THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB (US/Germany - 2018) Directed by Fede Alvarez. Written by Jay Basu, Fede Alvarez and Steven Knight. Cast: Claire Foy, Sverrir Gudnason, Lakeith Stanfield, Sylvia Hoeks, Stephen Merchant, Vicky Krieps, Claes Bang, Cameron Britton, Synnove Macody Lund, Mikael Persbrandt, Christopher Convery, Andreja Pejic, Hendrik Heutmann, Volker Bruch. (R, 115 mins) It's been seven years since David Fincher's big-budget American version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, based on the first novel in Stieg Larsson's "Millennium Trilogy." It was generally faithful to the book, with Rooney Mara's Oscar-nominated interpretation of researcher/hacker/badass Lisbeth Salander more than holding its own against Noomi Rapace's career-making portrayal in a trilogy of Swedish adaptations. Larsson was only 50 when died of a heart attack in 2004, a year before the first of his three completed books in the series hit European bookstores en route to becoming a phenomenally popular bestseller in the US in 2008. Swedish writer David Lagercrantz was commissioned to continue the "Millennium" series, resurrecting Salander with 2015's The Girl in the Spider's Web and 2017's The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye. Opting to nix the second and third books in Larsson's trilogy and start fresh with a sequel to/reboot to the 2011 film, THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB doesn't bring back any of DRAGON TATTOO's participants other than producer credits for Fincher and Scott Rudin. Mara has been replaced by a game Claire Foy, but she's fighting a losing battle. Director/co-writer Fede Alvarez, best known for his work in the horror genre with the EVIL DEAD remake and the overrated DON'T BREATHE, completely drops the ball on re-establishing Salander as a heroic figure for the #MeToo era. The film jettisons almost everything that made her such a fascinating and iconic heroine in the past and instead drops her in the middle of what looks like a mash-up of SPECTRE, Jason Bourne, and a FAST & FURIOUS sequel. DON'T BREATHE was an excellent thriller to a very specific point where Alvarez jumped the shark: THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB's turkey baster moment comes rather early, when Salander leads some cops on a motorcycle chase and eludes them by driving off a dock and speeding across a frozen lake. It's only the first of several instances where you can hum the 007 "da-da-DA-DAAA!" cue and it wouldn't be at all out of place.
Opening with a flashback to Salander's childhood that doesn't really gel with her background in Larsson's books or in any of the movies, we're introduced to her sister Camilla, the favorite of their pedophile father (Mikael Persbrandt). Though Salander would grow up to be a righter of wrongs against women, she left her sister behind, escaping their abusive father by taking an improbably steep dive down a snowy hill off a balcony and never looking back. Cut to the present day as Salander--apparently known throughout Sweden as a hacker, vigilante, and media figure and somehow constantly out in public and living in what looks like a huge warehouse in a busy part of the city with its own closed-circuit security system and panic room--is hired for a job by Frans Balder (Stephen Merchant), who worked for the US government and designed a software program that would allow the US military to access and override the world's nuclear launch codes. Feeling he's created a monster with the serious potential for global destruction, Balder wants Salander to hack into the NSA's system in D.C. and steal it back so he can permanently delete its existence. This catches the attention of NSA analyst and former military and black-ops mercenary Edwin Needham (Lakeith Stanfield), who immediately flies to Stockholm with the intent of retrieving the program and eliminating Salander. With Swedish intelligence head Gabriella Grane (Synnove Macody Lund) putting Balder and his genius/autistic son August (Christopher Convery) in the least safe safe house imaginable, with a wide-open window you can see in from a great distance, it's only a matter of time before their lives are in danger. Of course, the danger arrives in the form of The Spiders, a collective of Russian bad guys in the employ of--who else?--Camilla Salander (Sylvia Hoeks), who took over their father's criminal empire and wants the launch codes as a global power play and, I presume, to get her sister's attention?
Does that even sound like something Stieg Larsson would've concocted? Foy could've made this role her own but not with that material she's been given, turning Salander into a rote, generic action hero. If this is indeed the start of a new action-driven franchise, then it already looks about two films away from putting Salander in space. Lisbeth Salander is an abuse survivor, troubled loner, and genius with incredible researching and computer skills. Why is she in car chases? Why is she in intricately-staged shootouts? Why is she dodging explosions? Why is her sister an albino-looking, Blofeld-like supervillain with a ridiculous wardrobe that makes her resemble the long-lost sister of Edgar and Johnny Winter? Why is Mikael Blomkvist (played here by BORG VS. MCENROE's Sverrir Gudnason) given virtually nothing to do? And why do Salander and Blomkvist seem to be the same age now? Wasn't his being quite a bit older a key component of their complicated relationship? Speaking of nothing to do, why is Vicky Krieps, who was so good opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in PHANTOM THREAD, squandered in a superfluous supporting role as Blomkvist's editor and sometime lover Erika Berger (played by Robin Wright in the 2011 film)? Salander's shut-in hacker pal Plague also returns in the form of MINDHUNTER co-star Cameron Britton, who more or less serves as a de facto Q to Salander's 007.
Only Stanfield (GET OUT, SORRY TO BOTHER YOU) manages to stand out, mainly because most of his scenes show him intensely glowering and walking through crowded places with steely purpose, almost as if he's trying to find the nearest way out of this movie. His character's shifting alliance seems more like plot convenience, and the long sequence where Salander assists him in escaping police custody in a Stockholm airport is thoroughly absurd (how can she coordinate that many things with such perfect precision timing?). THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB is filled with preposterous contrivances, eye-rolling coincidences, and lazy storytelling, glossing over plot details in a muddled fashion and leaving a capable cast stranded. Alvarez is obviously no Fincher, but while the film looks nice and has a couple of striking shots (one standout being Salander and Blomkvist facing each other from glass elevators in adjacent buildings), everything about it is a perfunctory clock-punch that feels like a Netflix Original that was accidentally released in theaters.
GONE GIRL (US - 2014) Directed by David Fincher. Written by Gillian Flynn. Cast: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry, Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens, Patrick Fugit, Scoot McNairy, David Clennon, Lisa Banes, Emily Ratajkowski, Boyd Holbrook, Lola Kirke, Casey Wilson, Sela A. Ward, Missi Pyle, Jamie McShane. (R, 149 mins)
"You only hurt the one you love" is a saying that's appropriate for David Fincher's version of Gillian Flynn's bestselling 2012 novel. Flynn scripted the adaptation herself, but the end result is very much in line with Fincher's cynical worldview. Over the last 20 years, Fincher has built a reputation as an auteur's auteur, and comparisons to cinema giants like Stanley Kubrick have been made for quite some time. There's no doubt that some of those comparisons are justified, especially in Fincher's mercurial nature and his methodical, meticulous, and sometimes fussy style. He's been known to do an exorbitant amount of takes like Kubrick did, and both display signature styles to ensure their films feel like no one else's. This has been especially the case with Fincher over the last few years, as GONE GIRL marks his third consecutive teaming with score composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, and the fourth overall with Cronenweth, who also shot Fincher's FIGHT CLUB (1999). Over the course of THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010), THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2011), and now GONE GIRL, Fincher and that team have forged a unique style in cold, clinical detachment, and perhaps that's where the Kubrick analogies really started to gain traction, though if any comparisons are to be made, he's more in line with the non-fantasy side of David Cronenberg.
While the mere mention of Fincher's name is enough to elevate expectations and get cineastes salivating, his pursuits are generally more commercial than either of those legendary filmmakers, and they exist in different eras that make comparisons a moot point: while Kubrick and Cronenberg also made film versions of wildly popular, bestselling novels (THE SHINING and THE DEAD ZONE, respectively), Kubrick never would've made a film about Facebook. And even as an auteur who's probably given more wiggle room than most of his contemporaries, Fincher still has people he reports to, and with today's "$50 million opening weekend or it's a flop" mindset, there's no way a major Hollywood studio would give Kubrick complete autonomy and a blank check to make whatever he wanted and then leave him unsupervised to take all the time he needed to do it. And Kubrick, while possessing a cynical outlook, pointed his finger mostly at established power structures (the military in PATHS OF GLORY and FULL METAL JACKET, the government in DR. STRANGELOVE, the aristocracy in BARRY LYNDON, the supernatural in THE SHINING, the perverse upper class in EYES WIDE SHUT) and their cruel and frequently dehumanizing nature. Kubrick wasn't quite the misanthrope that Fincher is. Fincher doesn't like people, he doesn't trust people, and in his world, they're largely inherently unhappy and looking for a way out, and no matter how successful they are and what they achieve, happiness is perpetually elusive. Matt Singer pointed in a pre-release Dissolve piece on GONE GIRL that it's the first Fincher film to put the impossibility of romantic relationships front and center. While GONE GIRL may form a loose stylistic trilogy with the two Fincher films that precede it, it's really not some thinkpiece-worthy truth bomb blowing the doors off the psychology of relationships, misogyny, feminism, and the state of marriage in America. Anyone who was a child of divorce, saw their parents have a huge argument, has gotten divorced or been around when married friends have a meltdown in a social setting or been in any kind of romantic relationship at all knows that marriage and relationships can be ugly. How many single people have had a married friend tell them "Don't ever get married"? There's certainly room for discussion over its conclusion and the decisions and compromises that certain characters make and the ways they manipulate those around them, but for the bulk of its sometimes bloated two and a half hours, GONE GIRL is a riveting, top-notch thriller by a director at the top of his game. Fincher isn't the second coming of Kubrick. He's a more stylized, high-end Alan J. Pakula or Sydney Pollack. And that's still pretty great.
Flynn's novel utilized dual unreliable narrators in Nick and Amy Dunne. Flynn keeps structure here but in ways that obviously need to be made cinematic, along with other incidental changes to suit the medium. On the day of their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy (Rosamund Pike) disappears and her husband Nick (Ben Affleck) comes home to find their house a shambles, with signs that a struggle ensued. Fincher repeatedly cuts between present, anchored by Affleck, and past, represented in flashbacks with narration by Pike from Amy's journal. She's the daughter of famous children's book authors (David Clennon, Lisa Banes) who based their beloved Amazing Amy character on Amy herself, with Amy constantly feeling like the let-down version of a fictional character who never disappointed her parents and got all the things Actual Amy wanted. In Nick, she finds the first person who understands and accepts her and doesn't want Amazing Amy. But domestic bliss slowly begins to unravel: Nick and Amy lose their jobs in the recession, Nick's mother is diagnosed with cancer and his father with Alzheimer's, the bills aren't getting paid, and Amy's parents get dropped by their publisher and need to use Amy's trust fund to get out of debt. Nick and Amy move from NYC to his childhood Missouri suburb where Amy feels adrift and left out when it comes to Nick and the bond he has with his twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon). Tensions escalate in Amy's journal, and in the present, evidence mounts that suggests Nick may have killed his wife. Nick isn't being upfront about numerous things with the cops or with Margo, and then Fincher pulls a daring bait-and-switch at just past the one-hour point that provokes a palpable buzz of energy among the audience and forces you to view everything you've just seen in a completely different fashion.
To say any more would involve divulging massive spoilers, but the performances of Affleck and especially Pike, a very difficult role, are outstanding. They get tremendous support from one of the year's best ensembles, particularly in the unlikely casting of Neil Patrick Harris as one of Amy's ex-boyfriends who's still hung up on her, and Tyler Perry as Nick's lawyer, a big-money celebrity attorney known for defending husbands accused of killing their wives. Coon is excellent, as is Kim Dickens as the increasingly incredulous detective investigating Amy's disappearance. Fincher and Flynn spend quite a bit of time examining the notion of media hype, deftly represented by a shrill, shrieking, over-the-top harpy of a cable news broadcaster (Missi Pyle), clearly based on the loathsome Nancy Grace. They also take aim at the culture of fleeting celebrity and the idea that everything is entertainment. Witness how Nick is accosted by a flirtatious woman who aggressively takes a selfie with him against his wishes, and of course the photo ends up on cable news as "proof" that he's a callous, remorseless wife killer. A bar--called The Bar--owned by Nick and Margo becomes a destination for gawking rubberneckers as Fincher pays subtle homage to Billy Wilder's bile-soaked ACE IN THE HOLE (1951). Like many filmmakers before him, Fincher has frequently cited Hitchcock as an influence, and that's on display here as Pike's Amy isn't too far removed from the blonde and "complicated" heroines played by Kim Novak in VERTIGO, Janet Leigh in PSYCHO, and Tippi Hedren in MARNIE (Margo: "Nick! Don't you know 'complicated' is code for 'bitch?'"). There's also one fleeting shot where a character hastily exits a room in a way that's identical to "Mother" leaving the motel room after the shower murder in PSYCHO.
Nothing is what it seems in GONE GIRL, and even if you've read the book (I haven't), it works as exemplary storytelling as Fincher punches the narrative forward in the same hypnotic, matter-of-fact fashion he did with his 2007 masterpiece ZODIAC, a damn-near-perfect thriller that opened to great acclaim at the time but for some inexplicable reason, seems to be a lesser-mentioned Fincher film that's fallen through the cracks in just a few short years. It's rare these days to see a provocative adult thriller that gets the audience talking and opens the floor for post-viewing debate. That doesn't necessarily warrant the "deeper meaning" thinkpieces of the sort that seem to permeate review sites and blogs every week (and really, if GONE GIRL hasn't opened this past weekend, we'd be getting similarly pretentious, diarrhetic essays on ANNABELLE), but perhaps the flood of such thinkpieces is actually a damning critique that too few intelligent films for grownups are getting any exposure in the current cinematic climate.
