The music of the mechanics of the investigation

A man, recently humiliated for making unsubstantiated accusations against a public figure, is brought to a remote, frozen corner of Northern Sweden, an island of vast manors inhabited by the aging members of an industrial dynasty, some of them one-time Nazis, few of whom talk to each other anymore. The man has been asked by one of the family elders to research his memoir, but the real purpose of the research seems to be to discover what happened to a 16-year-old niece who vanished back in 1966.

As the man gets deeper into his increasingly precarious task (many within the family aren’t nice to him; one even shoots at him) he hires a young woman as an assistant—the same young woman who did an extremely thorough background check on the man for the family elder. Turns out they make a great team: he’s cool but affable, ruggedly handsome in his heavy knits, a sort of old school gumshoe type of investigative reporter, good with legwork and making contacts; she’s withdrawn and socially handicapped, a genius with data processing (she may even have a photographic memory) and swift with acts of necessary roughness, diminutive, with a pale, orphan-child face, multiple piercings and tatts, and, at times, an invincible mohawk. (How does her hair stay so vertical after wearing a motorcycle helmet?) The film they’re in has little time for conventional character development, so our rapid registering of their peculiar, quiet chemistry is important. The characters are embodied by Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, whose performances, defined by such distinct choices in body language, appear effortless, or rather, all about attending to the task at hand. And that’s the sensibility driving The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in a nutshell: telling a story one task at a time; process, procedure, efficiency.

The hiring of director David Fincher for the English-language adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s pulpy, often tawdry international bestseller is inspired. Very few filmmakers could simultaneously manage a production of this scale and bring to it such personal, unfussy finesse. Early scenes snow us with exposition and flashbacks, yet we get everything we need to, and even if we don’t it’s all quite compelling. There’s a great deal of ordinary work up on screen: googling, highlighting documents, scanning photos, thumbing through files, and all of it clips along like the tip-tapping of a crash cymbal. The mystery at the heart of this is genuinely interesting, the resolution pretty satisfying, but what animates The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the music of the mechanics of the investigation itself.

Fincher’s work underwent a seismic breakthrough with 2007’s Zodiac—a mystery that doesn’t even have a resolution!—and this new film takes its cues from that film, as well as 2010’s The Social Network. All these films are on the long side, all of them crammed with plot, all of them hugely dependent on pace, rhythm, dynamics, adrenaline. Dragon Tattoo isn’t the deepest thing Fincher’s made (its serial killer’s gimmicky showmanship mirrors one of the corniest/most shamelessly lurid elements of 1995’s Se7en) by it’s as engrossing as his best work. Even after two-and-a-half exhausting hours, I found myself eager to come back and see what Fincher and his cohorts do with the next installment of the trilogy.

Rise of the nerd economy: The Social Network

If the internet sometimes feels like the crowning achievement of American rear-view myopia—a disdain for any history that isn’t myth; the quest for forms of communication that annihilate reflection via equally instantaneous responses to events banal and of the utmost gravity—then it’s that much more exhilarating to discover this very American movie that interrogates recent history—the creation of what is arguably the most colossal internet phenomenon of our century’s first decade—in a manner that’s at once deeply reflective and gloriously impatient, and through a story that forsakes virtual communities for actual ones.

Based on Ben Mezrich’s nonfiction bestseller The Accidental Billionaires, The Social Network opens with a riveting break-up scene rife with humiliation and rapid-fire banter—Todd Solondz by way of Howard Hawks—and closes with the smuggest half of this broken couple refreshing the other’s stubbornly oblivious Facebook page like a caffeinated laboratory mouse tapping his lever in vein hope of some paltry reward. Director David Fincher has described The Social Network as “the Citizen Kane of John Hughes movies,” and he’s not far from the mark. That young woman who left him at the bar with unflinching assurances of his asshole status will remain Mark Zuckerberg’s elusive Rosebud, the one who got away and stayed away, understandably so since only minutes after being dumped the future Facebook creator blogged about what a bitch she was before drunkenly creating a flamboyantly misogynist hotness rating site using photos of every girl on campus as the coup de gras. Unlike Orson Welles’ media giant and failed politician, Zuckerberg’s odyssey ends before he even hits 25, having already become the world’s youngest billionaire yet nonetheless still wearing plastic sandals with tube socks to his emotionally-heated legal proceedings. Kids: they grow up fast these days.

Zuckerberg is portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg, whose facility with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s brilliantly bracing dialogue is almost supernatural. Eisenberg is even less ingratiating here than he was in The Squid and the Whale, far too in control of his performance to concern himself with audience sympathy. He’s beautifully matched by Andrew Garfield’s diabolically shafted Facebook CFO—Zuckerberg’s former best friend, and probably the most sympathetic character in the movie—Justin Timberlake’s absurdly confident Napster creator—it was Timberlake killed the music industry!—and most especially by Armie Hammer’s dual role as the Winklevosses, the handsome and wealthy Harvard twins and human rowing machines who recruited Zuckerberg to do the nerd labour for their proposed Harvard student dating site and watched helplessly as Zuckerberg took their fragment of an idea and turned in into the biggest virtual place in the ether. I love the fact that Sorkin gives many of the best of his smart-ass lines to these guys, the characters who could be seen as the story’s biggest schmucks: “I’m 6.5, 220, and there’s two of me.”

The completely convincing doubling of Hammer for these bits is not only the result of skillful acting but also fluid special effects, something Fincher knows his way around (even if the movie’s CGI breath during some ostensibly chilly outdoor scenes looks distracting and ridiculous). Yet one of the things that makes The Social Network so satisfying is the sense that Fincher has almost completely shaken off the technical show-offery that plagued some of his earlier work, most notably Panic Room. Delivering on the promise of his career make-over Zodiac, he emerges here as a nimble, eloquent and precise storyteller, never hitting the themes harder than necessary, locking his focus on faces of characters whose lives are going too fast for them to fathom, and gleefully compacting extremely wordy scenes into taut matches of wit and desperation. These scenes indeed allude to contemporary issues of dissolving privacy, fractured interaction and fast money, yet they so often resonate most potently as a study of masculine psychology barely past he gates of awkward adolescence.

2000s: the decade in movies

top to bottom: numbers 2, 29, 28, 5, 10, 6

31 films to remember from the first decade of our 21st century. The number is arbitrary, but from such arbitrary elements we forge our lists, striving to bring some order to the recent past. If one thing is certain about the last decade in movies, it’s that no amount of industry tumult—the ungovernable internet; the vagaries of home video; the strikes; the ostensible death of cinema-going which thankfully never happened—hasn’t had the slightest effect on our capacity to make great movies. What has changed is our ability to get great movies seen. The studio juggernauts, with their advertising budgets equal to the gross national product of numerous small countries, have arguably never been worse, while the best independent and foreign releases became only more confined, not just to art houses but often only to festivals. Clearly, as we look to the future, those of us passionate about movies are placing our hopes that all these new delivery systems will somehow make great movies easier to discover, and that the digitization of theatres might make bringing small movies to big screens more economically feasible. In any event I'm voting to keep us all going out to the movies.

top to bottom: numbers 7, 9, 26, 19, 17, 22

But enough industry—let’s talk about the work. Frankly, the below list wasn’t so much finished as abandoned. Even as I build this post I keep thinking of titles that I can't believe I've forgotten. But after a while I simply couldn’t keep mulling over my hundred-strong short list any longer without going into a trance. A trail of masterpieces lies beyond these 31. I decided to allow only one movie per director, simply so as to cover more ground, which meant the decade’s best filmmakers—Almodóvar, David Cronenberg, Claire Denis, Michael Haneke, Werner Herzog, Lucrecia Martel—could have just as easily had another title on this list. Some wound up without a movie included at all, despite the fact that the last decade of movies from Gus Van Sant (see the previous post), the Dardenne Brothers, Aleksandr Sokurov, or the deliriously prolific Steven Soderbergh was sometimes revolutionary and in every case consistently impressive—it’s this very consistency that made it so hard to pick one film that stood out.

top to bottom: numbers 4, 16, 24, 15, 13, 31

Great movies can do so many things, from entertaining to beguiling us, from enlightening to devastating us, from blowing our minds to re-awakening our senses. Some of the movies on this list—see, for example, numbers 5, 7 and 10—do many of these things at once with exhilarating verve. Some of them, we might argue—see, for example, numbers 19 and 28—do only one or two of these things but do them so gloriously as to tower above other movies that merely do countless things deftly. There are plenty of critically lauded crowd-pleasers I could have put on my list that more of you would surely have recognized, just as there are plenty of ultra-severe, verging on alienating works I could’ve listed out of sheer admiration for their audacity and perverse rigour. I hope the titles you know provoke you to reconsider, and that the ones you don’t provoke you to track them down. In the end I chose the movies I chose because they usurped the choicest real estate in my imagination and still haven’t moved away; because they continue to fascinate me even after the initial dazzle faded away; because they continue to move me long after first catching me off guard; because they thrill me shamelessly; because they make me afraid of the world while still wanting to fight for it; because they make me in love with the world even when it seems to love no one; because they allow me to keep dreaming, even when I’m wide awake.

top to bottom: 11, 21, 23, 12, 3, 25

(Incidentally the ranking of these titles, a practice I don't usually subscribe to, is also arbitrary. I did it mainly because there's too many titles here not to organize. The first five or six definitely feel like they're in the right place, and the subsequent 11, say, feel like they're grouped accordingly. But really, what the hell is difference between 22 and 28?)

number 1

1. In the Mood for Love (Wong, 00)
2. Mulholland Dr. (Lynch, 01)
3. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong, 06)
4. Code Unknown (Haneke, 00)
5. The Holy Girl (Martel, 04)
6. The Intruder (Denis, 04)
7. Zodiac (Fincher, 07)
8. Summer Hours (Assayas, 08)
9. There Will Be Blood (PT Anderson, 07)
10. A History of Violence (Cronenberg, 05)
11. Silent Light (Reygadas, 07)
12. The New World (Malick, 05)
13. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, 04)
14. Wendy and Lucy (Reichardt, 08)
15. Fat Girl (Breillat, 01)
16. No Country for Old Men (Coen, 07)
17. Volver (Almodóvar, 06)
18. Encounters at the End of the World (Herzog, 08)
19. Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai, 03)
20. George Washington (Green, 00)
21. Birth (Glazer, 04)
22. The Royal Tenenbaums (W Anderson, 01)
23. Brand Upon the Brain! (Maddin, 06)
24. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (Mungiu, 07)
25. Children of Men (Cuarón, 06)
26. Colossal Youth (Costa, 06)
27. I’m Not There (Haynes, 07)
28. The Limits of Control (Jarmusch, 09)
29. Three Times (Hou, 05)
30. Werckmeister Harmonies (Tarr, 00)
31. Before Sunset (Linklater, 04)

The case file as art: Zodiac on DVD

Watching Zodiac in its director’s cut nearly a year after the original version’s theatrical release, it feels that much more remarkable, that much more singular, this film so haunted by the unknowable, so unapologetically embracing of tracing the intricacies of laboring toward uncertainty. While seeing the film in the theatre with a captive audience unsure as to what to expect was for me at least an exhilarating happening, Warner/Paramount’s new two-disc special edition somehow completes the Zodiac experience: presenting a movie driven by obsession in a package so brimming with commentary, supplementary data and contradictory opinions, invites the viewer to obsess right along with Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), the cartoonist-turned one-man investigatory team whose exhaustive books on the unsolved Zodiac murders provide the story’s foundation.

The material added by director David Fincher only fortifies the film’s slow building of character, period and engagingly banal procedural detail –not to mention humour. The scene in which Captain Lee (Dermot Mulroney) and Inspectors Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) and Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) lay out their grounds for a search warrant not to a living person but a tiny speakerphone simultaneously mounts anticipation of a new break in the case and feels vaguely like borrowed shtick from Charlie’s Angels.

Yet it’s the same details you saw the first time around that really deepen the chilling evocation of these otherwise disparate events linked only by shared trauma: the brief exchanges, alluding to complicated, intimate relationship histories, and even an unexplained sense of imminent danger, between the Zodiac’s victims at Blue Rock Springs and Lake Barryessa; the frequency with which we see Toschi eat, this man who’s life becomes consumed by Zodiac in turn seeking to comfort himself through consumption; the hysterical woman who claims to have been abducted by Zodiac (Ione Skye), hiding her baby in some bushes off the side of the highway at night; the sheer amount of time that passes while memories fade and research accumulates and gets filed away, sucked into multi-jurisdictional limbo. Just as no single member of the tremendous ensemble cast passes through Zodiac without making some distinct impression, everything in the film becomes equally absorbing, boggling the mind with the promise of some grand interconnectedness that may not truly exist.

Fincher’s commentary track is illuminating both technically (he seems, perhaps to a fault, a perfectionist of the first order) and with regards to the director’s own emotional involvement with the film, tied to his growing up in San Francisco during the Zodiac’s heyday. It’s fascinating how a project that mightn’t seem all that personal can finally become a filmmaker’s richest, finest, most idiosyncratic and humane work, and it’s revealing to hear how Fincher himself made a concentrated effort to avoid any kind of formal flourish that would detract from the clearest possible observance of character and action. This lack of flash becomes a vision in itself, and renders everything else in Fincher’s oeuvre, from the genuinely creepy if over-adorned Seven to the rather tedious Panic Room, a mere warm-up for the more serious filmmaking displayed here.

A second commentary track trades off between a laid-back Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr., who are consistently amusing if not especially insightful (and Gyllenhaal kind of embarrasses himself by going on this long spiel about Raymond Carver when I’m pretty sure he means Raymond Chandler), and the power team of screenwriter James Vanderbilt, producer Brad Fischer and, most welcome of all, novelist James Ellroy. In sly deadpan, Ellroy boldly introduces himself as “James Ellroy, King of American crime fiction… acknowledging that this film is one of the half-dozen greatest American crime films.” Now that’s how you kick-off a commentary! (Makes you wonder what the other five films are.) Vanderbilt and Fischer speak eloquently about all the varied choices that sprung from their resolve not to show anything that didn’t have a surviving eyewitness. They also discuss the sheer weirdness of the possibility that Zodiac murdered cabbie Paul Stine, then stole his glasses, put them on his face and walked away from the crime as though disguised as his victim. Ellroy meanwhile interjects with articulate reverie over the film and some terrific non-sequiturs, such as his bizarre anecdote that illustrates why he hates Donovan or what he considers to be the moral of Moby Dick.

The second disc features a nicely put-together making-of featurette that provides a sense of the strange balance between fact-based minutia and pure creativity that went into every aspect of the production. There’s also an extended documentary on each of the murders and all the particulars surrounding them, and, maybe best of all, a shorter doc solely about Arthur Leigh Allen, the deeply enigmatic prime suspect who died just before he was to meet with police one last time back in 1992. New interviews with the pivotal Don Cheney and several others who knew Allen alternate between strengthening the case against him and poking still more holes in it. Criminology experts make a convincing plea for a practice of fitting the evidence to a suspect instead of trying to fit a suspect to the evidence, yet even if certain aspects don’t fit the profile for Zodiac, Allen remains a compelling scapegoat even in death. His long, ovular face stares at us from a handful of obscure photographs, giving away precious little, ready to have whatever foul notions projected upon it, still the centre of a mystery that’s been arduously compacted into what is finally one of the great films of our age.