David Fincher (USA, born 1962)

The Social Network (2010) 

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

In The Social Network’s opening scene, Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend Erica, played by Rooney Mara, breaks up with him. She also takes the opportunity to impart ‘You’re going to go through your life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.’

Because it’s so early in the movie, we can’t yet judge how justified this assertion is. It’s probably not necessary, strictly speaking, considering she doesn’t have to see him anymore, but it doesn’t come off wholly gratuitous either; the delivery is suggestive of a young woman who has come to the end of her tether with Mark, for whom the relationship has not just brought about an absence of patience, it’s also left her sad, and weary, and doubting herself. For one thing, she can’t argue with him- with his formidable intellect, he simply steamrollers anything and everything she says with inexhaustible, scattergun, rat-a-tat rhetoric.

This scene, for me, references the movie’s most pertinent issue: is Mark Zuckerberg an asshole? I’m very pointedly talking about the movie-Zuckerberg here, not the real one; there are striking distinctions between the two, not least the fact that this Zuckerberg looks nothing like his counterpart and, as far as I can tell, doesn’t really have his mannerisms either. Over the course of the film, a portrait develops of a character who is- almost relentlessly- snarky, defensive, insolent, impudent, solipsistic, aloof, ill-tempered and self-satisfied.

Some of his traits could be read as positive. He doesn’t seem to care if other people like him and is far more intelligent than most of them. He shows no interest in the parties that his cohorts throw around him, in the very house that he lives, and doesn’t indulge in the booze, the drugs or the womanising that would have been manna from heaven for most 19-year-olds. He’s focused, highly motivated, and unafraid to say what he thinks. Ultimately, it’s highly debatable as to whether these personality pieces, pound-for-pound, make him an asshole outright, and, like Shame, there is no definitive answer- it would likely be a weaker, less interesting movie if there was.

This is another film which I saw quite soon after it came out, didn’t really like, and have found myself watching again around a decade later. At the time, Facebook was a relatively new behemoth, fresh on the scene, and although it was already huge, I still didn’t know how big it was going to become or the full extent to which it would ingratiate itself into general life. Back then, I regarded social media in itself as a fledgling concept, though some took to it much quicker than I did, and because of its novelty, it was an intriguing topic, if not necessarily one that would naturally lend itself to effective cinema. The movie’s strong reviews, however, highlighted how well it was able to elevate itself above these potential issues, which I guess was what ultimately led me to watch it. What I saw then was a thin and over-stylised piece about bratty, shallow Silicon Valley types bickering and squabbling, and I believe you can still read the film that way if you want to. I found Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue style irritating- overwrought, Mamet-lite, and pertaining to some sort of fantasy regarding human speech and communication whereby everyone always knows exactly what to say, when to say it, and how to phrase it in ways that superficially make them sound very sharp and incisive.

On second viewing, I spent the first hour of the film feeling about the same. I thought that this was uninteresting material with uninteresting characters and a vortex where the film’s heart, soul and thematic heft should have been. However, at around that hour point, something changed and I started to like it more. It’s not easy to say exactly why, though the reduced screentime of the deeply dislikeable Winklevoss twins could have been a factor. The film’s plot strands, which I hadn’t thought I cared about, came together in a cohesive manner and the ‘point’ of the movie became clearer for me.

Chiefly, was Erica right to call Mark an asshole? Is she accurate? And why exactly does he not seem to be interested in any other women? This may not have been the ‘point’ of the film for many other viewers, especially as in its final reel it arrives at something of a climax regarding financial betrayal, and touches on the fickle nature of friendship and loyalty, but it was the issue which I found myself most interested in, especially as the introduction of Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake in a fey, unconvincing performance) gives us an extra yardstick of comparison; his cheery, sociable demeanour belies a character that is more mercenary and snakelike than Mark, and can be more straightforwardly considered an asshole.

Earlier I said that Mark doesn’t seem to care if people like him, and I think this holds true for almost everyone- everyone, that is, except Erica (and maybe Sean to a much lesser extent). We don’t know why she’s so special to him- she’s only in two scenes- but it’s possible that he’s in love with her and this is driving his unpalatable behaviour. Then again, it may not be love- it could be jealousy, anger or resentment at her having made such a comment straight to his face, but either way, he wants her to like him again. Despite his intelligence, he’s still naïve enough to think that he can chauvinistically insult her online and she will be okay with him- maybe even open to a reconciliation with him- if he later approaches her in a bar in front of her friends.

From doing some background reading, I find that there was no attempt made by David Fincher, Aaron Sorkin or Ben Mezrich, the author of the novel on which this is based, to reflect real-life events as they played out; they freely admit to The Social Network’s sensationalist nature, and that their version of Zuckerberg is exactly that- a version, a construct. Maybe they even cast an actor that doesn’t look like him on purpose. There is a part of me that cannot see why you would make a film based on real-life events if you haven’t tried to make it as documentarian as possible; I have had to consciously put this hypothesis to one side as I re-assess the film’s intentions and dynamics.

I would still hesitate to call this any sort of ‘great’ movie, though I will concede that it’s a pretty good one, even if it does sometimes come across like a particularly slick and well-produced version of The Junior Apprentice. It flows smoothly and it makes its points with the precision of a well-oiled and competently operated machine. For latter-period Fincher though, I would still take Gone Girl over The Social Network. Both films have a certain emptiness at their core that style and assurance can’t completely cover up- incidentally, I prefer his TV series Mindhunter to both movies- but Gone Girl somewhat compensates for this with its strong plot intrigue and thriller elements. The Social Network, to put it bluntly, doesn’t.

Zodiac (2007)

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

There’s a scene in David Fincher’s police-procedural serial-killer period piece Zodiac where our titular murderer, faceless to us, tells a woman in the passenger seat of his car that he’s going to kill her and throw her baby out of the window. The scene cuts away- the next thing we know, passers-by are helping the woman, who has managed to escape. Maybe, in itself, it’s not such an unusual decision to omit the intervening minutes, but then Fincher repeats the technique ten minutes later, when Robert Downey Jr.’s hard-bitten, booze-soaked reporter Paul Avery follows up a shady anonymous lead; despite having received explicit threats on his life, he makes his way, alone, under darkness, to a deserted, desolate location, but we don’t see what happens then- we simply hear about it, second-hand, through dialogue, whilst in the meantime, night has become day.

Are these ‘gaps’ in our narrative an attempt to re-create the confusion that the movie’s characters feel as they chase this ever-elusive boogeyman, and are confronted at every turn with red herrings and pieces that don’t fit? Is it an attempt to introduce supple derivations to the more formulaic elements of the film, and the more generic, archetypal traits of its characters? Or both?

Jake Gyllenhaal is wide-eyed, boyish and eager. Robert Downey Jr. is the older, more seasoned reporter- chain-smoking, sarcastic, and the very picture of jaded cynicism. Mark Ruffalo is pitched somewhere between the two, sometimes coming off as an anchoring influence for the viewer, relatable and familiar, though not necessarily immune to the occasional quick streak of abrasive behaviour.

Generally, I felt that Zodiac never really caught fire or grabbed my attention the way I would have liked it to. This is partly, it would seem, through stylistic choice- the movie is a decidedly slow burn and appears to be pitched, very deliberately, at a certain cerebral level. We know, for instance, that the killer isn’t going to suddenly jump out from the shadows and ambush our protagonists- it isn’t that sort of film. Neither does it feature any of the overtly gruesome or sensationalistic aspects of a movie like Seven. Nevertheless, it is quite a creepy film- it maintains an undercurrent of discomfort and dread throughout, not least when Fincher sets a murder sequence to the bouncy but unnerving strains of Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man. This undercurrent is arguably the most successful, strikingly effective aspect of the movie, made more beguiling when it is not always clear, exactly, where the undercurrent is coming from- is it coming from the notes and messages that the faceless killer keeps sending to the police, or is there just a broad, undefined fear across these Californian locales that the Summer of Love and the utopian dreams of the 1960s have turned distinctly sour, and that this movie has managed to capture with twisted aplomb?

Elsewhere, we are just supposed to take it as read that Jake Gyllenhaal’s Robert Graysmith is obsessed with the case without the film ever really explaining why or how such an obsession has come about. Maybe it doesn’t feel that it needs to, as the nature of obsession is inherently inexplicable. In this, perhaps we can see echoes of our own little fixations, especially ones that we don’t even understand ourselves and that we continue to indulge even when they are detrimental to our wellbeing. Perhaps we can also see parallels in our own lives’ unanswered questions, those situations which should have been relatively straightforward but turned out to be anything but, and you were forced to walk away from, leaving them unresolved forever.

All this results in a movie that feels deeper and darker than your average serial-killer flick, even those that are in the more mature and analytical vein that this one is. I even saw superficial parallels with The Headless Woman in its oblique stylings and disagreeable aftertaste. It’s probably slightly overlong, and that also feeds into its understated vibe of wilful perversity, prompting questions as to whether this is in fact something of an art piece disguised as a relatively commercial mainstream picture with major stars.

A mixed bag.

The Killer (2023)

The Killer features Michael Fassbender as a hitman. In its opening scenes he talks us, in some detail and with a completely flat and unfeeling meter, through his methods- the things he does in preparation for the kill, the discipline required of him, and a bit of philosophical musing. He does aerobics and push-ups. He quotes statistics. He talks disparagingly about the hordes of normal people who kid themselves that there is any moral point in behaving well. 

So…why should I care? I think I’m supposed to find this sort of stuff really ‘cool’, as a hypothetical narrative device if not part of a genuine, real-world admiration of his attitudes. He’s a badass who doesn’t play by society’s rules. He’s challenging preconceptions. He’s transcended the 9-to-5.

But we’ve seen this before, haven’t we? Didn’t Timothy Olyphant do this sort of thing in Hitman? Didn’t Matthew McConaghey do a trailer-trash version of it in Killer Joe? You could say that The Killer has a different tone to both the multiplex fluff of Hitman and the consciously grubby sleaze of Killer Joe, and you’d be right. It does. But these elements nevertheless risk being all much of a muchness. We’ve looked unflinchingly at men who snuff out people’s lives and feel nothing about it, and sometimes come out with clever-sounding mumbo-jumbo to intellectually ‘explain’ or even ‘justify’ their actions. Do we really need to do it again?

Can Fincher and Fassbender bring anything new to this particular table?

Not to my mind. I mostly found The Killer to be an empty, wearying entry into both David Fincher’s oeuvre- overshadowed there by several more involving, straightforwardly enjoyable pieces- and also the hitman/assassin/sniper sub-genre in general, which admittedly is not something I am either particularly knowledgeable around or predisposed towards.

The movie may well have worked better if it hadn’t been told exclusively from the assassin’s point of view, and had offered us a more rounded experience. Fassbender is, of course, a very talented actor, and one wonders if he is really being used to the best of his abilities when the entire movie requires of him only dry, dead-eyed psychopathy with underlying arrogance. Elsewhere, Tilda Swinton, in a small-to-medium-sized role, is OK, and along with the lesser-known Kerry O’Malley, plays one of probably the two most interesting characters in the film (which is not saying much). Some scenes inevitably have an insistent stylish effectiveness to them, most notably when Fincher and Fassbender suddenly lurch into moments of sudden brutality, providing punctuation points to the otherwise languid rhythm of the piece. Overall though, I was left just as unmoved as our steely central anti-hero. I don’t know what the point of The Killer was, and I don’t care.