Daily Archives: Saturday, November 21, 2015

  • The Social Network

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Fincher (2010)

    It’s hard to believe that this wonderfully concise and entertaining film about the creation and creators of Facebook comes from the man whose previous picture was the interminably vague The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  David Fincher’s films had being getter longer, extending from Se7en (128 minutes), through Fight Club (139) and Zodiac (158), to Benjamin Button (166).  The Social Network runs just two hours and there isn’t a dull moment.  The film opens, at Harvard in the autumn of 2003, with an extended dialogue in a student bar between Mark Zuckerberg and his sort-of girlfriend, Erica Albright.  The exchange is rapid and relentless and works on your nerves:  Mark is alarmingly brittle and borderline paranoid, continuously questioning what Erica has said, finding hidden, negative meanings in it, expressing his own anxieties and prejudices.  (The effect, oddly enough, isn’t that far removed from that of reading Ivy Compton-Burnett.)  From this point onwards, the emotional velocity of the film is unyielding – yet it’s never monotonous.   The Social Network is genuinely exciting because its subject and history are so contemporary and because the director and writer know exactly what they’re doing (and are doing something worthwhile).  Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue is dazzlingly, insistently clever but the writer’s showing off never comes over as just showing off because the people in this film are hyper-articulate:  the torrent of smart talk always seems to be in character.  (The tagline for the film – ‘You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies’ – is worthy of the writing in it.)

    Based on The Accidental Billionaires, a 2009 (non-fiction) book by Ben Mezrich, The Social Network has a clear narrative line, framed by scenes from the hearing of lawsuits brought against Mark Zuckerberg by the twin brothers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (who approach Mark for help with programming their idea for a new website, ‘The Harvard Connection’, and claim he then pinched their idea for his own venture) and by Mark’s ex-best friend Eduardo Saverin (who helps him financially, and in other ways, with the launch of Facebook then gets frozen out of its prodigious profits).  The tensions and ironies of the story, although obvious enough, give the movie a richly entertaining texture.  We watch very clever people motivated by selfish needs and childish impulses to do ingenious things.  We see the archaic social hierarchies of Harvard (the sadism that governs the rites of passage into the Phoenix club into which Eduardo is accepted and that Mark hasn’t a prayer of even getting tested for) – and the part they play in bringing about socially revolutionary technology.  The Harvard that Fincher creates here is fascinating – the social layers, the mixture of grungy, boozy languor and extreme competitiveness, the idea of a closed world changing the world outside it.   Mark expresses himself to an online audience partly as a consequence of his relative isolation.  It’s a key stage in the evolution of this Twittering world – in which, however few or many friends you may have in your life offline, what you’re doing or have to say is reckoned to be of potential interest to everyone in cyberspace.

    Except for Tilda Swinton, I didn’t think Fincher got an interesting performance from his large cast in Benjamin Button:  his orchestration of the players here is acute and subtle.  Jesse Eisenberg, who played the elder son in The Squid and the Whale, is marvellous as Mark Zuckerberg. There’s clearly a risk of this nerdy, to a large extent antisocial, character alienating the audience through his shut-off egocentrism.  There’s not much less a risk that an actor, in trying to avoid that, will overcompensate by making Mark’s vulnerabilities too plain, to ingratiating effect.  Eisenberg performs a considerable balancing act with great skill – he keeps us interested in Mark without letting us feel close to him.  As Eduardo, Andrew Garfield is more evidently acting – but his wit and charm are vital:  they establish a connection with the audience that the film needs (and which Fincher sees that it needs).  Garfield is such a quicksilver performer that you never feel that you’re being manipulated to sympathise with Eduardo.   Justin Timberlake, as Sean Parker, makes a terrific, fast-talking impression in his first scene – and his slightly mannered prettiness works well throughout, although the character of Sean develops into a relatively conventional baddie.  The co-founder of ‘Napster’, an online music file-sharing system, Sean becomes a highly self-serving mentor to Mark and drives a wedge between him and Eduardo.   You could say that Sean allows Mark to realise his true (immediately evident) potential as a user but the film is less distinctive once the action has shifted from Harvard to the cutthroat commercial world in which Sean Parker moves comfortably.

    Armie Hammer plays both Winklevoss twins – with the help (according to an online article about the film) of ‘a body double and a whole lot of CGI’.  The satire of the Winklevi (as Mark calls them in the plural), rich boys and rowing aces, is sometimes a little too broad.  The sequence that sees them competing then socialising with Prince Albert of Monaco at the Henley Regatta is one of Fincher’s and Sorkin’s few failures although, such is the momentum of the film, it’s an almost welcome opportunity to draw breath.  The Social Network is brilliantly cast all the way through.  The actors in smaller parts – especially Douglas Urbanski as the Harvard President Larry Summers, and David Selby, John Getz and Denise Grayson as the senior attorneys involved in the lawsuits brought against Mark – seem effortlessly effective.  They neatly create a character then let Sorkin’s lines do the rest, without pushing them at us.  This is not a movie with great roles for women although Rooney Mara as Erica comes through strongly.

    The editing and sound are superb – and not just from a technical point of view.   The speed and smoothness of the cutting (by Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall) are elating without being flashy.  A good example of this is a sequence in a club, where Mark is having a drink with and talking – or rather listening – to Sean.  The sound perfectly captures not only the experience of fighting to hear an interlocutor when there’s deafening, pulsing noise going on around you in a crowded place but also the fact that – if you manage to make out what the other person is saying  in such circumstances – your concentration on their words, combined perhaps with your slight inebriation, causes their voice to come through as if the Red Sea of noise had parted around it, giving their words an impact and authority that lodges them almost physically in your brain.  The music (by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) and cinematography (Jeff Cronenweth) support the film without drawing attention to themselves.

    The scene in which Eduardo vents his anger that Mark and Sean have reduced his share of the company from a third to less than one tenth of one percent is very well staged.  This kind of sequence, coming near the end of a film, tends to be determinedly conclusive with one character gaining the upper hand unequivocally, the other(s) utterly vanquished.  That doesn’t happen here:  all three men look defeated and shaken by the experience – and the emotional dynamics here are a good example of the moral ambiguities of The Social Network, the fact that Fincher and Sorkin don’t simply take sides.   In the last scene, one of the lawyers on Mark’s team (Rashida Jones) explains to him that they’ll be settling with Eduardo out of court:  they’re worried that Mark’s personality will go down badly with a jury.   The lawyer’s parting remark to Mark is, ‘You’re not an asshole – you’re just trying so hard to be one’.   Mark goes to the Facebook page of Erica (who branded him an asshole in the film’s opening scene) and applies to be her friend.  When the computer screen fades from the cinema screen, he’s still waiting for confirmation.  The music over the closing credits is ‘Baby, You’re a Rich Man’.  The very ending of The Social Network is, in other words, much more definitive than the rest of the film but I didn’t have a problem with Fincher’s sealing things up in this way.  It serves in effect as a distillation, a confirmation of the audience’s feelings, about what we’ve just seen.   Those feelings are a mixture of unease and exhilaration.

    10 October 2010

  • Gone Girl

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Fincher (2014)

    Novels with first person narrators, when adapted for the screen, are often diminished by a loss of voice and the lack of an adequate replacement for it.   This is not a problem with making a film of Gone Girl in which the husband and wife protagonists, Nick and Amy Dunne, tell the story in alternating chapters:  you’re glad to be rid of their voices.  Both are dislikeable from the start of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 psychological thriller.  The competition between Nick and Amy, which has several aspects, is keenest in which of them will have proved the more tiresomely hateful once you’ve got through the 460 pages of Flynn’s novel.  They used to earn a living as writers of sorts and that suits Flynn very well:  it provides a kind of justification for the narrators’ often gratingly self-conscious use of language (even if this tendency is really Gillian Flynn’s) and a plausible pretext for trying out more than one narrative voice for Amy.   She disappears from the couple’s Missouri home on the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary.  The vanishing of this highly photogenic woman – who as a child was the inspiration for ‘Amazing Amy’, in a long-running series of books by her psychologist parents – sparks huge media interest and turns Nick Dunne into prime suspect and, in the words of a television talk show host who interviews him, ‘the most hated man in America right now’.

    In the first part of the book, Amy’s account of her decaying marriage to Nick takes the form of diary entries written over several years, starting with their first meeting in New York in 2005.  She’s a native New Yorker and he’s working there:  they move back to his home town of Carthage, Missouri after they’ve both lost their jobs in the wake of the 2008 recession.  Much of Amy’s ample trust fund has been clawed back by her parents, who’ve invested unwisely and whose books are no longer selling.  Nick’s mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer into the bargain.  Amy’s remaining funds are used to set up a bar in Carthage, which Nick runs with his twin sister, Margo (whose name is irritatingly – and, for this reader, confusingly, when it’s the first word in a sentence – abbreviated to ‘Go’).   Metropolitan-minded Amy is increasingly stultified in the small town; Nick’s secret affair with a nubile young student in the creative writing class he teaches there, when he’s not at the bar, is the last straw for their marriage as far as Amy’s concerned.  Halfway through Gone Girl, the diary entries stop and Amy takes over the narrative reins in the present:  it turns out that she hates Nick so much that she’s framing him for her murder.  She has faked her own abduction (and a pregnancy), making deliberate mistakes in her preparation of the ‘crime scene’ so as to raise suspicion that it’s her husband who’s faked the abduction.  The diary itself, left in order to be found, was a fraud – at least the later entries were:  in these, Amy describes a growing fear that Nick may kill her.

    Amy hides out in a motel – deglamorising herself as best she can, eating junk food to put on disguising weight, avidly watching television coverage of the investigation into her disappearance.  At first, she intends to drown herself and, in doing so, provide clinching evidence of her husband’s guilt so that he too pays with his life (Missouri still has the death penalty).  I’m not sure how convincing it is that Amy changes her mind about suicide – and decides, after seeing Nick’s apologetic TV interview, that she wants to resurrect their marriage, but Gillian Flynn needs this volte face in order for Amy eventually to return.  The journey home is a long one for the reader as well as for Amy.  Two other motel guests rob her of the large wad of cash she’s carrying.  In desperation, she contacts a rich, creepy ex-boyfriend called Desi Collings, who was crazy about Amy in high school and remains pathologically devoted to her.  After she’s told him how terrified she is of Nick, Desi sets Amy up – virtually imprisons her – in his luxury lake house and sees that she goes on a diet that will restore her former, floral slenderness.  Amy eventually murders Desi and drives back to Carthage.  Preparing to do so, she rehearses to herself the complicated lies she’s going to need to tell the police and this tall story, as you read it, sounds like Gillian Flynn checking that there are no holes in her elaborate plotting.  Amy’s narrative in Gone Girl includes a good deal of complaint about how she’s been treated by Nick – treatment which she generalises as typical male behaviour.  This gives the writing a ‘feminist’ sheen but Flynn is as slippery as her main characters:  Nick, unappealing as he is, can hardly not be preferred to the ‘psycho bitch’ (her husband’s phrase) that Amy turns out to be.  The longer it goes on, the more the novel seems to be less the story of Nick and Amy than a demonstration – almost a self-examination – by the author of her cold, shallow cleverness.

    The book is overlong; so too is David Fincher’s (149-minute) screen adaptation, for which Gillian Flynn wrote the screenplay.  You don’t get bored, though, and the film is a professional job – with insidiously oppressive murky photography by Jeff Cronenweth (even though, as Anthony Lane has noted in the New Yorker, the locale doesn’t develop the character you might expect from Fincher) and another effective score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross:  their music nods, in alternation, to the story’s themes of fake happiness and malicious reality.  There’s one bad lapse into trashy tastelessness:  Amy’s killing of Desi is garishly staged but, much worse, is the fact that, once she’s back in Carthage, she sits in hospital clothing, answering police questions, yet still covered in her victim’s blood – for no better reason than that she has to go home in that state for Fincher to get maximum impact from a scene in which Amy and Nick stand no-secrets naked in the shower together and the blood on her mingles with the water and swirls Psycho­-style down the plughole.  The film’s ending, more elaborate than the novel’s, is too protracted but the storytelling throughout is clear – Fincher’s handling of the broadcast media phenomenon that the Dunnes become, although it contains few surprises, is particularly accomplished.  The editing, by his usual cutter Kirk Baxter, is very crisp.

    David Fincher can’t, however, resolve what is fundamentally wrong with, or objectionable about, the source material.  Shorn of most of Amy’s the-evil-that-men-do invective, the film of Gone Girl comes across as more simply misogynist.  Fincher, reasonably enough, concentrates less on what Amy has to say than on what she is prepared to do to Nick and Desi – and to herself – in order to destroy them.  (Her blood-letting in her kitchen at home, designed to incriminate her husband, is only a warm-up for her masochistic self-harm in the lake house: in order to be able to claim that she was kept prisoner and repeatedly raped by abductor Desi, Amy binds her own wrists and ankles and penetrates herself with a wine bottle to simulate forced entry.)  As in the novel, once Amy is revealed to be still alive the big plot card has been played – with half the story still to go.  This inevitably switches the focus of attention from the mystery of what’s happened onto the characters of her and Nick – and they’re just not interesting.  The only satisfaction in the outcome to Gone Girl is that you feel they deserve each other – and to inflict themselves on each other, instead of on the audience.

    Rosamund Pike is good for as long as she’s playing the disappeared Amy – a tantalising, elusive figure.  Once the avenging Amy is fully on screen, Pike seems too lightweight for the role.  In the book, a little of Amy’s vindictive dynamism went a long way:  it may seem unfair therefore to complain that Pike is an image rather than a personality (especially since Gillian Flynn’s Amy is a fancy idea rather than a character to start with) but she lacks the charge that the role needs.   (In disguise, Pike’s Amy occasionally suggests photographs of Sylvia Plath, which puts an odd spin on the unhappy marriage being described in Gone Girl.)  Ben Affleck is an able actor but a dull presence; it’s a back-handed compliment to describe him as right for the part of Nick Dunne but he is.  Nick becomes a media hate figure largely because he doesn’t get emotional on camera the way that a husband in his situation is expected to do.  Affleck can’t make Nick’s inappropriate public manner, and its relationship with his private personality, as fascinating as this element was in A Cry in the Dark but you can hardly expect that:  Nick Dunne isn’t as complex a character as Lindy Chamberlain seems to have been (and Ben Affleck isn’t Meryl Streep).  Affleck’s acting is intelligent, though.  He convincingly becomes more animated whenever Nick has the opportunity for spontaneous expressions of selfishness; he’s particularly good when Nick gives his mea culpa television interview – insisting that he didn’t kill his wife but admitting he was a bad husband – which transforms his public image and (less credibly) causes Amy to think again.  You believe that Nick Dunne is shrewdly self-serving enough to learn how to perform effectively to camera.

    As Tanner Bolt, the flamboyant celebrity attorney who specialises in defending husbands accused of their wife’s murder, Tyler Perry adds a welcome zest and humour to proceedings. There are few characters in the novel with potential for comedy on screen so it’s a particular disappointment that Amy’s self-satisfied, touchy-feely parents are reduced to the drab pair that David Clennon and Lisa Banes bring to the screen.  As Go, Carrie Coon, although she shows some deadpan wit in the early stages, also veers towards the mournful.   Kim Dickens is good as the main detective, Rhonda Boney, persuasively blending human decency and professional discipline.  It’s a pity that Fincher rewards her efforts with a couple of small exchanges between Boney and her sidekick (Patrick Fugit) which, if anything, detract from Dickens’s strong characterisation.  Neil Patrick Harris does more than can be expected with the impossible role of Desi.  The cast also includes Emily Ratajowski as Nick’s mistress, and Missi Pyle and Sela Ward as cable television hosts.

    7 October 2014

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