The Abject Perfectionism of David Fincher's 'The Killer'
#246: "The Killer," "Priscilla," "Pain Hustlers," "Foreign Correspondent," "Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse"
Edition 246:
Hey movie lovers!
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This week: It’s David Fincher’s turn in the spotlight with a meditative revenge thriller inside the head of a hitman. I also saw Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla Presley biopic and the Netflix flavor of the week Pain Hustlers. For streaming, how bout an old Alfred Hitchcock joint and my No. 1 movie of the year hitting Netflix? In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Ryan Gosling has major Ken-ergy as a stunt man in an adventure comedy.
The Killer
Few people in the history of pop culture have done more to shape the popular imagination around serial killers than David Fincher. Se7en, Zodiac, and “Mindhunter” are seminal texts. But in all of them, the murderer is always being chased, his psyche analyzed through bits and pieces of evidence. He’s always the mouse of the story, never the cat.
The Killer flips that on its head, taking place entirely inside the head of a hitman played by Michael Fassbender. The primary narrative device is this hitman’s inner monologue, told though voice over, part stream of consciousness part Ted Talk on how to be a good hitman. It’s a little annoying, and it’s meant to be. He’s a psychopath. And he insists to the audience that the only way to be a good hitman is to be a psychopath, through a series of mantras. Stick to your plan, he thinks. Anticipate, don’t improvise.
What makes the story interesting is that Fassbender’s killer is an unreliable narrator. He often doesn’t take his own advice, and usually his utterances come just before screwing up in some hilarious way. It’s not that he’s bad at his job, he seems quite good, it’s just that he’s human. And that’s a problem in his line of work.
It’s illustrative to be talking about Fincher this week after going long on Scorcese last week, because I think it shows how the line between “good” filmmaking and “bad” filmmaking is not linear. There is no right and wrong way to do things, strictly speaking, and both of these directors are total masters of the craft in very different ways. Fincher is an icy cold filmmaker, precise, detail-oriented, a minimalist to Scorcese’s three-and-a-half-hour maximalism. In each case, the styles service the material. Fincher loves process — how people get things done — and the look and feel of his movies match the stories he’s trying to tell.
As much as this is a strict genre thriller about the hitman going on a revenge mission after his employer tries to kill him, it’s really a story about perfectionism. Being a robotic control freak might lead to optimal efficiency in one’s work, and in the telling of our story, the hitman insists that the disciplined few will always prey on the weak compromising many. But what’s the point of all this efficiency if you can’t enjoy it?
It’s a theme that I feel any Type A personalities out there can identify with. Even though it’s a seemingly cold, emotionless movie explicitly, it would be utterly wrong to call it heartless. The heart is kind of the whole point.
Needless to say, I loved it. On the whole the movie comes together nicely but even if it didn’t each individual scene is completely riveting. The story progresses across the globe, as various missions tilt straight ahead in a way that’s easy to follow but constantly surprising. It’s actually very funny, in a wry and clever sort of way, and the dialogue sequences are often as tense and exciting as the action set pieces.
The whole movie hangs on Fassbender’s physicality, and he’s nothing short of incredible here. Not only has he not lost a step from only making one movie in the last six years, I think it’s his career-best performance. He plays an entire spectrum of emotions within like one to two degrees of expression. (And if it wasn’t weird to say I want to dress like a serial killer, I’d tell you his looks are such a vibe…I’d buy his closet.)
I saw this movie in theaters, which obviously I’ll always recommend, but it’s hitting Netflix next Friday (Nov. 10). I was planning to hold it for next week’s newsletter, but was too excited to share. After updating my rankings, this is my No. 3 movie of the year (behind Spider-Verse and Past Lives). Can’t wait for you all to see it.
Priscilla
Sofia Coppola’s movies have never been my particular cup of tea, for obvious, target audience reasons — it’s hard for me to personally identify with The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette, or The Beguiled — but even the ones of hers I do like — Lost In Translation, The Bling Ring, On The Rocks — I do so in spite of their style.
Coppola doesn’t hold plot in high regard, and even “character study” is too sharp of a term for her stories because she does not strictly define or pass judgement on her heroines. “Tone poem” is a pretentious word for it, but she’s kind of a pretentious filmmaker. If she were a painter, her works wouldn’t be called full-on abstract, but she’s like an impressionist, making recognizable references to real life while being much more interested in painting outside the lines. It’s an apt comparison visually, too, because her movies are often lush and stylized.
It’s a good match with this material, which allows Coppola to do for Priscilla Presley what Spencer tried to do for Princess Diana and Jackie for Jackie Kennedy, essentially using modern sensibilities to reexamine the lives of historically significant and misunderstood women with a bit more empathy than they got the first time around.
Told entirely from the perspective of Priscilla, who is cast as the purposely petite Cailee Spaeny against the 6-foot-5 manhunk Jacob Elordi as Elvis, this movie (based on her memoir) contends that the price of being the First Lady of Rock n’ Roll was being sidelined, belittled and addicted to pills. From the age of 14, when she meets 24-year-old Elvis in Germany and gets caught up in his whirlwind, everything in her life happens on his terms, and her attempts for independence or autonomy are routinely rejected by a distant, unknowable and somewhat pathetic Elvis.
This movie is not screaming bloody feminism from the rooftops, something like Promising Young Woman, and doesn’t really seem to have any agenda or broader messaging other than the sad reality of a man’s world. Perhaps it’s extra-textual and I’m missing it — the irony does not escape me that I found depth in Fincher’s hypermasculine The Killer and not this — but to my eye the movie came off more like beautifully rendered historical record straightener. Considering it’s not a particularly fun journey on the surface either, I couldn’t find my way into the experience as a whole. But like I said, Coppola has never been my cup of tea.
Something New
Pain Hustlers (Netflix): There’s been a lot of ripped-from-the-headlines movies in the wake of The Big Short that try to attack social issues with a tongue in cheek, fun-first approach that I find more often than not does a disservice to the story. For example, we’ve now seen a handful of prestige-y pieces of entertainment about the opioid crisis (Hulu’s Dopesick, Netflix’s Painkiller and documentary series “The Pharmacist”). At this point we get it. IT’S BAD.
So introducing Emily Blunt — who for the record, in her regal English-ness could never pass as a Floridian ex-stripper living in a sleazy motel — as a drug salesman turned architect of destruction who nonetheless we’re supposed to root for because she has a sick daughter and a conscience, is just totally the wrong approach here. Throwing in Chris Evans as a foul-mouthed co-conspirator does nothing, other than continue his post-Marvel run of stinkers, and everyone else is the cast is begging to be not taken seriously. I think the only way to do a story like this is to be meaner or at least more finger-pointy, but even as a fun jaunt the movie is just kind of meh. Maybe I crowned Netflix’s original movie comeback a little too soon?
Something Old
Foreign Correspondent (1940, Max): Alfred Hitchcock certainly has flashier and more well-known movies — Vertigo, Psycho, Rear Window, North by Northwest — but it’s amazing to see what he could do to elevate a middling programmer movie such as this. There’s nothing special about the premise of this topical movie of the week, with our protagonist taking a job as a foreign correspondent reporting on the tense days before the start of World War II. He falls in love, of course, and gets mixed up in a vast conspiracy plot (double of course) where people try to have him killed (triple of course).
The thing is, Hitchcock makes the material sing. I watched this movie with a handful of 20-somethings, not all of whom are movie nerds, and nobody was bored. Even with 1940s pacing and technical limitations, Hitchcock wrings out every ounce of tension from both small moments and impressively staged big action set pieces, and creates a handful of memorable visuals. The acting is theatrical and overdramatic, as was the style of the time, but the sing-song nature of Golden Era dialogue crackles as ever. This wouldn’t be the first of his movies I would recommend, but I can promise you middling Hitchcock is a lot better than the best of what most people put out these days.
Something to Stream
Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse (Netflix): This continues to be my No. 1 movie of 2023, and despite its strong box office performance I’m excited that so many more people are going to get to watch and discover it now on the world’s most popular streaming service — even if that means you can’t see the beautiful visuals on the big screen like I did (twice!).
Read my full write-up on the movie HERE. And give it a shot even if you’re not normally a super heroes person (neither am I), animation person or young adult content person. You’ll be glad you did.
Trailer Watch: The Fall Guy
Ryan Gosling is displaying remarkable Ken-ergy in this action comedy about a Hollywood stunt man who gets sent on a real life adventure to rescue the movie’s star, in order to win the heart of the director. Not sure why this is such a hot concept right now — The Lost City, Argylle — and I’m pretty spotty on director David Leitch (Deadpool 2, Hobbs & Shaw, Bullet Train), but there’s enough star power with Gosling as well as Emily Blunt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Bond!), Teresa Palmer, Stephanie Hsu (Everything Everywhere All At Once), Winston Duke (Us) and Hannah Waddingham (“Ted Lasso”) to make you believe this is a big time Hollywood original movie. Those are the kinds of movies I’ll always show up for.