The Auteur Files #8: Four films considered: Penn, Renoir, Culp, Fincher

THE MISSOURI BREAKS (1976, Arthur Penn)- I wasn’t quite prepared for the gradually increasing oddity of this movie, a quality that is directly related to an unhinged performance from Marlon Brando as an eccentric “regulator” hired by a rancher to kill a bunch of Jack Nicholson-led horse rustlers. I’ve known of this film’s notorious status for years, and yet it still threw me for a loop. The prevailing theory is that somewhere along the way Penn lost control of the film, largely due to Brando’s mammoth ego and erratic behavior. And this very well might be true. What’s also true to my eyes is how Penn, along with his longtime editor Dede Allen, actually managed to salvage an at times powerful document from the footage. Things move from fairly typical revisionist Western territory into a surreal, fractured, dissonant environment and the steaming wreckage gets loosely assembled into commentary on the tenuous nature of control and the friction between one person’s perception and another’s identity. It’s an understatement that EVERYONE’S mileage is gonna vary on this one: I experienced at least a half dozen head smacking “what the fuck” moments as this baby unraveled (which in this case isn’t a bad thing), and there were surely elements that I didn’t enjoy, most notably John Williams’ score. However, taken as an unwieldy whole, BREAKS is one of the monumental last gasps from the New Hollywood before it basically got steamrolled by the worship of the bottom line at the dawn of ‘80s. Some directors were able to survive the transition, and a few were even able to flourish. While Penn continued to make films, he never seemed to really get his swagger back after BREAKS’ critical and commercial failure. That’s a drag, but he did make quite a few great ones along with this gobsmackingly weird one, one that just might be great as well. I need to see it again.

THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939, Jean Renoir)- One of the greatest of all films, most certainly. I’ve never met a Renoir movie that I didn’t love, and this just might be my favorite due to its rich complexity and perfect blend of satire and humanism. The use of deep focus is as integral here as in CITIZEN KANE, adding such brutal dimension to the characters and their actions that it’s unsurprising the initial reception to its brilliance was hostility. Much of the disdain is directly related to historical circumstances in Europe at the time of its release, WWII being just around the corner. It lambasts the behavioral mores of the idle rich without objectifying the working class and makes clear that social station and lifestyle are no security against the consequences of conduct. Well, his countrymen hated it, the invading Nazis banned it and for decades it was an essentially lost film, existing only in a truncated and far inferior edit. The miracle that is the currently available and justly celebrated fully-restored masterpiece stands as the foremost example of Renoir’s genius and his lasting importance. Nobody better exemplifies the concept of Classique = Moderne and his precise balance between content and form remains one of the beacons of 20th Century art.

HICKEY AND BOGGS (1972, Robert Culp)- I’m finding it really difficult to comprehend just why this film remains so unknown. Television star Culp’s sole motion picture as director, it combines a couple of very attractive elements, specifically a variation on the dark pessimism that infiltrated much of the serious cinema of its decade and a tough, raw, no-nonsense visual sensibility that is remindful of some of the older Hollywood hands that were still prolific or at least working in the same period, guys like Don Siegel and Phil Karlson. As such, it should please those enamored with the above mentioned New Hollywood in addition to folks who get randy at the sight of the lean ‘70s action cinema helmed by more underground names like John Flynn. There has been some talk about the film’s commercial failure, and I disagree with the notion that the movie was/is a downer. Culp (Boggs) and his co-star Bill Cosby (Hickey) are certainly bitter, despondent “loser” types, but they are not unsympathetic, registering more as two guys that have been bitten particularly hard on the ass by the cold, hard reality of life. And the story’s action arrives so briskly (and is so solidly directed) that it eases the presence of bleakness and turpitude, even Boggs’ flagrant alcoholism and his horrible choices regarding a nogoodnik ex-wife. My hypothesis is a simple one. People wanted a reprise of I SPY, and when they were offered this instead, they simply said no thanks. The overall heft of this very worthwhile one-shot is comparable to the grimy underbelly of post WWII American pulp crime fiction, Chester Himes in particular, and justice will go unserved until this film is available in a good transfer.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010, David Fincher)- my pick as the best big-budget Hollywood film to hit screens so far this year, it’s an incredibly rich concoction of biopic, current events saga and legal film that utilizes a thrillingly tight flashback (or more appropriately, flash forward) structure (shades of Welles circa KANE) with wildly potent and smartly stylized dialogue (ala Sturges or Hawks, though obviously contemporary to the zeitgeist). Fincher has found a perfect balance between a bold approach to form and a compact, direct style of mainstream storytelling, and additionally his deft use of digital techniques and CGI gives me hope for the future of the medium as the use of 35MM film slowly becomes less commonplace. A huge part of his success, along with an unerring choice of collaborators, is the attention to detail and importance that’s given to scenes/moments that are essentially perfunctory to the overall weight of the narrative, or would seem so. Nothing is sloppy in the cinema of David Fincher. Small, throwaway moments are subtly imbued with meaning or at least with a modest, casual beauty that’s inextricably tied to the joy of watching: the clinical buzzing and brightness of a florescent light, or the noise level as people converse in a crowded bar, for two instances. And when a scene is overtly humorous, it’s a solid bet that it’s covertly much more than just that. Is this a great as ZODIAC? Well, no, since that was one of the ten best Hollywood films of the last decade. But NETWORK is scaled differently. Underneath the perceived insubstantial quality of its “tell-all” exterior is the guts of a film that speaks very deeply about how we live right now, but in a low key way that’ll work in the favor of longevity as the status of classic is eventually awarded.

The Auteur Files #2- David Fincher's Zodiac (2007)

I haven’t watched Se7en in over a decade, but remember it as a damn good movie, so good that I went to the theatre to see Fincher’s follow up, The Game, and found myself being a little let down. I don’t recall thinking that it was a bad film (I’d like to see it again), and I certainly didn’t place Fincher my personal purgatory of directors, but I must confess that I’ve not seen either Fight Club or Panic Room. I will eventually, sure. Fight Club quickly gathered a coterie of rather annoying male fans that gave me an aversion to the whole thing, and Panic Room just happened to slip by me.
The fact that I hadn’t been keeping up with Fincher made my recent viewing of Zodiac all the more surprising. It’s an ambitious movie that beautifully integrates a startling amount of elements into its long running time, never falling into heavy-handedness or self-indulgence. Marketed as a serial killer flick, it’s really something much more than that, instead a deft interweaving of police procedural and newspaper drama that chooses a true story that never came to any satisfying (i.e. predictably cinematic) conclusion. The film works superbly on so many levels that I’m not a bit hesitant to declare that I prefer it to 2007’s other critically acclaimed movie about modern violence, that being The Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men.
Zodiac scores big points for not following the standard path of most serial killer stories. The general trend since Silence of the Lambs has been to subtly turn the pathological into something sexy, with the killers taking on variations of dysfunctional superhero, fucked-up moral crusader (Se7en fits this description), or charismatic nutcase. By now the trend has become rather entrenched, and it’s gotten tiresome.
It seems that Fincher has made some serious strides as a filmmaker since Se7en, choosing to tackle the weird phenomenon of California’s Zodiac killer without any identification or romanticizing of the person responsible. The fact that nobody was ever caught might seem to play a big part in this at first, but the thorny complexity of the case and the killer’s bizarre self-promotion through the media really cry out for the kind of cinematic idealization that’s become the norm. Fincher simply eschews the temptation: the murders are filmed with ample violent intensity, but are not presented to the viewer as a series of trophy shots that ultimately serve as celebration of the acts, and while it would be false to describe the movie as humanist, it also lacks the contempt for humanity that many serial killer films (or films that feature killing in general) display, instead choosing a detached sensibility that is sympathetic to the characters without developing favorites. Zodiac isn’t about the killer at all, but uses his actions as a vehicle for a film that intensely examines information overload and human obsession. The violence is frontloaded in the movie, the flow of events always moving forward (no flashbacks).The importance of the murders isn’t the tension and release of the acts, but instead the lasting impact they have on other people. When a likely suspect emerges into the narrative, his presence isn’t at all engaging. Instead he’s a mostly bland (a little creepy) character with a pedophiliac past. Then he promptly disappears from the story (to return later, in one of the movie’s best scenes) as the focus centers on the march of time and how the lack of resolution affects the lives of the characters that make up the bulk of the film.
Fincher shot digitally, only apparently using film-stock in a few instances, but you wouldn’t know that from the structure of the film, which harkens back to a more classical style, using an economy of shots that are often quite beautiful in their construction. The visual texture is rich, with a great use of color, but it is also somewhat low-key, lacking grandstanding or hyperbole, which matches the acting. Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards, Robert Downey Jr., and especially Jake Gyllenhaal all give outstanding, mature performances, and when the film’s judicious depiction of period is taken into consideration, it becomes clear that any shortcomings Zodiac has will only be revealed, if at all, by further more attentive viewing. Sure, some will be frustrated by its preoccupation with systems, procedures, and puzzles, and the almost three hours required to watch it might bug others, but I happen to find these elements actually work in the movie’s favor. The way the story deeply delves into how the characters do their jobs and struggle to come up with answers never feels mundane. It seems less about realism and more about the steady build up of information and momentum, which certainly requires time, and while I certainly noticed the film’s length it really added to the effectiveness of the whole thing (and to the points that were quietly made), starting in the late 1960s and ending in the early 1990s.
As far as similarities with other films, Zodiac’s attention to the detail of systems and procedures reminds me of Fritz Lang minus that director’s often caustic view of human behavior. It is also somewhat reminiscent of the ‘70s work of Alan Pakula (All the President’s Men) and the police centered films of Sidney Lumet. There is no homage in this movie though; instead it seems to exist as a standalone work that consciously resists the temptation to fall back on any specific earlier stylistic tropes (its general tendency to classical film style isn’t self-conscious or inclined to any particular filmmaker’s signature). To expand, the bulk of the film is set in the 1970s, and while Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (a film also inspired by the string of Zodiac murders) becomes a brief part of the story, the film never reaches for the (anti)-conventions that are a large part of that decade’s most revered movies. This is particularly notable during the ending, which while leaning toward one suspect as the killer, still lacks the sense of closure that most Hollywood films feature. One recurring aspect of ‘70s cinema was how many pictures ended in one big question mark, sometimes successfully, other times with a ham-fisted attempt at profundity that would miss its mark by a wide margin (My, aren’t we deep?). Maybe the studio denied Fincher and Co the opportunity to end on this type of lingering ambiguousness, but my gut reaction is to credit the creators with the denouement’s mixture of no emotional closure and the attempt through written text on black screen to arrive at an ending that didn’t leave audiences with a shoulder-shrugging That’s it?. I really want to see the longer cut of this, because my suspicion is that the ending will be the same. It deals with its lack of a tidy emotional conclusion in a contemporary way, fitting quite well with the rest of the film. Zodiac mixes genres but isn’t a genre movie. It’s influenced by the past but not beholden to or infatuated with it. One of the strongest compliments I can give it is to describe it as being a film completely of its period. It’s not avant-garde (that is to say, ahead of its time) or cultish, though it uses state of the art tech to increase its effectiveness, its efficiency. Its maturity and knowledge of the past never for an instant leans toward stodginess or self-importance; instead it moves with a smart, smooth pace that is plugged into the specific complexities of right now.
Zodiac dumps a shit-load of information on us and then deftly pulls us along to a point where we are asked to swallow the lack of finality. Its characters spend the entire running time either refusing or finally finding ways to let go of the past, and when it’s clear that all the principals in the film have come to that crossroads, the credits are rolling, and then we have to make that choice as well. The choice that the film makes is clear, for like any truly contemporary artwork (lit, film, painting, music, etc) its direction is soundly delineated: Forward.