The Cinephiliac Moment: Zodiac

            The Cinephiliac Moment is a weekly series in which I choose a moment in a film where cinema reaches transcendence. This moment may be inspired by anything – the composition, the score, the edit, the narrative – but it is a moment in which cinema becomes something more than entertainment and possibly more than art. Read more about the original inspiration to the project here.

Blank Check - Zodiac (2007)

            Like all of David Fincher’s work since entering the digital era, Zodiac uses compositions within his frames that are tightly wound and filled with layers. Details are never just casually thrown together, though unlike his 90s-auteur counterpart, Wes Anderson, Fincher never emphasizes them. They are often the background, but they mean everything. There’s not a wasted moment or image in Fincher’s tale of three men driven to obsession by an elusive serial killer – even the film’s breathtaking avant-garde three minutes of darkness illustrates the passage of time for these men. So as Robert Graysmith and Inspector Toschi meet for the last time, we’re in so deep to every detail that our eyes are glued to the screen as the final clues are set into place, literally, as Graysmith uses various diner objects to lay out the groundwork for why he has identified the killer. As he lays down his final clue, a waitress comes over and drops off the check. Why? Why would Fincher throw in this random detail – especially one that may distract from our obsession in the case – to have of note that a check has been thrown down? Because it’s the film’s joke on these characters. The total has been added up. And what does it mean? Nothing. It’s just a total. We’ve watched this film for 160 minutes and Fincher has made us as intent as his characters searching for the truth. And what do we get? A small check that shows the total of their efforts. Unlike The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, in which Fincher de-emphasizes the clues of his case by dislocating the dialogue from the visuals, Zodiac does everything in its power to make us look as much as listen (consider the film’s breathtaking interview with Arthur Leigh Allen). So we notice something as mundane as the waitress dropping this check, and immediately question it in its validity in the case. And then we realize it has no meaning - as the final clues come together, why look at the total? It’s a meaningless total.

Much thanks to Jim Gabriel for the screencap above.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: A Twisted Hero for Twisted Times

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Directed By: David Fincher

Written By: Steve Zallian, based on the novel by Stieg Larsson

Starring: Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgard, and Robin Wright

Director of Photography: Jeff Cronenweth, Editors: Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, Production Designer: Donald Graham Burt, Original Music: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

Rated: R for hard violence, rape, and all the other stuff to support your anti-holiday cheer.

            The pitch-perfect sequence in David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is also one of the most unmemorable sequences in the film. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is led around the yard outside the mansion of millionaire Henrik Vagner (Christopher Plummer), who has changed Blomkvist with investigating his family. Henrik explains each member of his family, where they live, and who talks to who. But Mr. Fincher’s camera refuses to let our eyes process this information. He cuts to shots of each home of each family member, and refuses to orient the spatial relationship of these homes to each other, just that they all surround each other. This reflects not only the script’s suggestions that the closest people to us are often the ones that hurt us the most, but more so, Fincher’s deconstruction of the investigative process. The textual information is displayed concretely and without flourish, but because the director refuses to reinforce each detail with visual information, we remain lost to the mystery.

            If Zodiac, Fincher’s cult classic masterpiece about the true-life serial killer in San Francisco, was all about making audience as obsessive as the characters solving an unknown case, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo does the opposite. The answer to the central mystery is slapping us in the face, but because Fincher constantly disorients us with his bold and anti-genre compositions, it remains more of a character piece. And thus, the American director of Fight Club and The Social Network has done the best job he can in adapting the tepid, international best-seller by Stieg Larsson. Why the Swedish novels became an extravaganza still remains something of a mystery—the narratives are built on the same twist-heavy lackluster prose that launched Dan Brown, but include intense violence and rape as well. Perhaps thought, that comes down to the film’s titular character, here played by Rooney Mara (last seen breaking up with Mark Zuckerberg in the opening of The Social Network).

Margaret and the Dragon Tattoo: Or Recent Going-Ons in Film Criticism

            Two big stories relating to film critics are once again bringing up questions about the role of film criticism today. Because the world needs another piece on the state of film criticism, I found this a most dire subject to write on, though I think one story highlights the other, so bear with me. The two stories individually have been getting a lot of notoriety, one for its complete idiocy and the other for its idealistic advocacy. I’ll start with the more banal story first.

            If you picked up a New Yorker yesterday and flipped to the movie section, you may have read David Denby’s review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the highly anticipated adaptation of the Stieg Larson novel from Social Network director David Fincher and produced by Scott Rudin. In publishing the review, however, Denby broke perhaps the one big rule film critics have to follow: don’t publish your reviews until the studio says so, a so-called “embargo.” A series of emails, published by The Playlist, follow the back and forth between Denby and Rudin, which highlight the triviality on both sides. 

            To be frank, the whole thing feels like a schoolyard dick-measuring contest. But Rudin’s point to Denby that the film “has been badly damaged” by the early review is something to really scoff at. When you have a huge blockbuster like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, one knows people are going to go to it, whether or not reviews are good. How many teenage girls decided to skip out on Twilight: Breaking Dawn because David Edelstein gave it a middling review? Embargos on films let studios control the press on their films to give it the most exposure, but when it comes to a film that is going to be plastered on billboards everywhere, Rudin’s anger seems misplaced. 

            However, that doesn’t mean film critics don’t have their place, which brings me to the story of Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan’s ambitious masterpiece that came and went without much notice when released in September. Because of the film’s legal troubles, the distributor, Fox Searchlight more or less dumped the film, while the few major trades that did review somewhat dismissed it. But soon, other critics—Ben Keningsberg, Alison Wilmore, Matt Singer, Richard Brody, and Glenn Kenny, among others—caught up with it during its release and herald it a masterpiece, or at least something of merit worth more than two weeks and little advertizing. I managed to catch up with it during the second-to-last day of its theatrical release and went particularly over the moon as well.

            As Margaret disappeared from existence, however, #teammargaret, a Twitter hashtag to fight for the film’s existence was born. The whole thing played like an inside joke for film critics until last week, on the eve of the film’s UK release. With raves coming from London film critics, including a pair of five star reviews from The Guardian and The Telegraph, Slant film critic Jamie Christley launched a petition to Fox Searchlight to get the film back in discussion by making the film accessible for critics for their end-of-year awards. While that doesn’t necessarily help people who don’t get press invites, the wave of buzz led to staggering numbers in the United Kingdom--The Guardian reports a weekend gross of £4,595 ($7,170). “That number gave Margaret the highest screen average of any film on release, by some margin. This, despite the film only receiving one evening showtime per day (at 8pm), due to its hefty duration of 150 minutes.” Next weekend, Searchlight has decided to expand the film to ten screens in the UK, which rivals the entire number of screens it played in the United States.