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heavy knits, a sort of old school gumshoe type of investigative reporter, good with legwork and making contacts; she’s withdrawn and socially handicapped, a genius with data processing (she may even have a photographic memory) and swift with acts of necessary roughness, diminutive, with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.

When movie stars should send screenwriters to jail: Law Abiding Citizen

Just before Clarence Darby (Christian Stolte) jabs a blade into his guts, just before Darby proceeds to rape and kill his wife and do about the same to his little girl, Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) hears this fat, sweaty, slovenly, drug-addled, disgusting pervert-ogre whisper in his ear, “You can’t fight fate.” Even by the standards of the overcharged Hollywood thriller this is ultra-portentous. Clyde takes it to heart. He stews over it for ten years, during which time Darby’s accomplice awaits execution while Darby himself does three years and goes free as thanks from the DA for ratting his buddy out. For ten years Clyde gets stoked on the ineffectuality of American justice and concocts a whopper of a plan to set things straight.

The central conceit of Law Abiding Citizen, that grief and frustration turns a contented family man and otherwise non-psychopathic maniac into Hannibal Lecter on steroids, could only have ever worked as utter camp. As an ostensibly serious, ostensibly engaging, ostensibly dark and brooding thriller about thorny issues of crime, punishment and bureaucracy, it’s a mind-numbingly absurd travesty of a movie. Clyde kidnaps Darby and slowly, messily tortures him to death, making imaginative use of power tools a poison isolated from the liver of a Caribbean puffer fish. Of course! It’s only his opening act. He gets thrown into maximum security and his rampage only escalates. Somehow he keeps exacting his flamboyant, baroque feats of violent revenge from captivity, gradually killing off anyone with even the most tangential connection to his case. Except for Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), the attorney who made the deal with Darby. Nick gets to watch as the whole house of cards collapses, wondering when he or his wife and daughter will get iced. Clyde and Nick play cat and mouse.

You don’t need a degree in law, psychology or engineering to balk at the mountain of risible improbability Law Abiding Citizen hinges on. Genius serial killers are among the most tiresome tropes, but Clyde Shelton and his reign of terror go far beyond the usual level of artifice and dumbness. Yet even if the basic story, which comes courtesy of Street Kings and Ultraviolet scribe Kurt Wimmer, weren’t so stupid, the details too feel all wrong, from our glimpses of Nick’s cardboard family life to the inner chambers of play-cynical Philadelphia lawmakers. The film’s only reason for existing is to try and keep you from guessing what moronic plot twist it’ll unleash next, until you finally realize that this thriller is really a horror movie, torture porn of sorts. It wants to be tough, I guess, but it’s really just crude, very, very silly, and more than a little sick.

Butler is on some kind of a roll. Here’s a sampling: Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, RocknRolla, The Ugly Truth. Dude’s been in some of the worst shit I’ve had to sit through over the last few years. I’m inclined to indulge a guy trying to move up in the system a little, but to what end? Does his producer’s credit mean to imply that Law Abiding Citizen is his fucking dream project? Does he secretly fantasize being confined to a prison from which he can slaughter his own career by remote control?

One last stray observation. There's an important early sequence where Darby's condemned accomplice gets executed by the state. As the sequence builds to its climax we keep cutting back and forth between the execution and a musical recital where Jamie Foxx's daughter plays the cello. Followers of this blog wonder with me: were the makers of Law Abiding Citizen studying The Walking Dead, or what?

Righteous Kill: cop buddies bugger the better sex subplot

Righteous Kill was written by Russell Gewirtz, the same guy who wrote Inside Man. Like the earlier movie, this serial killer thriller and rabidly macho buddy cop caper bristles with conflicted ambitions toward making something that’s both smart and base, a genre work for the sleaze hungry and the beard-strokers alike. It’s a tough gambit, especially without a director of Spike Lee’s shrewd audacity and style to help pull it off, but I’m actually impressed how relatively well it works, even if it all inevitably evaporates under the heat of its own sketchy conceit.

From the start we’re encouraged to see verge-of-retirement hard-ass homicide detectives Cowan (Robert De Niro) and Fisk (Al Pacino) as platonic lovers of unyielding fidelity. They literally shoot their loads side by each at the firing range, cheer each other on during cop baseball games, sing each other’s praises to anyone who’ll listen, even parrot each other’s deflective one-liners when separately grilled by the NYPD shrink. When early on the corny looking faux-CCTV video footage of Cowan confessing to going on an extended vigilante killing spree begins its piecemeal interjections into the drama proper we know that these old pals will follow each other to the precipice of destruction. It’s only a question of whether one will follow the other right over the edge.

The economy of characters in Gewirtz’s script is itself a source of dynamicism, keeping his leads surrounded by numerous closely-watching potential adversaries nearly all of the time: the younger detectives Riley (Donnie Wahlberg) and Perez (John Leguizamo), who begin to suspect that the “poetry killer” of various local scumbags must be a cop; the amiable but stern Lieutenant Hingus (Brain Dennehy, a highly welcome face, and one that’s aged into an uncannily resemblance to Milan Kundera), who has a good poker face but seems all too aware he’s got a loose cannon on his hands; and crime scene investigator Karen (Carla Gugino, a highly welcome everything), a girl who likes her sex extremely rough and is currently being obliged by Cowan, their proximity giving her access to his private life if not quite his inner life.

Director Jon Avnet, whose long resume includes jobs as, um, diverse as Fried Green Tomatoes and 88 Minutes, gets down to the grunt work from the get-go, keeping the camera whizzing around and the cuts a-flying like Tony Scott on auto-pilot. He’s hardly the most sensitive filmmaker, but he keeps things moving—whether they want to move or not. With this fidgety style, he can’t quite perform the subtle slight-of-hand Gewirtz’s script is crying out for, and to be fair I’m not sure anyone could. The big reversal is telegraphed pretty far in advance and once you catch on to what’s really happening in Righteous Kill you may or may not want to bother sticking with it—the movie slowly becomes about the clever reversal itself instead of the meatier themes of loyalty and justice it lays claims to.

More disappointing for me is the neglect of the Karen character. The most interesting thing in The Score was Robert De Niro’s girlfriend, played by the sorrowfully underused Angela Bassett. Likewise, the most interesting thing in Righteous Kill is easily De Niro’s relationship with Gugino, an enormously delicate negotiation of trust, sex and maybe, just maybe, love, or something like it. Gugino brings tremendous texture, sass and dignity to a character that, far from being a conventional love interest, could have been difficult or impossible for the audience to identify with. This being De Niro’s movie, it’s just as important that her character has the potential to tell us a lot about Cowan. It’s a shame then that her Karen gets more or less brushed aside as the film hurtles toward its big, sloppy, scenery-chewing climax.