. Debbie isn’t afraid to call Ford on his bullshit and is willing to challenge his beliefs, which makes for an entertaining give and take between them in their scenes together. There’s a sexy and smart frisson between these two characters that is a lot of fun to watch. After sex one night, she playfully chastises his naïveté about sex, calling him a monk, chiding him, “How can you figure out the criminal mind if you can’t even figure out your girlfriend?” Good point.

Jonathan Groff plays an atypical FBI agent. He’s youthful and sensitive – hardly the Melvin Purvis type. He’s also very smart but lacks the street smarts to excel in the field as evident in the bungled hostage negotiation that kicks off the show. He needs more time in the field with an experienced veteran showing him the ropes. His boss arranges a meeting with Tench and the elder agent instantly reads the younger one. He asks Ford to tag along with him on the road, teaching FBI techniques to local law enforcement all over the country.

Initially, it appears that Fincher is treading on familiar turf with the Ford-Tench duo – the idealistic young agent butting heads with the older, more experienced agent. What Ford lacks in experience, he makes up for with intelligence and soon his enthusiasm for profiling serial killers is contagious enough to convince Tench and then their boss to interview them. Ford isn’t the brash, impulsive person that Mills was in Seven and Tench isn’t ready to give up on humanity like Somerset was in that earlier film.

Their first teaching gig does not go well. Ford gets too cerebral, his college training confuses most of the cops while Tench tries to keep things simple. Ford ends up pissing off a veteran detective who then asks them for advice on a grisly local murder case. They offer several theories but nothing concrete for the clearly frustrated detective, which only upsets him even more. And so it goes. Not every case can be solved but it is unusual for one of the protagonists to admit it so honestly. The episode ends with nothing resolved and tangible tension between Ford and Tench.

Setting Mindhunter in the late 1970s is an interesting choice. As Fincher has pointed out in interviews, it was the end of the J. Edgar Hoover era with the last vestiges of the stereotypical FBI agent idealized by Melvin Purvis and represented by Ford and Tench’s boss being replaced by people like Ford. Tench represents a bridge between the two eras. He still adheres to old school practices but is receptive to Ford’s new way of thinking and Holt McCallany does an excellent job of showing how his character deals with these contrasting schools of thought – the old vs. the new. Initially, Tench doesn’t reveal much about himself but over the course of the show he’s given moments, like a quiet scene in a bar with Ford in the fourth episode, where he reveals a very personal detail about his home life that is wonderfully conveyed by the actor who displays an impressive amount of vulnerability. A few minutes later, we are shown a glimpse of his home life in a heartbreakingly understated scene.

In order to understand the criminal mind better it makes sense that one should talk to criminals. Ford wants to interview Charles Manson but he’s unreachable – ever for the FBI – and so at one of their teaching gigs a cop says they should talk to Edmund Kemper (Cameron Britton) a.k.a. the Co-Ed Killer, a man that decapitated 16 teenage girls and had sex with the corpses. He’s a dream interview – he loves to talk about himself. Fincher films Ford walking through the prison, down the halls among the inmates with the sounds of them leering and yelling at him. The look on his face is one of palpable unease.

The meeting with Kemper is a brilliant sequence that begins on a comical note as the killer insists Ford has an egg salad sandwich as if he were entertaining him in his living room. The serial killer initially comes off as an affable man. He’s eloquent and honest (“People who hunt other people for a vocation all we want to talk about is what it’s like.”) and is able to become unsettlingly threatening on a dime. Kemper recounts his normal childhood and how it ran parallel to another, more depraved life. He fascinates Ford, while Tench is convinced that he’s manipulating his partner, telling him what he wants to hear. On the second visit, Ford is a little too chummy with Kemper in an amusing bit where they actually banter back and forth. They delve into the man’s past and what motivated him, which he tells in a chilling monologue. Cameron Britton does an excellent job playing Kemper. He moves little, letting his eyes convey his feelings. Kemper is someone that plays things close to the vest, reading Ford and then telling a story of how he killed his mother in a creepy, matter-of-fact monotone.

Not surprisingly, the most compelling parts of Mindhunter are the interviews with the killers. As Fincher has said, these scenes are like little one act plays as these guys tell their stories. The show wisely doesn’t resort to flashbacks, which would be the obvious thing to do, and instead lets the actors playing these killers flex their acting chops, holding our attention with their ability to tell their characters’ depraved stories and make it compelling.

Meeting Kemper convinces Tench that there is value in talking to serial killers in order to understand what motivates them and he decides to stick up for Ford when their boss chews them out for interviewing the murderer without telling him. They’re threatened with suspension and it is this confrontation that bonds Ford and Tench. By the end of the second episode they’ve finally gelled as a team. They are finally on the same page.

As Mindhunter continues, Ford and Tench begin to diverge on how the work they do affects them. The latter is increasingly repulsed by the repellent nature of the killers they talk to, while the former finds himself getting deeper into the mindset of these men, running the risk of becoming like them, treading the same line that Will Graham does in Manhunter (1986). Mindhunter shows how these cases take their toll on the men that investigate them, most significantly, Tench who doesn’t tell his wife anything about his work and this causes noticeable tension between them. This is explored in a scene where she confronts him about it. As their work continues, Ford becomes more analytical and detached while Tench is more empathetic, especially when they interact with the killers and the local cops.

Are serial killers born or are they formed? This is a question that Ford and Tench wrestle with over the course of the ten episodes. It is why they are interviewing these men in the first place. Mindhunter does a superb job balancing the procedural aspects of Ford and Tench’s work with the impact it has on their personal lives in a way that gradually makes them rich and compelling characters over time. This is thoughtful, absorbing procedural that takes the time to delve not just into the work that these men do but their personal lives as well in a deeper way that Fincher was trying to do in Zodiac but was constrained by the limitations of feature filmmaking. The medium of television has allowed him to go as deep as he wants and this results in some of his best work.

The Social Network

A film about the creation of website – really?! Have we finally run out of ideas for stories to tell? There must’ve been something deeper, more intriguing enough to attract the likes of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher as their involvement in The Social Network (2010) gives the film a lot of credibility. Based on the “non-fiction thriller,” The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, the film chronicles the origins of the immensely popular social networking website Facebook and turns out to be a familiar story about greed, jealousy and power – a study in class warfare: old money vs. New Economy dot com millionaires. What started as an idea shared among a small group of Harvard University students eventually became the domain of one person: Mark Zuckerberg. However, after Facebook became a legitimate global phenomenon and he became a billionaire, the others wanted in on the action (and the money) and lawsuits and court battles ensued. Because the notion of authorship is in question, Sorkin and Fincher apply the structure of Citizen Kane (1941), by telling the story via flashbacks from multiple points-of-view, while viewing it all through a detached journalistic viewpoint reminiscent of All the President’s Men (1976). The end result is an engrossing, intelligent look at young, ambitious men who made something that altered the popular culture landscape forever.


Harvard undergrad Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is super smart but socially inept, saying all the wrong things and this is readily evident in the film’s prologue when his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara) dumps him, and seals the deal by telling him that he’s an asshole. Motivated by being dumped in public, he vents his frustration on his blog with a vicious diatribe. To get his mind off it, Zuckerberg creates a website called “Face Mash” comparing all the girls at school with each other. He does this by hacking his way into other websites on campus. With the help of his friend and fellow classmate, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), Face Mash becomes a hit – so much so that it crashes the school’s computer network. Fincher quickly establishes Zuckerberg as a computer programming genius and, along with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ pulsating electronic soundtrack, actually makes the sequence where the proto-Facebook website is created look cool. Reznor and Ross’ dark, brooding score perfectly complements Fincher’s often gloomy, atmospheric imagery. The director juxtaposes this sequence with a party at the school’s most exclusive club, the Phoenix S-K Final Club, in order to show how they both end up objectifying women, reducing them to sex objects for horny, young men.

Zuckerberg is busted for invasion of privacy and is approached by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer) who have created a crude prototype of Facebook and they ask him to merge his ideas with their own. In return, they’ll introduce him to the higher social strata of Harvard. However, Zuckerberg’s gateway to the big time occurs when he meets Sean Parker (Justine Timberlake), the co-creator of the Napster, an infamous and very popular music file sharing website. Parker is a persuasive speaker and his slick ways impresses Zuckerberg as he sells him on the potential of Facebook on a global scale. Parker introduces Zuckerberg to nightclubs and, more importantly, appeals to his antisocial tendencies. Justin Timberlake does a fantastic job of playing Parker as a smooth-talking salesman cum New Millennium con man who is smart enough to recognize the Next Big Thing, latch onto it and ride it out to fame and fortune. He delivers a playful performance and there’s more than a whiff of a master manipulator as Parker comes across as someone who had an ethics bypass at birth. There is a delicious irony seeing a slick performer like Timberlake playing a slick entrepreneur like Parker. It’s like Parker is the Silicon Valley Tyler Durden from Fight Club (1999) to Zuckerberg’s socially awkward hacker. Parker is Zuckerberg’s unchecked id as he surreptitiously drives a wedge between the young programmer and his best friend Saverin.

Jesse Eisenberg is a revelation as he’s cast against type in The Social Network. Known for playing stuttering, loveable neurotic characters in films like The Squid and the Whale (2005) and Adventureland (2009), he shifts gears to play an aggressively ambitious nerd. His take on Zuckerberg is that of an extremely logical person with loads of talent to burn and who is motivated by rejection. He comes across as an insensitive prick that doesn’t have the time for people who can’t keep up with him and his fast mind. The film posits that the main motivational factor for him doing what he did was to climb the social ladder, to make money and to be the head of an exclusive club where he has the power to accept or reject people instead of being the one on the outside looking in. However, when it gets down to it being spurned by Erica was the prime motivator for Zuckerberg creating Facebook.

After making the popular tear-jerker The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), Fincher returns to the moody, journalistic approach he took with Zodiac (2007), but where the latter was a slow burn over almost three hours, The Social Network moves along at a very brisk two hours as the talented young cast delivers Sorkin’s wordy screenplay in his trademark rat-a-tat-tat style. This film is absolutely dense with dialogue, even topping Zodiac with all of its scenes of theorizing about the identity of a serial killer. Sorkin had just come off the high profile flop of his short-lived television show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and this film sees him back on familiar turf with fast-talking cocky characters antagonizing each other. His dialogue his smart and funny as it gets to the heart of the matter – providing Zuckerberg’s motivation and doing a great job chronicling just how Facebook came to be in an engaging way. Fincher and Sorkin have pulled off quite an accomplishment with The Social Network by making an entertaining and engrossing film about the creation of a website. The irony is that Zuckerberg created Facebook as a way for people to acquire friends and connect with each other while he is a deeply antisocial person who doesn’t really care about having friends. Of course, he’s now a billionaire, which I’m sure cushions the blow but the film leaves the lingering impression that he still wants to be with Erica and that this is something that no amount of money will make go away.

The Game

NOTE: This post was inspired by Piper's two excellent posts on this film over at the Lazy Eye Theatre. Check 'em out here and here.

After the success of Seven (1995) expectations were high for David Fincher’s next film. He had risen from the ashes of the Alien 3 (1993) debacle and produced a critical and commercial hit when everyone least expected it. What would he do next? Never one to take the easy route, Fincher confounded critics and audiences alike with The Game (1997), a fascinating film that plays around with the conventions of the thriller genre like a feature-length episode of The Twilight Zone. Critical reaction was fairly positive and the box office returns were decent but not as good as Seven’s. Even among fans of Fincher’s films, The Game is somewhat underappreciated but worth revisiting if only to explore the shadowy alleyways and nightmarish scenarios that torment its protagonist.

Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) is a wealthy investment banker who lives alone in his family’s palatial estate just outside of downtown San Francisco. He follows a daily routine that involves making business deals. Imagine an older, slightly more mellower Gordon Gekko from Wall Street (1987) who somehow escaped imprisonment and moved to the west coast. Nicholas lives in a hermetically-sealed world as evident from the meticulously decorated, museum-like mansion he inhabits. He’s divorced and his parents are both dead, his mother recently and his father committed suicide when he was just a boy. Describing Nicholas as emotionally unavailable is an understatement to say the least.

It’s his birthday and his ne’er-do-well younger brother Conrad (a refreshingly jovial Sean Penn) meets him for lunch where he gives his older sibling a present. It is a pre-paid invite for a company known as Consumer Recreation Services (CRS). Conrad tells Nicholas to call them because it will make his life “fun.” He is rather enigmatic about CRS, describing them as an “entertainment service” and that what they offer is a “profound life experience.” Nicholas is turning the same age as his father when he died and it is implied, via flashbacks, that his greatest fear is ending up like him so he decides to give CRS a try.

Nicholas goes through an extensive screening process with Jim Feingold (James Rebhorn) so that whatever it is his experience is it will be tailored to his personality. Feingold describes it as a vacation, except that “you don’t go to it, it comes to you.” He goes on to drop tantalizing tidbits like, “we provide whatever’s lacking,” and “we’re like an experiential book-of-the-month club.” Among the battery of tests Nicholas undergoes, one bears a remarkable resemblance to the famous montage sequence in The Parallax View (1974).

One day, at the racquet club he frequents, Nicholas overhears two men talking about CRS. He meets them and they are intriguingly vague about their own experiences. The next day, a representative from the company calls to inform him that his application has been rejected. That night, Nicholas arrives to find a life-sized doll lying in his driveway with a key from CRS in its mouth. Later on, his television starts talking to him. His game has begun. Nicholas’ day begins as usual only now with the awareness that he’s playing the game and this causes him to look at everyone and everything differently. Strange things start to happen. He can’t open his briefcase during an important meeting. A waitress spills a tray of drinks all over him. A homeless man collapses in the street right in front of him.

At first, these incidents don’t seem like much but as the film progresses they take on a more ominous tone and become more dangerous. For example, Nicholas and Christine (Deborah Kara Unger), the waitress who spilled the drinks on him, take a homeless man to an emergency room that suddenly becomes deserted and the lights go out. The game also starts to take on a much grander scale. How can so many people be in on it? Are we to take everything literally or, like Nicholas, are we supposed to accept things as they are and take the ride? A certain sense of paranoia sets in and we are constantly guessing what is real and what isn’t. The deeper Nicholas goes into the game, the more nightmarish the scenarios become and the film escalates into full-on paranoid thriller mode.

The screenplay for The Game was written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris in 1991 and was promptly put in turnaround at MGM while Fincher was making Alien 3. In 1992, director Jonathan Mostow was attached to the project with Kyle MacLachlan and Bridget Fonda cast in the lead roles. Principal photography was to start in February 1993. However, early in ’92 the project moved to Polygram and Mostow dropped out only to become an executive producer of the film. Producer Steve Golin bought the script from MGM and gave it to Fincher in the hopes that he would direct. According to the director, the film was about “loss of control. The purpose of The Game is to take your greatest fear, put it this close to your face and say ‘There, you’re still alive. It’s all right.’” He has mentioned that there are three primary influences on the film. Nicholas was a “fashionable, good-looking Scrooge, lured into a Mission: Impossible situation with a steroid shot in the thigh from The Sting.”

Fincher liked the various plot twists and turns in the script but brought in Andrew Kevin Walker, who had written Seven, to make Nicholas a more cynical character. They spent six weeks changing the tone and trying to make the story work. Fincher intended to make The Game before Seven but when Brad Pitt became available that project took priority. The success of Seven helped the producers of The Game get a larger budget than they had originally projected. They approached Michael Douglas to star in the film but he was hesitant, at first, because there were concerns about Polygram’s ability to distribute it what with the company being rather small in size. However, once he came on board, his presence helped get the film into production.

At the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, Polygram announced that Jodie Foster (playing the role of Christine) would be starring in the film along with Douglas but Fincher was uncomfortable with putting a movie star of her stature in a supporting part. After talking to Foster, Fincher considered rewriting Conrad as Nicholas’ daughter so that she could play that role. However, she had a scheduling conflict with Contact (1997) and could not appear in The Game after all. However, she would go on to star in one of Fincher’s subsequent films, Panic Room (2002). Once Foster was out of the picture, the role of Conrad was offered to Jeff Bridges but he declined and Sean Penn was cast.

More revisions were made to the script. Originally, Nicholas kills Christine and then commits suicide but Fincher felt that it didn’t make sense. In 1996, Larry Gross and Walker were brought in to make further revisions to the script. Principal photography began on location in San Francisco despite studio pressure to shoot in Los Angeles which was cheaper. Fincher also considered Chicago and Seattle but the former had no mansions that were close by and the latter city did not have an adequate financial district. The script was written with ‘Frisco in mind and the director liked the financial district’s “old money, Wall Street vibe.” However, that area was very busy and hard to move around in. So, the filmmakers shot on weekends in order to have more control. The cast and crew endured a long, tough shoot that lasted 100 days with a lot of night shoots and locations.

Fincher utilized old stone buildings, small streets and the hills to represent the city’s class system pictorially. To convey the old money world, the director set many scenes in restaurants with hardwood paneling and a lot of red leather. Some of the locations used included Golden Gate Park, the Presidio and Filoli Gardens and Mansion in Woodside, San Mateo, which stood in for the Van Orton family home. Fincher masterfully transforms San Francisco into a shadowy labyrinth that Nicholas must navigate.

With his trademark atmospheric cinematography (courtesy of Harris Savides, who would collaborate with Fincher on Zodiac), Fincher presents the city as a gradually threatening place where danger lurks at every corner so that what was once familiar has become very strange. This was the first time that Harris Savides had been the cinematographer on one of Fincher’s films. In the 1990s, they had worked together on music videos and commercials. For the visual look of Nicholas’ wealthy lifestyle, they wanted a “rich and supple” feel and took references from films like The Godfather (1972) and Being There (1979), which featured visually appealing locations with ominous intentions lurking under the surface. According to Fincher, once Nicholas leaves his protective world, he and Savides would let fluorescents, neon signs and other lights in the background be overexposed to let “things get a bit wilder out in the real world.” For The Game, the director employed a Technicolor printing process known as ENR which lent a smoother look to the night sequences. For him, the challenge was how much deception the audience could take and “will they go for 45 minutes of red herrings?” To this end, he tried to stage scenes as simply as possible, using a single camera because “with multiple cameras, you run the risk of boring people with coverage.”

Michael Douglas is no stranger to playing icy, business types and initially Nicholas is clearly a riff on his Gekko character only this one is more receptive to changing his life. After all, he has no choice. Douglas does a good job of gradually showing how Nicholas changes from a repressed individual to someone who appreciates life thanks to being thrown into several life-threatening situations. It’s only once he’s been chased by vicious dogs, dropped into a dumpster and almost drowned that he begins to appreciate life. However, as the game continues to escalate, he gradually unravels which puts his mental and physical limits to the test. Nicholas has to hit rock bottom, to be torn down completely, before he can change into a better person.

Sean Penn brings a playful vibe to his first scene in the film and it contrasts well off of Douglas’ repressed character. Penn also bring a welcome levity, like when Conrad tells Nicholas that he remembers being at the restaurant they meet at many years ago. Nicholas says that he took him and Conrad corrects him: “No, I used to buy crystal meth off the maitre’d.” The two men banter back and forth as only siblings can. Conrad is the polar opposite of his brother. He speaks his mind and has a snarky sense of humor. However, this is flipped on its head when Conrad appears for the second time while Nicholas is in the midst of the game. This time, Penn brings a frantic intensity as he rants and raves about being hounded by CRS. Conrad has been reduced to a paranoid mess and gets into messy confrontation with his brother as their dysfunctional relationship reaches the boiling point.

Deborah Kara Unger’s test reel was a two-minute sex scene from David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996) and Douglas remembers that he thought it was a joke. When he and Fincher met her in person they were impressed with her abilities. Christine is a rather enigmatic character. She starts off with an antagonistic relationship with Nicholas but she appears to become his ally after being drawn into the game along with him. However, like Conrad, and pretty much everyone Nicholas meets, appears can and are deceiving. The strikingly beautiful Unger imbues her character with a sarcastic common sense that plays well off of Douglas’ privileged businessman. She is quite good in The Game and it’s a shame that she didn’t do more high profile films after this one.

Fincher does an excellent job orchestrating the various nightmare scenarios that Nicholas experiences, chief among them a white-knuckle taxi cab ride that ends up with him trapped in the car as it goes speeding into the San Francisco Bay. As the car descends into deeper water, a frantic Nicholas desperately tries to find a way out. This sequence was shot near the Embarcadero with the water tank elements for Nicholas’ near-drowning done on a soundstage at Sony Pictures studio. Douglas’s close-ups were filmed on a soundstage that contained a large tank of water. The actor was in a small compartment designed to resemble the backseat of a taxi with three cameras capturing the action.

The Game  received mostly positive reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half stars out of four and praised Douglas as "the right actor for the role. He can play smart, he can play cold, and he can play angry. He is also subtle enough that he never arrives at an emotional plateau before the film does, and never overplays the process of his inner change.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “Mr. Fincher, like Michael Douglas in the film's leading role, does show real finesse in playing to the paranoia of these times.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss wrote, "Fincher's style is so handsomely oppressive, and Douglas' befuddlement is so cagey, that for a while the film recalls smarter excursions into heroic paranoia (The Parallax View, Total Recall).”

The Washington Post’s Desson Howe wrote, "It’s formulaic, yet edgy. It’s predictable, yet full of surprises. How far you get through this tall tale of a thriller before you give up and howl is a matter of personal taste. But there’s much pleasure in Fincher’s intricate color schemes, his rich sense of decor, his ability to sustain suspense over long periods of time and his sense of humor.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B+” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Emotionally, there's not much at stake in The Game — can Nicholas Van Orton be saved?! — but Douglas is the perfect actor to occupy the center of a crazed Rube Goldberg thriller. The movie has the wit to be playful about its own manipulations, even as it exploits them for maximum pulp impact.” However, Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers felt that “Fincher's effort to cover up the plot holes is all the more noticeable for being strained ... The Game has a sunny, redemptive side that ill suits Fincher and ill serves audiences that share his former affinity for loose ends hauntingly left untied.” Fincher defended his film’s apparent jumps in logic by saying, “you have to embrace the movie for what it is, and what it is is a really strange trip.”

The Game is more than a cinematic jigsaw puzzle. It is also about a man coming to grips with his past, a son finally dealing with the death of his father – something that has haunted him his whole life. It has been said that the film is a modern re-telling of the Scrooge story – a mean, rich man learns the value of life by being shown how precious it is. The Game is ultimately a tale of redemption with a surprisingly satisfying emotional payoff at the film’s conclusion.

SOURCES

Hochman, David. “Game Boy.” Entertainment Weekly. September 19, 1997.

Hochman, David. “Unger Strikes.” Entertainment Weekly. October 3, 1997.

Swallow, James. The Dark Eye: The Films of David Fincher. Reynolds & Hearn Ltd. 2003.

Seven

Living in any major metropolitan city in North America can be a dangerous experience. Ask anyone who lives in places like New York City, Philadelphia or Los Angeles. There is a certain amount of fear and paranoia that exists in these densely populated, often congested areas. When you have that many different types of people living in one place problems are bound to arise. In the past, these problems have always seemed containable, maybe even solvable, but now there is a certain sense of pessimism or apathy that pervades the public consciousness. Where once there was hope, now there is only despair, or worse yet, disinterest. Seven (1995) is a film that taps into these feelings with startling accuracy and clarity. It is a disturbing descent into a dark, urban hell that is at once powerful and unpleasant. Call it an urban horror film.

Detective William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) is a thoughtful man on the verge of retirement and clearly tired of the uncaring city he is forced to protect. His early retirement is a way out, an escape from this horrible place that keeps him awake at night with its noises of people yelling, blaring sirens, and incessant traffic. As the film begins, he is assigned a new partner and a new case. David Mills (Brad Pitt) is a young, up-and-coming detective who is energetic and hopeful — everything that Somerset is not.

The case starts off simply enough: an extremely obese man is found dead in his squalid apartment. It seems that the man had been force fed at gunpoint. At first, Somerset wants nothing to do with the case, but then a second murder occurs. A prominent defense attorney is found dead in his office with the word, "greed" written on the carpet in his own blood. After going back to the previous crime scene and finding the word, "gluttony," Somerset realizes that there is a pattern forming — these murders are in fact fashioned after the seven deadly sins: sloth, wrath, pride, lust, envy, greed, and gluttony. Still, he does not wish to get involved in the investigation, but the unique style of these murders continues to nag at him. So, he and Mills team up and find themselves delving deeper and deeper into this increasingly disturbing case.

Seven's origins lie in a screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker, whose previous credits include a string of forgettable films like Brainscan (1994) and Hideaway (1995). To his credit, these scripts were altered significantly by other people to the point where they barely resembled his original idea. This is all changed with Seven, which remained relatively untouched throughout the entire production. Even the downbeat ending was not changed, thanks in large part to the influence of the film's two big stars, Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, and the film's director, David Fincher, who insisted that the ending was not to be changed in any way.

The primary influence for the Seven's screenplay came from Walker’s time spent in New York City while trying to make it as a screenwriter. "I didn't like my time in New York, but it's true that if I hadn't lived there I probably wouldn't have written Seven." This distaste for big city life is readily evident from the first exterior shot of the film that features an urban abyss filled with crowded, noisy denizens while an oppressive rain always seems to fall without respite. This look was an integral part of the film as Fincher wanted to show a city that was "dirty, violent, polluted, often depressing. Visually and stylistically, that's how we wanted to portray this world. Everything needed to be as authentic and raw as possible."

After the Alien 3 (1992) debacle, Fincher did not read a script for a year and a half. He said, “I thought I’d rather die of colon cancer than do another movie.” He was drawn to Walker’s script because he found it to be a “connect-the-dots movie that delivers about inhumanity. It’s psychologically violent. It implies so much, not about why you did but how you did it.” Fincher approached making Seven like a “tiny genre movie, the kind of movie Friedkin might have made after The Exorcist.” Fincher worked with cinematographer Darius Khondji and together they adopted a simple approach to the camerawork. One starting off point was the television show Cops and “how the camera is in the backseat peering over people’s shoulder.”

Fincher turned to production designer Arthur Max to create a dismal world that often eerily mirrors its inhabitants. "We created a setting that reflects the moral decay of the people in it," says Max. "Everything is falling apart, and nothing is working properly." The film's brooding, dark look was also created through a unique chemical process whereby the silver in the film stock was re-bonded which in turn deepened the dark, shadowy images in the film and increased its overall tonal quality. Max and Fincher do such an impressive job on the setting that the city begins to take a life of its own, almost becoming another character.

However detailed and impressive the setting is, it never overwhelms the characters that dwell there. In particular, the three main characters, played by Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, and Gwyneth Paltrow (who plays Pitt's wife in the film), are so strong and distinctive that they refuse to be lost in the atmospheric mise en scene. Freeman is excellent as the jaded policeman who is ready to call it quits. Somerset is a world apart from the stereotypical, shoot-first-ask-questions-later cop that is usually depicted in these kinds of films. Freeman portrays him as a patient man, who is methodical and thorough in his methods — much like the killer and much like the film itself, which takes its time and draws you in with an almost hypnotic intensity. Somerset is also a thoughtful and reflective person. There are many shots of Freeman just standing or sitting in silence as he tries to figure everything out, to make sense of it all. Most films would never take the time to show these kinds of things. When Walker wrote the screenplay, he originally envisioned William Hurt as Somerset and the character’s name came from one of his favorite authors, W. Somerset Maugham. During pre-production, Al Pacino was considered for the role of Somerset but decided to do City Hall (1996) instead. Watching the film now one can’t imagine anyone else playing the role but Freeman.

For such an ominous and forbidding film, there are some real moments of warmth and compassion and these are provided by Paltrow. There is a great scene where she invites Freeman's character over for dinner. The way she greets them, “Hello men,” with a warm, inviting smile, instantly draws you in. The three characters talk and laugh over a meal and this scene comes as a welcome relief from the horror that we have experienced so far. Paltrow, with her engaging smile and gentleness, imbues Seven with a much needed touch of humanity and transforms what could have easily been a standard wife role into a touching portrayal of a woman torn between the love for her husband and her doubts of living in such a threatening city.

Credit must also go to Fincher and Khondji, who create a visually evocative world and take the time to develop the characters. No rapid-fire MTV editing here, which is a surprise considering Fincher's background as music video director. He only breaks the suspenseful pace for a truly exhilarating chase through a run-down building as the two detectives pursue a mysterious figure that might be the killer. We are suddenly thrust into an adrenaline-driven scene fueled by jarring, hand-held camera shots that are quick and disorienting. This approach enhances the scary, unpredictable quality of the scene as we frantically try to get our bearings. Up until then, nothing prepares us for this sudden jolt and the effect is very powerful indeed.

In his review for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-a-half stars out of four stars and wrote, “Seven is well-made in its details, and uncompromising in the way it presents the disturbing details of the crimes. It is certainly not for the young or the sensitive. Good as it is, it misses greatness by not quite finding the right way to end.” Janet Maslin, in her review for the New York Times, wrote, “Mr. Freeman moves sagely through Seven with the air of one who has seen it all and will surely be seeing something better very soon. His performance has just the kind of polish and self-possession that his co-star, Mr. Pitt, seems determined to avoid.” In his review for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers wrote, “It's not the identity of the killer that gives Seven its kick – it's the way Fincher raises mystery to the level of moral provocation.”

Desson Howe, in his review for the Washington Post, wrote, “But what makes things watchable is Fincher's direction. He has a gift for building understated menace. His cinematographer, Darius Khondji, puts a silky contrast into the colors, making things seem velvety, dark and intense.” In his review for the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “the filmmakers stick to their vision with such dedication and persistence that something indelible comes across—something ethically and artistically superior to The Silence of the Lambs that refuses to exploit suffering for fun or entertainment and leaves you wondering about the world we're living in.” Finally, Sight and Sound proclaimed the film to have “the scariest ending since George Sluizer’s original The Vanishing . . . and stands as the most complex and disturbing entry in the serial killer genre since Manhunter.”

Seven is ultimately a mesmerizing condemnation of life in sprawling, urban areas. For such a negative view, one would have to look back to Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1973), a film that also presented a nightmarish vision of a big city. While the two films share some of the same thematic preoccupations, Seven's stylish predecessor would seem to be Blade Runner (1982) with its noisy, congested, rainswept landscape and film noir look. Seven is a powerful, distinctive film that offers a refreshing take on the tired serial killer genre.

Some of the screenshots that accompany this article came from the excellent Movie Screenshots blog.

SOURCES

Montesano, Anthony. “Seven’s Deadly Screenwriter.” Cinefantastique. February 1996.

Taubin, Amy. “The Allure of Decay.” Sight and Sound. January 1996.

Zodiac

After the technically accomplished but ultimately hollow thriller Panic Room (2002), director David Fincher returned to familiar subject matter with Zodiac (2007), a dramatization of the murders perpetuated by the infamous serial killer known as the Zodiac Killer that terrorized the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1960s and early 1970s. With Se7en (1995), Fincher seems like an obvious choice to direct this film but those of you expecting a rehash of that film will be disappointed. With Zodiac, he faces the daunting challenge of making an exciting thriller that runs two hours and forty minutes long and where the killer was never caught. He does this by focusing on the people who investigated the case and how it affected them.

Based on Robert Graysmith’s two books on the subject (Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked), the film focuses on three men who investigated the case and how each one became obsessed with solving it to the point where their lives and those of the ones close to them were affected. Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) is an investigative journalist who covers the story for the San Francisco Chronicle; Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a political cartoonist for the same newspaper who takes an interest in the encrypted letters that the killer sends to the police and several newspapers, taunting them; and David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) is one of the San Francisco police detectives assigned to the case along with his partner Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards).

Zodiac begins with the murders and Fincher doesn’t shy away from the brutality of them but doesn’t revel in the gore either. He shows just enough to be disturbing, resisting the urge to glorify it like so many horror films made in the past few years. From there, the focus shifts to Avery and Graysmith – how they got involved in the case and the initial legwork they did before shifting the focus to Toschi and Armstrong who are brought in to investigate the Zodiac’s murder of a taxi cab driver. There is this shift in focus because as the two detectives investigate the case, Avery and Graysmith become marginal figures. They aren’t privy to the kind of access to information available to Toschi and Armstrong. As the years drag on, the trail gets colder and they exhaust all of their possible leads and avenues and have effectively been beaten by the system. They move on to other things and this is where Graysmith picks up the ball and runs with it and the focus changes while Toschi becomes the peripheral character as does Avery who has been beaten by his own addictions and paranoia.

Mark Ruffalo really immerses himself in the role of David Toschi, the man who inspired Steve McQueen’s character in Bullitt (1968) and Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry Callahan. The actor adopts a specific voice and a distinctive look that sets him apart from the other characters but not enough to be distracting. It doesn’t hurt that he’s got great material to work with and rises to the challenge of playing a man frustrated by bureaucracy. Ruffalo has only gotten better with every performance and this may be his best one to date. Robert Downey Jr. tones down his sometimes scene-stealing style down so that he isn’t as flashy but delivers a solid performance as a jaded journalist. He gives Avery a certain disheveled charm and over the course of the film he does an excellent job showing the man’s gradual disintegration due to paranoia fueled by alcohol abuse and drugs that take their toll both physically and mentally. Jake Gyllenhaal is good as the eager Graysmith who becomes fascinated by the case and pursues it even when the trail goes cold and it seems like everyone else has lost interest or given up.

Fincher’s films have often been criticized for their lack of characterization and emotional detachment but this is not the case with Zodiac. The actors go a long way in providing an emotional connection to their characters and the director does give us moments in which to make that connection, like several between Toschi and his partner in the form of little exchanges but they all add up and build to the scene where Armstrong tells Toschi that he is transferring to another department. You really feel for Toschi from the disappointed expression on Ruffalo's face. There is also a gradual build-up between Avery and Graysmith. They are introduced together very early on and we see how they interact with one another and then there is a nice scene at a bar where Avery buys Graysmith a drink and they talk about why they are obsessed with the case. It is at this moment that these two characters connect in a meaningful way. These moments make you sympathize with these characters so that you care about what happens to them later on.

This is a film that shows people talking and doing research – hardly, dynamic, cinematic material but Fincher makes it fascinating with strong performances from his talented cast and a solid screenplay to anchor the film. Like Michael Mann’s equally obsessive serial killer film, Manhunter (1986), Fincher spends a lot of his motion picture showing offices buzzing with activity as the case heats up and we see people hard at work as the police, FBI, the Chronicle and even the CIA all try to decipher the Zodiac’s code and solve the case. He also shows the minutia of their methods while also reminding us of the limits of technology at the time (no personal computers, no Internet, no DNA testing, etc.). These people faced a monumental task of sifting through hundreds of false leads and crank calls from the substantial information that might have actually furthered the case.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Toschi and his partner are hampered by maddening bureaucracy at every turn. Because several of the murders took place over multiple jurisdictions, they have to consult with the police departments in each one in order to obtain the information that they have. Naturally, some are more cooperative than others. This only slows things down and obstructs the investigation. As the case drags on, we see the hold it has on Avery, Graysmith and Toschi. Both Graysmith and Toschi spend less and less time with their families and Avery is driven to drink and displays increasing erratic behavior, due to his frustration with the case and also because the Zodiac killer contacts him directly, making him understandably paranoid.

Stylistically, Fincher claims that he was influenced by All the President’s Men (1976) and this restrained approach permeates every aspect of Fincher’s film, from the way he frames characters in a scene to the way the Chronicle’s offices are lit to the emphasis on legwork and research conducted by the protagonists in order to catch the killer. The attention to period detail is fantastic and authentic, right down to the fluorescent lights in the aforementioned newspaper office, the cars, the clothes, and the period music that never overwhelms the film or draws attention to itself. It only helps establish the mood of the times and creates the feeling that this film was shot in the 1970s. Fincher shot the entire film digitally on the Thomson Viper (the same camera that Michael Mann most of Collateral and Miami Vice with) but it certainly doesn’t look it. He makes sure that there is nothing stylistically to distract us from the riveting content and strong performances.

Zodiac presents a wealth of information and invites you to sift through it like the three protagonists. In fact, there is so much to absorb that repeated viewings only reveal more details that might not have been caught upon an initial viewing. The film’s long running time (two hours and 40 minutes) allows you to gradually immerse yourself in the film and the story it tells. However, it never feels too long because Fincher maintains a brisk, efficient pace cramming as much detail and information as he can into every scene. The killer is a fascinating enigma and his encrypted letters, his blatant taunting of the police, and the discrepancies between murders only it makes it more interesting. It is easy to see why people became obsessed with this case. Ultimately, the Zodiac case doesn’t just leave a trail of actual bodies but also collateral damage in the form of failed marriages, ended partnerships, and substance abuse. And this is just the people who investigated the case. The toll taken on the victims who survived, their families and those of the people who were killed is inconceivable. A whole other movie could be made about them. Fincher has made a smart, engaging thriller that suggests a new direction for the filmmaker, one that places an emphasis on character and story instead of atmosphere and set design.