Real Life

In the comments section for this excellent post by Glenn Kenny about the “torture debate,” as I suppose I’m forced to call it, surrounding Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s Zero Dark Thirty, which was stirred up originally in a piece by Glenn Greenwald that Glenn Kenny is directly refuting, I left this comment (which has been edited for content, length, and clarity), in regards to not Zero Dark Thirty, as I hadn’t seen the film at the time, but rather violence and morality and perhaps, but perhaps not, immorality in films in general, Taxi Driver specifically, and how critics and film lovers approach and process such material:

Cool, the ending of Taxi Driver is not. Horrifying, it certainly is. But I’m very tired of the kneejerk reaction, when faced with one kind of simplification of that film’s climax, to counter with another simplification coming from the opposite direction. For all the blown-apart hands and knife wounds, is it so easily forgotten that Travis Bickle – not a man to be admired or emulated, as the film does make clear – chooses as his victims men who operate and/or patronize a grimy New York whorehouse that offers to its clients 12-year-old girls? To whom they can, and are even expected to, do whatever they please? And the variety of things they might please to do is laid out pretty clearly by Sport at one point. Schrader and Scorsese didn’t do this on a whim.

Glenn says that Zero Dark Thirty makes him uneasy, and I believe it does. The fact that he loves it at least partly for that reason is a rare reaction. Over the years, I’ve noticed that, among the many positive things a film might offer, one that many critics and cinephiles claim to desire most is a film that challenges their core beliefs and received morality. It’s been my experience, however, both as an observer of people who claim to want this and as someone who claims to want this himself, that this is pretty much bullshit. Not all the time, but most of the time, and pretty much. I’ve seen it over and over again – a film presents a discomforting moral ambiguity, and that ambiguity is absorbed in such a way that all the fuzz and haze that held the two or more points of the ambiguity together is sharpened, for the viewer, so that the film is saying either one thing or the other. Whether the thing the viewer has decided is being said means the viewer loves the film for confirming their beliefs, or hates the film for rejecting them, depends a lot on what the person wanted out of the film in the first place.

This is why I hope to never again hear or read anyone talk about Straw Dogs. Peckinpah was one of the most ruthless purveyors of morally uncomfortable films, and he was never more ruthless or aggressive than with Straw Dogs. It’s almost as if he was specifically saying ‘So you think you want to be challenged on these grounds? Okay. Let’s go.’ The reactions to that film over the years, both positive and negative (‘fascist work of art’ my ass) is a strong indicator that this sort of thing isn’t really that desired at all. And not that I think Greenwald would ever want moral ambiguity in whatever the hell he considers good art, but this is precisely the line of thinking he’s following, right off the cliff.

Now, I would regard it as just swell if I could leave it at that, as far as the aforementioned torture debate is concerned, but now that I have seen Zero Dark Thirty I feel like I’m compelled to address it again, with the weight of experience now upon me. And frankly, I resent that. I resent that some myopic pinheaded dope with a massive forum like Glenn Greenwald can set the tone of the conversation about Zero Dark Thirty before he’d ever even seen it (that’s what Greenwald did, though his stance didn’t shift a millimeter after he did finally see it, which as plot twists go is about as shocking as the guy who’s a werewolf in a werewolf movie turning out to be a werewolf), so that now any time somebody wants to throw in their two cents – which is what I’m trying to do in this post, not prolong this asinine debate – they might appear chickenshit if they decided to hop over that particular landmine, even if the avoidance is born out of a total lack of interest. Which is just about where I find myself. But if Greenwald can, after he’d seen Zero Dark Thirty, stand the ground he staked out before he’d done so, then I should be able to do the same. Because make no mistake, I believe what I said in the above-quoted comment now more than ever. As far as I’m concerned, Bigelow and Boal’s approach to the torture scenes (the torture of captured terrorists by American military and CIA operatives, just in case I need to be clear, which, if the Greenwald side of this whole thing has taught me anything, I just might) in Zero Dark Thirty is an, if anything, on-the-nose illustration of my point. I believe the moral ambiguity at play here was entirely intentional on their part (without believing that either of them condones torture; this is neither counterintuitive nor hypocritical, by the way), and was meant to be absorbed as an ambiguous moral point. Greenwald and others are quite right when they point out that beginning Zero Dark Thirty with real audio clips of 911 calls made by those who died and nearly died in the September 11 terrorist attacks, and then segueing directly into the film’s first of many torture scenes, sets a certain tone, but where they’re wrong is what that tone is. That tone can perhaps be best illustrated through a kind of dumbass equation: this happened because that happened. Furthermore, over the course of the film it turns out that torture techniques (ironically enough, the very deliberate not torturing of a detainee, but why should we let that cloud the issue?) do yield a key piece of evidence that gets the ball rolling towards the location and execution of Osama bin Laden (oh incidentally, that’s what Zero Dark Thirty is about). But even further if you have eyes in your head and can figure out what happens in movies while you watch them you’ll see that the film’s primary CIA torturer (played by Jason Clarke) begins to not like doing it. I myself, as someone who found it pretty easy to admit the detainee at the beginning of the film was a confessed terrorist, can hardly blame him.
I swear to God. I cannot believe anybody has to tell other people, grown people, what was in the movie they just saw in order to get them to put away the goddamn picket signs and consider for five seconds that art, even art about current events, might have other goals in mind than simply parroting back at the audience the moral viewpoint they walked in with. And really, not even parroting back at the audience – parroting back at you. Al Pacino’s “You fuckin’ child in Glengarry Glen Ross springs to mind unbidden. As I say, I’ve become resentful.

The mild irony of all this is that, unlike Glenn Kenny and others, like Tom Carson, who have written well in defense of Zero Dark Thirty against Greenwald’s slack-jawed self-righteousness, I didn’t love the film. Don’t worry, I liked it – I may have even Liked It Very Much. But quite unexpectedly, the film has about it more than a whiff of the true story as classically told by Hollywood, which, depending on which era is the one being classical, can mean a wonderful display of craft or a schematic, button-pushing exercise. Zero Dark Thirty feels like both, and can’t sail over the rough spots on the strength of its central performance by Jessica Chastain as Maya, the young CIA agent who has spent her entire career, which began fresh out of high school, doing nothing but hunt for Osama bin Laden. Chastain is a terrific actress, what they call “luminous” in Malick’s The Tree of Life and other films – there’s a good reason why she’s been everywhere lately -- and seems like a good and potentially fascinating to lead Zero Dark Thirty, but I think a mixture of Boal and Bigelow’s falling back on Hollywood shorthand and bullet points (see, for instance, the moment where Kyle Chandler as Joseph Bradley, Maya’s CIA chief in Islamabad, drops off a file for her and asks her if she even knows what he wants back from her, and she rattles off with a smirk all the procedures she’s memorized, calling them after Bradley as he walks away with a “Oh boy these precocious young people!” sigh) and perhaps either bad direction or just plain not being seated for this kind of role (in this case, watch Chastain during a scene about halfway through the film where she freaks out on Chandler after he makes clear that his priorities have shifted away from bin Laden, and note all of the what I call “weird actor things” she does with her head) combine to make her appear to be very much playing a role – move my head here for this effect, add a lilt on this syllable to play up the humor…it’s all very mechanical, surprisingly so.

But maybe the problem is Mark Boal, and his script. Or rather, Mark Boal under the tutelage of Bigelow. This is only Boal’s second script after 2008’s The Hurt Locker (he also has a story credit on Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah), but more so than in that earlier Bigelow film I could feel Bigelow’s long history working within a particular form of Hollywood genre filmmaking come through. It’s right about now that I suppose I should say that outside of her recent work, I’ve never been much of a fan of Bigelow. I’m not overly keen on 1980s action movies in general, which is the kind of thing on which Bigelow built her name, and my admittedly meager experience of her work up until The Hurt Locker (only Strange Days and Near Dark, if you’re going to push me on the issue) did nothing for me. I don’t like the “This is cool, right? This is the 1980s/1990s, so this is cool” tone of it all, nor do I like the way such films manufacture the ragtag crew of shaggy fringe professionals who bust each other’s ass and have put lizards on their shoulders and eat from giant sacks of popcorn while explaining complex computer systems to the new guy in the suit. Now mind you, Zero Dark Thirty is not that kind of movie. But bits of that kind of movie seep in, and I can picture Bigelow sitting Mark Boal down and screening a series of her own films and those of her ex-husband, James Cameron, for whom such films are not just everything but the only ting, and telling him to chart Zero Dark Thirty somewhat along those lines. This results in Chastain’s first scene with her first Islamabad crew, and the news-reader spilling out of information from one after another of them – exposition as straining small talk -- so that we know they all have voices, but also allowing Chastain’s New Kid to question their analysis and make them begrudgingly say “Hey she’s not so bad!” with their faces. It also leads to a moment near the end when Chris Pratt’s Seal Team Six soldier telling his buddies, while they’re in the helicopter on the way to storm bin Laden’s compound, that he’s listening to a Tony Robbins self-help tape so his buddies can laugh because what a character, but he’s like no, these are really helpful, ha ha ha but he’s a Navy Seal! This bit has the virtue of being blissfully shorter than the eyeholes sketch in Django Unchained, but if anything it feels even more out of place. Tarantino at least sets things up in such a way that it seems like he can do just about anything he wants, only proving otherwise when he tries something that falls on its face and breaks its nose. Zero Dark Thirty is supposed to be much more rigidly structured and composed. This doesn’t preclude the existence of any humor, and the film does have some genuine, earned laughs, but the Tony Robbins scene is the most blatant example of Bigelow’s predilection for the kind of film I described above blowing a hole in Zero Dark Thirty and tumbling through.

Of course, there’s much in the film that is excellent. Pratt’s verbal, not-fat equivalent of “fat guy falls down” aside, the raid on bin Laden’s compound, which lasts about a half hour or so, is pretty phenomenal. In fact I’d say that at around the point Maya tells James Gandolfini’a “CIA director” (Leon Panetta, I’m assuming) “I’m the motherfucker who found this place,” Zero Dark Thirty was just about on rails – just about – and that counts for a good hour (for one thing, the expository dialogue becomes a lot cleaner in this stretch). Also in that chunk of time we get Mark Strong, as one of Maya’s supervisors confronting the National Security Advisor (Stephen Dillane) in a White House hallway, angry that the intelligence indicating bin Laden’s presence in an Abottobad, Pakistan compound is not being followed up on more vigorously by the President. In this scene, two men on different sides of the aisle are shown spitting nails at each other in the pursuit of doing their respective jobs well, with each job moving towards the same end result. This is a unique scene in modern American films, I think you'll agree. On top of this you had to add Jason Clarke as Dan, the operative who walks Maya through the CIA’s detainee program, and who is the man who does most of the film’s torturing. This is an outstanding performance, and for about half the film it seems like Clarke is Chastain’s co-lead. The reason he isn’t is the part of Zero Dark Thirty during which Glenn Greenwald must have got up to pee, but anyway Clarke plays Dan as a smart, good man who believes his job is incredibly vital, and he’s correct. In the course of his job he does things that a lot of people vehemently disapprove of, and maybe by the end he does too, so he shifts focus to do another kind of job. Bigelow and Boal’s absolute refusal to comment on him or judge him is perhaps Zero Dark Thirty’s greatest achievement, and Clarke moves through it all as a man we think we can see completely even though we don’t know a thing about him.

However, if Zero Dark Thirty has anything truly fascinating to communicate, the most fascinating message might well be that David Fincher’s Zodiac is possibly going to be quite the influential film for some time to come. Just this year we have two major releases that owe some pretty clear debts to Fincher’s masterpiece, the other one being Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner’s Lincoln, of all things. From Zodiac, Lincoln borrowed the idea of the procedural structure as a means to depict both a historical epic and a historical snapshot, as well as its use of a large cast of instantly recognizable actors as the solution to a narrative problem (although these days Spielberg casts his movies like that anyway). The link between Zodiac and Zero Dark Thirty is rather more direct, as through the swirl of politics and history Bigelow and Boal’s film is, like Fincher’s, finally about obsession, and finding answers, and closure, and an end to things. Chastain’s Maya is Zodiac’s Paul Avery, David Toschi, and Robert Graysmith all wrapped up into one person, with everybody else in Zodiac transported over as everybody else in Zero Dark Thirty at the junction where it looks like Maya should move on. Not that I thinks she should, but it’s not hard to take their point. Hunting bin Laden, like the hunt for the Zodiac Killer, after a while comes to look like at worst a wild goose chase, and at best no longer as urgent as it once was. Agree to disagree, I guess, and thank God Maya felt the same way, because she achieves the payoff that eluded, and continues to elude, Graysmith. The film goes to great pains to imply – though not to unambiguously state – that they agree with James Ellroy’s claim that “closure is bullshit,” if not on a national scale than at least for Maya. Zero Dark Thirty’s goal, ultimately, is to be intimate, something Zodiac was after too, in its way. Procedures are followed by people, after all. That’s maybe the whole idea, but in the case of Zero Dark Thirty that idea feels like just a way to close out and go to credits, but it’s the lifeblood of Zodiac.

From the Mouth of a Wooden Clown

Tomorrow, Criterion will be releasing Paul Bartel's 1982 satire Eating Raoul and David Fincher's 1997 thriller The Game on DVD and Blu-ray, and it's interesting to note that both films, which are wildly divergent from each other in pretty much every other conceivable way, deal in some way with money, either the not having of it and how that can effect a person, or having a whole mess of it and how that can effect a person. I don't know, maybe there's been something in the news recently that can explain this coincidence. Anyhow, I'd seen both films before, many years ago, and had what I considered pretty ironclad reasons for disliking them: Eating Raoul wasn't funny, and The Game was stupid. But Bartel's film has always had some level of critical/cult acceptance, and while the film seems to have been somewhat forgotten over the years, this Criterion release will, I suppose, either reinvigorate the love some have for this really very modest little comedy, or prove that Eating Raoul did indeed have a very specific sell-by date, one that has long since passed. For myself, I was perfectly happy to give it another look and see what there was to see. As for The Game, as Fincher's place among living, working, and vital American directors has risen, so has the reputation for this movie, which was not exactly embraced in 1997, though it now enjoys a reasonably healthy cult status. Fincher had just come off of Seven, would go on to make Fight Club after, and so obviously, if you love those two films as much as so many people seem to (I don't, but I do like Fincher), The Game simply can't represent as significant a dip as it appeared. It just can't. Some people are doing a pretty good job of making a case for the film, as Mike D'Angelo does in this piece, so, again, bring it on, says I.

And so what am I left with? Well, in the case of Eating Raoul, I can say that the film is not not funny, but it's also mostly not funny. If you get me. Starring Bartel and long-time associate Mary Woronov as a married couple, Paul and Mary Bland (see, they're bland), the film, which was co-written by Bartel and Richard Blackburn (who in 1973 had previously written and directed the strange horror film Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural, is the kind of satire that aims to take on every side at once. The Blands are boring, and judgmental towards the swingers that populate their apartment building, and the swingers are mostly stupid, cretinous, selfish animals. The Blands dream is to open up a restaurant, but since neither of them make much money they have to get money by either selling off part of Paul's treasured wine collection, only to have the buyer rip Paul off, or to apply for a bank loan, only to have the bank manager (Buck Henry) turn out to be another swinger who basically tries to rape Mary. Then one night, Paul and Mary find themselves being assaulted by a particularly aggressive swinger, and Paul kills him with a frying pan. Swingers tend to be well off -- otherwise how could they live such carefree lives? -- and this one, the dead one, turns out to be no different. The Blands think nothing of emptying his wallet before disposing of the body. This leads them to the idea of luring swingers to their home with the promise of dominatrix-type swinging, provided by a frequently costumed Woronov, where the customer will be murdered, robbed, and disappeared. This also leads them to Raoul (Robert Beltran), a shady locksmith who wants in on their scheme, and who seduces the repressed Mary.

This kind of satire, the kind that sprays its bullets, is fine by me. It's also interesting to watch the film again and realize that the big joke is not, in fact, the one given away by the title, and that the film is not a riff on the Sweeney Todd story. That's the punchline, but not the joke. The joke, the big joke, the joke that the film more or less hinges on, is how easily the characters kill people. There's never a moral hiccup, there's almost never even a thought about jail. It's the most casual thing -- we won't go to jail because we'll get rid of the body and no one will ever miss this freak. This joke is set up early on in a scene with Paul at his job at a liqour store. A man comes in to rob the place while Paul is being chewed out by his boss, who pulls a gun and shoots the robber, then picks up the conversation where he'd left off. So get whatever you want by whatever means necessary, because it doesn't matter. No one cares about anyone but themselves, after all. The problem with this as a target for satire -- and I almost think this is a problem for satire in general -- is that Bartel and Blackburn make it easy on everybody by depicting all of the victims as scumbags. There's very little sting if everybody is the butt of the joke. Unless the joke is perhaps complex enough to include the possibility that by making the audience as uncaring about the bodies piling up as Paul and Mary, Bartel and Blackburn's point has sort of been made.

But is it funny, though? Sometimes. There aren't a lot of films that can be as filled with rotten jokes as Eating Raoul but can also casually throw out any number of genuinely good ones. My favorite is after Bartel has killed one of Mary's customers, who apparently had some sort of hospital/nurse fetish he was paying Mary to fulfill, he says "The consolation is that if you'd done what he wanted, he would have died anyway." But mostly not. Bartel and Woronov came from the experimental wing of the 1960s counterculture, and that's not a wing I think of as having produced a lot of great comedy. The humor that came from that world tended to be an uneasy mix of the psychedelic and/or surreal, the campy, and the broad -- slapstick on mushrooms, I guess somebody might very well have probably called it once. And it's very much not for me. It's not jokes so much as things that appear to be jokes. I never like novels that feature physical slapstick, because describing slapstick almost never works -- slapstick works if the performer knows how to time a specific kind of recklessness (something like that). Writing a description of a pratfall by definition cuts out the joke. The kind of comedy that dominates Eating Raoul somehow manages to be the cinematic, visual equivalent of that. I realize this doesn't make any sense, but that is the effect. A translation of a translation, perhaps. Anyway.

As for Fincher's film, I'm afraid my opinion of that one is essentially exactly the same as it was in 1997. The Game is essentially a paranoid thriller of the kind they used to make in the 1970s, but with the twist-ending hook that really started to take hold of, and strangle, American genre movies in the 90s. Admittedly, the difference between The Game's twist and that of, say, Identity, is that while the later film was transparently reverse-engineered to have a twist ("Here's my story idea, how do we tangle it up so that the idea itself becomes a shocking surprise?"), the Fincher film, which was written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, with an uncredited pass or two by Seven screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, has its twist built in -- it cannot end any way other than the way it does. There is no other way to tell this story, that I can see anyway. The problem is that as an idea it's fundamentally flawed, in that the filmmakers are asking the audience to buy into a relentless form of weird intrigue that they know means precisely jack shit, in the hopes that the audience will be willing and able to drop it all in favor of a large sack of Big Themes, which will be nervously and sweatily handed to them with about twenty minutes left in the film.

But it's pretty good for about forty minutes, minus the Daniel Schorr cameo. In The Game, Michael Douglas plays Nicholas Van Orton, an enormously wealthy man who also seems like he might be kind of a snooty dickwad. Not an outright villain, but a man who lives in a world very far removed from the one most of us live in, and he knows it, and he prefers it that way. Or maybe he only thinks he does, because his life as depicted in the early goings of The Game seems pretty dull and unhappy, even antiseptic. Outside of his professional life, which even though it’s showing some cracks doesn’t appear to be the kind of pumped up beehive that might conceivably cause a person to become addicted to it, Van Orton’s only close personal relationship is with his housekeeper (hey it’s Carroll Baker), and even that one could stand a defrosting or two. So one day, on Nicholas’s birthday in fact, he gets a call from his free-wheeling, former fuck-up of a brother Conrad (Sean Penn), the two meet for lunch, and Conrad gives him a gift. It’s a gift certificate to a company called Consumer Recreation Services, and the gist of the services they provide is that they turn their customer’s life into a thrilling game. Only it’s supposedly more than that, because Conrad, and later two men at Nicholas’s club who he overhears discussing CSR, claim it’s not just fun, but rather a wonderful, life-changing experience. So despite himself, Nicholas goes to the local CSR offices, is led through the registration process by a jokey, confident salesman (very ably played by James Rebhorn), and then, gradually at first but then with increasing intensity, the game kicks off. And it’s an all-consuming game – every facet of Nicholas’s life is involved, and the CSR people seem to be everywhere, and able to do anything, from changing the lock on his briefcase to delivering messages to him through the national news on TV. Nicholas goes from being uneasily intrigued, to just uneasy, to terrified, as he comes to believe, and with good reason, that CSR is not trying to change his life, but to ruin it.

As I say, it’s pretty good for the first forty minutes. Fincher and Co. use some tried and true creepy imagery, such as a large clown doll, to draw everybody into it, and the persistent question “What the hell is going on here?” gives the film its engine. But a host of problems are introduced with the character played by Deborah Kara Unger, none of which have anything to do with Deborah Kara Unger herself. First of all, because Hollywood – and I don’t know if you know this – has a tendency to pick up on things that worked in other movies and cram them into other movies that might not really be built for them, her character (a waitress named Christine who seems involved with the CSR shenanigans in some way but also doesn’t seem to realize it) and Douglas’s become hitched together on his journey to figure all this out, and because their initial meeting wasn’t exactly amiable, but they do feel attracted to each other, etc. You know the routine. It’s around this time that the film starts adding jokes, and though The Game never really threatens to shed its ominous mood and become Romancing the Stone, the idea does seem to have crossed somebody’s mind, and Fincher put in just enough to satisfy that person and mildly wound his film. Not that I actually know if that’s what happened, but it sure feels like it. Besides that, while Christine is a vital plot component, she’s nothing else. The ending tries to make her something else, but no one seems to have realized that the chemistry between Unger and Douglas never took, possibly because on film both performers give off a certain iciness. So it’s hard to care if these two snappy, unemotional people ever make it work in this crazy world. This isn’t even my main gripe, but it’s a symptom. The film unwinds its tension not at the end, but towards the middle, by focusing on things far less interesting than what it’s leaving behind. Knowing how the film ended, and not liking how it ended, I was surprised to realize that if I was watching The Game for the first time, after a while I would have been no more interested in what the film was pretending to be than what it actually turned out to be. When the stakes are raised, and CSR’s tactics become more aggressive, this leads (inevitably? To some, maybe, but it shouldn’t be) to shots of CSR vans, and CSR agents, I guess, piling out with machine guns to spray bullets up at the apartment where they know Nicholas is hiding. This is uninteresting and boring. Cliché thought it may be, the wooden clown that kicks this whole thing off is miles more intriguing than the knowledge that these CSR guys are (but actually aren’t) corporate thugs, or the mob hiding behind a corporate guise, or whatever those uniforms and guns and surveillance vans signify. So at least the ending brings something I hadn’t seen before into the mix, even if it’s something kind of slim. And stupid, but mainly stupid in retrospect. I’d incorrectly remembered the upshot of all this was an attempt to make Nicholas a nicer person, when in fact that’s just one of the presumed side effects. It just now occurs to me that The Game is sort of like A Christmas Carol in this way, and I wonder if that connection occurred to anyone making the film. Regardless, it’s worth thinking about in that way, as it might make some of the stupidness go down easier, but I imagine not much easier. The ending of the film invites all sorts of questions that begin with “But how could they have known…” Mine is “But how could they have known he’d go to the roof?” This isn’t the sort of question I find myself asking of too many films (I’m not very inquisitive, perhaps) but when you create a – and I use this word for the sake of simplicity – villain that can seemingly do anything, and then part of your big reveal is how, in its way, pedestrian the whole thing is, the audience is going to wonder how they manage to seemingly do anything. And plus, what the hell is this shit anyway? A massive, boundlessly wealthy corporation bent to one task: making other boundlessly wealthy people learn a little humility? This is the problem with twists – the complaint often is not, or shouldn’t be, “That would never happen” but rather “I don’t believe what you’ve just told me.” By structuring the film as a twisty thriller, Fincher and the screenwriters end up with something that’s nonsensical. If they’d wanted to explore their idea more directly, this maybe wouldn’t be an issue. It would almost certainly have been a different movie, obviously, but what’s the core idea of The Game that made people want to make it, and how is that idea best served?

But it’s well-made, as you’d expect from Fincher. I’ve become a fan of the guy, the turning point being Zodiac, one of my favorite films, but no amount of Zodiacs or Social Networks or The Girl With the Dragon Tattoos (underrated, in my view) can change my mind about the first half of his career, which to me remains slick, professional, stylish, self-important, and kind of goofy. Another person I’ve had a change of heart about since 1997 is Michael Douglas, who I used to dislike. However, a lightbulb switched on when I was reading William Goldman’s Which Lie Did I Tell?, where he quite logically lays out that the only problem with Douglas is that he’s often miscast. Douglas projects a few very specific things, having to do with race, wealth, and class. Within those few things, there’s a lot of variety and room to move about, but it’s hard to take those qualities and plunk them down in a movie like The Ghost and the Darkness (the film that got Goldman on this topic). The Game, though, is squarely in Douglas’s wheelhouse, and it provides him a good role, which he nails. It’s the movie that lets him down.

The Marlin, the Trout

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I've decided to break into the very early goings of this year's edition of The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! in order to discuss this movie about some website that I've heard some people have left the theater claiming they enjoyed. And this is the thing about David Fincher's The Social Network -- everybody loves it. Or nearly everybody, and so far, but still, the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive up to this point. I can only imagine that Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin are sitting in their respective homes, patiently awaiting the crashing waves of backlash that are unquestionably set to sweep them away.

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Well, I'm not going to be a part of those waves, despite the fact that I'm a minuscule part of the internet that Sorkin doesn't seem to like very much. Which is fine, because I don't happen to like Sorkin very much, and in fact initially resisted The Social Network not because, as many others seem to be doing, it's a movie about Facebook (follow me on Facebook's Networked Blogs, won't you?), but because of Sorkin's involvement. I'm simply not a fan, and I've given the man a fair shake, having seen several episodes each of his major TV shows, and a number of films he's written. His rapid-fire, "Hey lookit me, I'm Ben Hecht!" brand of wiseass banter that makes us laugh as we cry has not only always seemed to me to be too clever by half, but also led me to an understanding of what "too clever by half" actually means, which is this: the cleverness is presumed by the writer to be inherent in the words being spoken, but fails to manifest as such in the ears of the listener. Something like that anyway.

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Saying now that I believe The Social Network is the finest work of Sorkin's career probably sounds hopelessly faint, but I truly do believe the man has written a hell of a good movie here, and I'll return to Sorkin in a minute. First, though, I'll remind you that The Social Network is a film about Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), an arrogant, brilliant computer programmer who, while at Harvard, is pegged by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer, in an extraordinary feat of "twin acting", which, on the levels of both performance and camera trickery, is all the more brilliantly effective for being so casual) as just the guy to help them launch their intra-Harvard social networking website. Zuckerberg accepts, and then becomes, as far as the Winklevosses (or "Winklevi", as Zuckerberg refers to them at one point), a hermit, only to suddenly become the big man on campus because he, along with best friend Eduardo Saverin (Alex Garfield), is the genius behind another website called "The Facebook", which at the level of idea is very similar to the Winklevosses site. As The Social Network is primarily about the legal turmoil that followed the inception of Facebook, and even more about the shocking levels of condescending egomania that can exist in the mind and soul of a single man, it's Zuckerberg's indifferent (on his part) break with the Winklevosses that the ball gets rolling on a film that is pretty relentless as a piece of storytelling, and as a piece of entertainment.

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Because The Social Network is so packed full of words, the film feels like it belongs more to Aaron Sorkin and that excellent cast of actors than it does to director David Fincher, whose attachment pre-release was the soothing balm many people felt they needed to get past the fact that this was a movie about Facebook. But Fincher's craftsmanship is most gratefully noted by me, because this goddamn movie about Facebook absolutely zips along. Meanwhile, on a purely visual level, The Social Network is both beautiful and amusing to look upon. "Amusing" because Fincher's pallette might best be described as "dim" -- watching The Social Network, you might think that the Harvard University campus was in a state of perpetual power outage. In a more forgiving state of mind, one might think that, with all the candles and natural light, Fincher was taking a pretty major cue from Kubrick and Barry Lyndon, though with perhaps a less logical basis for his lighting choices. Either way, the movie looks great, even inviting; I wasn't blessed enough to attend Harvard, but if I knew, or thought, that it constantly looked so rich and dusty and medieval, I probably would have studied harder in high school. Plus, apparently if you give girls Ecstasy they'll kiss each other.

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I've mentioned before that the cast is excellent, and it is. Prior to this, I've been lukewarm on Jesse Eisenberg, and it's very possible I still am. If the idea behind Adam Sandler's magnificent performance in Punch-Drunk Love was that the character he'd been playing in films like Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore suddenly found himself transformed into an actual human being, then Eisenberg's work as Mark Zuckerberg is the sinister twin of the awkward, twitchy fellows he's been playing, with some wearying overlap, in Adventureland and Zombieland. But all that means is that Eisenberg is, at the very worst, perfectly cast as Zuckerberg. At best, he's as good an actor as everybody has been insisting he always was. Eisenberg is helped considerably by two things, the first and most obvious being that Aaron Sorkin has given him some truly plum moments of stratospherically egomaniacal condescension to play throughout. These moments remind me of what I used to consider Sorkin's best piece of writing, the "I am God" speech from Malice, and they can pop up anywhere, but they most memorably occur in the scenes when Eisenberg is being deposed for one or another of the various lawsuits in which he's become embroiled (these deposition scenes also form the film's spine, everything else spinning off from them in flashback). My favorite is when Zuckerberg, in full-bore sneering wiseass mode, checks the very simple math of the attorney for his former best friend, Eduardo.

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Who, by the way, got screwed by Zuckerberg, and is suing him. Because Zuckerberg is an asshole who knows just about everything, except what being an asshole is one day going to cost him. The Zuckerberg of the film was always headed this way, but he's helped along by former Naptser mastermind Sean Parker, played here by Justin Timberlake in, I must say, a very finely tuned performance. The way Timberlake takes Parker from charismatic whizkid to someone you want to punch straight in the mouth is really deft, and might remind the viewer of similar, real-life experiences, in which a friend or friendly acquaintance gradually revealed themselves to not be quite the fun, pleasant guy you thought, but rather someone with a heart full of serpents; and it might remind you of your own reaction, which was one of anger and disappointment, but, surprisingly, not quite surprise.

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Since The Social Network really is Sorkin's film, it's fitting that if anyone gets in the film's way, it's him. Sorkin's style that I've so disliked in the past annoyed me only three or four times in the course of the movie, which is about nineteen or twenty fewer than I'd expected, but which are still damaging. The whole chicken cruelty subplot, which is actually a crucial hinge in the Zuckerberg/Saverin friendship, comes off as so desperately writerly, no matter how closely it might mirror the reality (I have no idea, for the record), that it set my anti-Sorkin sensors flaring. Worse are the various conversational digressions (if you've seen the film, take the "3,000 pound marlin" bit as an example), meant to capture, I suppose, natural human speech and distracted thought processes, but from Sorkin are a bit proud, and unfunny (the latter being especially noticable in a film that is often very funny).

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Then there's the neatness of it all. To hear Sorkin tell it, Zuckerberg's monstrous ambition is fueled, including the monstrous part, by the girl (Rooney Mara) who dumped him. I have no problem with the idea that this moment, which is The Social Network's opening, had a profound impact on him, but I could have done without the later scene, when Zuckerberg sees her again, their meeting goes poorly for him, and he immediately decides to expand Facebook yet again. The Social Network doesn't exhaust itself trying to pin Zuckerberg down, for which I'm thankful, but when it veers that way -- out of obligation, I feel -- it's pretty simplistic. As is the film's final line, which if it wasn't the last line I'd quote in full. Suffice it to say, it's the kind of line that sounds good, but which leads me to wish the screenwriter were in the room so I could ask him "And what exactly does that mean?" Coming at the very end as it does, is a bit unfortunate.

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So the movie's merely excellent. It is not, I don't think, transcendent, which is about the level at which a lot the praise so far is being pitched. And initially, after seeing the film, I thought I might have to do something about that. You know, to stand up for injustice and everything, and begin a campaign to chip away at the Tower of the Overpraisers (as I'd begun to think of them, and it, the instant the end credits started to roll). But then I thought, well, maybe it's enough that The Social Network is really, really good. Maybe that's not a good enough reason for a pacifist such as myself to launch an assault. Then I thought that sometimes this whole deal where people compare and argue over their individual reactions to a given film can sometimes, if you're not careful, get a little bit silly.

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Timing is Everything

You plan and you plan, and what you plan is to watch Let the Right One In this weekend, both because you've been wanting to see it for months, and so you'll have something fresh to write about today. And besides, it feels like it's been a good long while since you're written a serious post about the horror genre. But your "planning" has actually consisted entirely of assuming that the film was available On Demand. Which, you found out yesterday, is not the case. So fine, go rent the damn thing. Okay, I will. Or rather, my wife says she'll pick it up on the way back from an errand she has to run. But our local video store is all out. There has, apparently, been a run on moody Swedish vampire films. As a result, I have no Let the Right One In to write about, but have learned, instead, a valuable lesson: planning gets you nowhere!

I'll watch some other movie soon and write that up instead, but, in the meantime, anybody else surprised about this?
I haven't seen the film yet, and therefore have no opinion, but I do know that it's hardly being heralded as a major triumph for David Fincher. Criterion has done this before, though, albeit some years after the film's release, with Ang Lee's The Ice Storm*. Maybe I'm just oblivious to the high regard with which Lee's film is held, but that one I have seen, and it didn't strike me as any kind of modern classic (or important, either). It seemed too scrubbed clean and proud of itself. But it was based on a novel by Rick Moody, so the being-proud-of-itself thing was probably built in. Anyway, I could more easily see a Criterion release for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Or Hulk, for that matter.


*Of course, Criterion also has Chasing Amy, Armageddon and The Rock under their belt, but I always hoped that was just a phase they were going through.