The Killer (2023)

Score: 3.5 / 5

A new David Fincher film? On Netflix? With Michael Fassbender? It didn't take much to put The Killer on my awards season watchlist, so I never really knew what to expect. And, now having seen it, I don't really know how to feel. It is at once exactly what I imagined and a bizarre surprise that didn't quite earn my favor. Make no mistake: Fincher is as precise and commanding as he's ever been, and the film is a blessing to behold. It's just a strange story with unexpected tone, and its release exclusively on streaming does it no favors in that regard.

A Fincher thriller about a hitman whose most recent job got botched? Yeah, okay, that tracks. The story of a cold-blooded, calculated assassin who has to reckon with suddenly losing control of his craft? Sounds suspicioiusly personal for Fincher, notoriously exacting in his obsessive creativity. Starring a man accomplished in playing heartless monsters and scary killers? Michael Fassbender has it down to a science. The dramatized perfectionism exceeds the story, adapted by Andrew Kevin Walker (8mm, Sleepy Hollow, The Wolfman, and Se7en), and feels quite at home with both cast and crew, blurring the lines between art and artists. Even when Tilda Swinton shows up, it's less a shock and more a natural bit of casting inclusion; of course she'd be there too, whether you see this as an exercise in coldly precise artists working together or because you see this film as an updated, zhuzhed-up Michael Clayton (which crossed my mind more than once). 

But it's also not what you'd expect because of its odd sense of humor. Granted, part of this may stem from its source material, a French graphic novel series I don't know anything about. The opening sequence is of the nameless protagonist -- Fassbender as the titular professional assassin -- staking out a hotel room and waiting for his target to arrive, and as chilling as it is to watch someone watching for someone, his "method," if you will, involves listening to The Smiths on repeat and justifying his murderous job to us in listless voiceover. The deadpan presentation is helped by the ironic music, to be sure, but also in an almost Ebenezer Scrooge-like means of self-defense via monologue; the killer often keys us into his own justification for being creepy and violent by noting that his actions are infinitesimal compared to the number of people are born and die any given day.

Things become less drily funny when his stakeout ends in disaster. Faced with running and hiding as his only reasonable option, he returns home to find his girlfriend in a bad way, and then he makes a shattering decision. Everything we've learned about him has been planned and calculated, emphasized in his repeated rule to never improvise or get emotionally involved. Suddenly he chooses to make this personal and seek revenge. He embarks on a bloody journey that, while mostly predictable in conventional narrative, remains endlessly watchable due to the cinematic craftsmanship on display by a team working in perfect harmony, harnessing the perfectionist streak of its protagonist and owning that same perfectionism in each aspect of bringing the film's world to life.

Fascinating and beautiful as it all is, it's also hard to connect with emotionally. Maybe we're not supposed to. I'm glad that the film never makes its leading man sympathetic -- I kept expecting some revelation meant to endear us to him -- but his detached approach to murder also saps the film of some of its prurient intrigue. Sometimes you want someone to love or hate more than just vaguely fear. Then again, this isn't a story of feelings. It's a story of someone who so carefully constructs their lives around being perfect and precise who then makes a mistake and has to messily deal with that to protect himself. Again, doesn't it sound a little personal for Fincher? That might also be why its strange tone leans so far into comedy. I was reminded more than once of Steven Soderbergh's filmography, vacillating between riveting dramatic thrillers and crime comedies. This is Fincher's version of the latter, including a running gimmick about the killer's aliases and countless references to name brands (some would say product placement), a curiously bitter commentary on our commodified, consumer culture that keeps us all connected while distracting us from very real threats walking among us.

Mank (2020)

Score: 4.5 / 5

A challenging, glorious piece that is as unexpected as it is familiar, Mank is the first feature film from director David Fincher since 2014. But for those of us hoping for anything resembling Fincher's regular fare, Mank is not what we expected or wanted. It's a biopic that dramatizes the life of screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz as he wrote Citizen Kane, his most famous work. Interestingly, this movie does not attempt to definitively solve the controversy regarding who actually deserves credit for the screenplay between its titular character and Orson Welles -- both of whom won the Oscar for it -- and while it certainly uses popular scrutiny over that question to frame the drama, Fincher veers away from any determinism to instead craft the year's most fascinating character study.

The year is 1940 and Herman "Mank" Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) is dictating his newest screenplay to his assistant (Lily Collins) while recovering from a broken leg. His new director, Orson Welles (Tom Burke), has finally been given complete artistic control over his newest film, and the two eccentric, theatrical personalities clearly will have some conflict, as we can see right away. Mank, nursing himself with alcohol, agrees to take no credit for his work, even as he obsesses over the script. From his assistant to his director, people slowly begin to realize the script screams its dangerous similarities to William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), a powerful media mogul and political meddler, and try to get Mank to change the material. Refusing to give in, he finally completes it in time, breaks his contract with Welles, and demands credit for what he -- and others -- deem to be his greatest work.

Not perhaps the most interesting plot when described that way, but the meat of Mank lies in its plentiful flashbacks, shown sequentially during the previous decade, as Herman enters the Hollywood scene and hobnobs with the elite. He meets Marion Davies (an amazing Amanda Seyfried), young actress and Hearst's lover, with whom he strikes up a sweet friendship. By ingratiating himself with Hearst, Mank becomes a screenwriter at MGM, ruled by the imposing Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard). Of course, Mayer and Hearst -- both wealthy and powerful Republicans in California -- have formed a tight political monopoly on propaganda, and launch a smear campaign against Upton Sinclair, running on a socialist platform. It's interesting to note that these fancy dinner parties are occurring even as the Depression reaches its lowest point and President Roosevelt is unveiling his New Deal. Some of these scenes -- political dialogue and all -- are the most dramatically potent and memorable of the movie, and I can't help but be surprised by Fincher's uncharacteristically timely content.

What's fascinating about this movie is that it's barely about its own plot; otherwise, it would be much easier to follow along, even with its almost inert drama. I think it's deeply about Herman's psychology -- speculative and dubious as it may be -- and about the state of the art. This is no love letter to old Hollywood. The studio system here is as venal and vile as you could imagine, ruled by rich bigwigs and their politics, where no one seems to enjoy their work, much less find interest in moviemaking. And yet, Fincher's typically obsessive control over his craft is palpable, and it is hard not to see this movie as a companion piece to Citizen Kane rather than a movie about its inception. In fact, I immediately rewatched the Welles masterpiece (which I've never much liked, despite the hoopla) and felt that I was seeing it for the first time. Fincher adopts some of the visual style of that landmark movie in his work here, along with cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, theatrically upstaging crucial elements, casting long dark shadows, and occasionally swirling in some expressionistic imagery just for fun.

Both movies are filmed in black and white, and Fincher even draws little circles in the corners of frames like in a traditional reel change. Mank isn't stark b&w, though, but almost cream and gray, providing more access to a modern audience while quietly shifting our experience from one of fiction to one of dreamlike memory, as if Fincher's drama were a Tennessee Williams play. Why is this interesting? Two reasons, one I think artistically satisfying, and one deeply disturbing. First, this new recreation of classic Hollywood style symbolizes the same kind of pre-Golden Age mythos, disguising a corrupt system of money and politics, that Herman Mankiewicz lived in, loved, and grew to hate. Second, though, is our realization that, especially during the pandemic as cinemas closed and everything went to streaming services, we're watching this movie on Netflix. Netflix and Amazon Prime and Hulu and Disney Plus, among other companies now, are doing exactly what the major studios did before old Hollywood broke up. The companies are in complete control of their means of production and of distribution, controlling their material not in independently owned movie theaters but in millions of screens in every subscriber's home, workplace, and pocket. I can't help but wonder if Fincher's usual thematic interest in the darker sides of humanity is not actually present in Mank, but just hidden better: the major studio system Mank rails against is returning.