Modern Hollywood's Iconic Directors: Episode Seven.
By Joe Boden
11th February 2010.

To conclude this column series which has spanned decades, I’ve decided to take a look at one of the most respected directors working in America today; David Fincher. A solid bridge of the gap between art and entertainment, Fincher has sky rocketed to fame off the back of a couple of bona fide classics (cult or otherwise), and it wouldn’t be too unfair to claim that he is still living off the back of their success. “Se7en” (1995) and “Fight Club” (1999) are hailed – and possibly rightly so – as two of the greatest American films of the last twenty years; brimming with tension, atmosphere, and perhaps intelligence. Anybody who has seen these two films will know that the man behind them certainly has the talent to provoke and to build suspense. For all intents and purposes, “Fight Club” managed to get the blend between intelligence and entertainment just about perfect.

“Se7en” is even better; a thriller which draws more from the pre-conceived notions of the audience than it does from what is on screen. Never actually showing you any of the murders (well, until the climactic one), “Se7en” is a film that creates an intense, tangible atmosphere that exudes suspense. It utilizes a slow, almost crawling pace, slowly pealing back the layers of a killer’s mind to reveal both madness and calculated intelligence. As much as it is a run-of-the-mill cops-versus-criminals tale, it’s a deep character study on three very separate men; Mills (Brad Pitt), Somerset (Morgan Freeman), and Doe (Kevin Spacey). It examines the differences between the men who kill and the men who chase those who kill, and blurs the line between them. Its climax is an elaborate but simple visualization of this primary theme, asking us if murder is ever justified, and asking us to differentiate between the man with the gun and the man facing it.

As you can probably tell from these two short paragraphs, I’m a big fan of David Fincher’s two most famous and most acclaimed films. But to simply discuss these two classics would be unfair; overlooking Fincher’s secondary and tertiary string of pictures creates a blinkered and overly positive view of the man and his work. It all started back in 1992 with “Alien [3]”, the sequel to both Ridley Scott’s sci-fi opus “Alien” and James Cameron’s inferior-but-still-good war film “Aliens”. You’ll probably know the story by now; David Fincher hated the film, disowning the project due to constant studio interference. Anybody who owns the Alien Quadrilogy box set will also notice that Fincher was the only one of the four “Alien” directors who refused to take any part in the project (the other three present are Scott, Cameron, and French whiz-kid Jean-Pierre Jeunet). It seems, then, unfair to criticize Fincher for his contributions to “Alien [3]”, but I’m going to anyway.

The problems with “Alien [3]” run much deeper than Fincher’s own input. Sigourney Weaver plays a watered down version of the character she made iconic in the first two films… the suspense is short lived and dispelled at random intervals by whatever ridiculous plot point the writers can thrown at it… the supporting performances (maybe with the exception of Pete Postlethwaite) are just bad… the finale is clichéd, dripping with cheese, and very “T2”-esque. You could easily make a case for the shortcomings of “Alien [3]” being nothing to do with Fincher himself, but – to be honest – I can’t really see a good version of “Alien [3]” existing even if Fincher had complete creative control over the project. The whole thing seems like a re-hash of the first film from the franchise, with Fincher’s direction drawing much too closely to that of Ridley Scott, and the novice director fails to manufacture a single original shot or a single imaginative thought in the entire runtime. The whole thing is a waste, and a forgettable one at that, and surely Fincher has to take at least a portion of the blame.

Alien[3], Fincher's much maligned debut.

Next was “Seven”, which we’ve already talked about. The script is amazing, the performances are amazing, and Fincher’s direction is, indeed, amazing. It seems impossible that anybody involved in “Alien [3]” – and Fincher was, of course, very much involved – could go on to make a film like “Se7en”, but it happened. Whether that is by some freak of nature or by calculated improvement, I don’t know, but the following film kind of implies that chance has something to do with “Seven”’s success. Fincher made “The Game” in 1997, a confusing, silly, unimaginative, boring, and un-thoughtful film that starts out well but rapidly gets worse. The general concept behind it is quite good; Michael Douglas is involved in a game which strives to control his every move, but Fincher fails to take advantage of solid foundations. The film should have been a condemnation of the all-seeing, all-knowing government and our over-reliance on technology, but instead it was simply an exercise in escalating ridiculous plot points. Most of the time, at least jumping the shark brings a little bit of bizarre absurdist humour, but this whole film is so dry and so mundane that even that guilty pleasure is taken away from us.

 “Fight Club” was next. It’s a film I liked very much when I was fifteen. It’s a semi-intelligent de-construction of the consumerist culture of America, and although my opinion isn’t quite as high as it once was, I still think it’s one of the top fifty American films of the last couple of decades. Enough has been said about the film already, including by myself in the opening paragraph, so I’ll promptly move onto “Panic Room” (2002). I think that Fincher’s close-quarters thriller is flawed in several ways; the ending lacks ambiguity and, for all intents and purposes, struggles to overcome the contrivances of the genre. Even worse, the criminal with a heart of gold scenario is so overused that it’s difficult for Fincher or Whitaker to do anything new with the character. However, it’s that kind of film which you will enjoy no matter how many times you watch it, and whatever state of mind you are in. Whilst “Fight Club” and “Se7en” attempt to bring some intelligent themes into their runtime, “Panic Room” is happy with just being a relatively cliché-free thriller which doesn’t ask its audience to suspend disbelief too far. It does, though, seem like another major step down for Fincher. Granted, it’s not quite as much as the extreme downward slope that was “The Game”, for that film was an abysmal, disparaging follow-up to what is probably Fincher’s greatest film. However, it’s still pretty obvious that “Panic Room” is somewhat run-of-the-mill when you compare it to the previous film.

The wild, oscillatory career path of Fincher continued with “Zodiac” (2007), which is a smart, assured re-telling of the Zodiac murders that plagued San Francisco a few decades ago. Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr, and Mark Ruffalo play three men each obsessed with unravelling the unsolvable mystery, and each of them are slowly torn apart by almost maniacal obsession. Expertly performed and very well directed, “Zodiac” was yet another return to form to the director. On the outset, it seems like nothing more than a murder mystery, with good guys and bad guys and a void in-between. However, over its epic, near-three hour runtime, Fincher reveals what is actually a complex, breathtaking, and imaginative study of those obsessed by killing. Much like “Se7en” did twenty years before, “Zodiac” blurs the line between hunter and hunted, asking whether these three men are simply concerned with their moral obligation to catch a murderer, or whether more primal, darker obsessions are at work. It also has the endings that “Panic Room” forewent; ambiguous and challenging, asking us to make our own minds up along with the film’s characters.

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (2008) is a film that I’ve not quite made my mind up about yet, despite the fact that I’ve now seen it twice. On first viewing, I thought it was good but flawed. I thought it was epic in its ambition, but a monotonous plot and some languid pacing stopped it from being the film it could have been, and the one it wanted to be. I was positive, though, because of the performances, because of Fincher’s direction, and because of one fantastic sequence, which discussed chance and fate when it comes to every day happenings. My second viewing, though, highlighted the negatives more-so than the positives. This ambition does not translate from the cinema screen to home viewing all that well, and what is left feels like a self-important, indulgent film with a couple of good performances and a couple of good sequences. Overlong by about an hour, it stretches a short story into an epic piece of Hollywood spectacle, only the spectacle is actually quite underwhelming. Blanchette is brilliant, though, and Fincher does indeed outdo himself at one particular point, and I’m sure anybody who has seen the film will be able to guess the scene I’m talking about.

Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchette in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button".

Fincher’s résumé is the very definition of a mixed bag. He goes directly from the sublime to the absurd, with a few select pictures sitting in that middle ground. And here’s the problem; I don’t think it’s reasonable to call David Fincher an auteur. Not only does he create just as many average films as he does good ones, but I’d also argue that he never really imposes his own stamp on a film. I wouldn’t be able to tell you, if I came out from under a rock after twenty years’ hibernation, if the same man who directed “The Game” was now directing “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, or if the guy behind “Panic Room” also made “Alien [3]”. Versatility isn’t a trait which should be condemned, I know. For instance, Kubrick made films as wildly different and as excellent as each other, and the same could be said about Curtiz. I don’t think anybody would argue with me calling Kubrick or Curtiz auteurs. However, I don’t think Fincher deserves to be in that same category. He is capable of great things, yes, but he’s also capable of thoroughly disappointing mediocrity.

I’m not particularly disappointed about the fact that Fincher doesn’t really want to make arthouse films. Indeed, I don’t think he has the ability or the inclination to make films like those of Haneke or Kiarostami. But Fincher certainly does have the ability to do something just as important. He has shown on two or three occasions in the past that he’s capable of taking run-of-the-mill thrillers or dramas and turning them into something more, delivering intelligence to the multiplex hoards. He will never make a four hour opus on the human condition, but he has the same ability as, say, Ridley Scott, in that he’s capable and willing to bring ideas into the mainstream cinema. And that makes his lack of focus and his varying quality even more disappointing. To waste such a rare gift in a world where Michael Bay and McG roam freely is really quite disparaging.