THE HIGHWAYMEN (US - 2019) Directed by John Lee Hancock. Written by John Fusco. Cast: Kevin Costner, Woody Harrelson, Kathy Bates, John Carroll Lynch, Thomas Mann, Kim Dickens, W. Earl Brown, William Sadler, David Furr, Joshua Caras, Dean Denton, Jason Davis, David Born, Brian F. Durkin, Jake Ethan Dashnaw, Emily Brobst, Edward Bossert. (R, 132 mins) Chronicling the notorious Depression-era Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow killing spree from the law enforcement side, the Netflix Original film THE HIGHWAYMEN centers on legendary retired Texas Ranger Frank Hamer (1884-1955), played by Denver Pyle in Arthur Penn's trailblazing 1967 classic BONNIE AND CLYDE. As great as that film is, it played a little fast and loose with the facts, most egregiously when it came to its depiction of Hamer, so much so that his widow filed a defamation of character lawsuit and won an out-of-court settlement in 1971. Hamer is presented as a bit of a buffoonish, walrus-mustached punchline in BONNIE AND CLYDE, particularly when he's captured and humiliated by the title duo. In truth, Hamer never saw Bonnie and Clyde in person until the moment he and his posse ambushed them on the side of a rural Louisiana country road and took them down in a hail of bullets. That's the Hamer portrayed here by Kevin Costner, who's introduced in 1934 barely tolerating a mostly forced retirement after the Texas Rangers were disbanded years earlier for their often lawless tactics. When Texas' "lady governor" Miriam "Ma" Ferguson (Kathy Bates) exhausts all other options for bringing Bonnie and Clyde down, she reluctantly agrees, at the suggestion of Marshal Lee Simmons (John Carroll Lynch), to make Hamer a special "highway agent" assigned to essentially hunt down and exterminate the pair.
Joining Hamer is his old partner Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson), now an unemployed drunk living in a foreclosed home with his daughter and grandson. Both men are haunted by the violence of their past and dealing with it in their own ways, and Hamer is hobbled by chronic pain from an estimated 16 bullets still remaining in his body from various skirmishes over the years. Their biggest obstacle in the pursuit is dealing with the movie star-like following that Bonnie and Clyde have with the general public, excited by their Robin Hood tactics of robbing banks at a time when everyone is in dire financial straits, but they seem to turn a blind eye to their brutality and the dead bodies left in their wake. It's even strongly suggested that one naive young deputy helping them (Thomas Mann), a childhood friend of the pair, may have even tipped them off about a plot to nab them at the home of Clyde's father (William Sadler).
Right down to its slightly overlong 132-minute length, THE HIGHWAYMEN has the leisurely feel and pace of a post-UNFORGIVEN Clint Eastwood film, which isn't surprising considering that director John Lee Hancock (THE BLIND SIDE) scripted two Eastwood works from that era (1993's A PERFECT WORLD, which starred Costner, and 1997's MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL). As written by John Fusco (YOUNG GUNS, YOUNG GUNS II, THUNDERHEART), THE HIGHWAYMEN has the comfortable, familiar feel of the kind of uncomplicated procedural that your dad would enjoy, and I mean that in a good way. Aside from setting the record straight on the distinguished career of Hamer and paying lip service to the idea of fawning over dubious celebrities (America's women make Bonnie an inadvertent fashionista by copying her clothing and hairstyle, while 20,000 people attended the pair's funerals, mourning them like heroes), THE HIGHWAYMEN is content with familiarity of well-worn cliches and character arcs, like Hamer's devoted wife (Kim Dickens) just wishing he'd stay home and paint the kitchen but acknowledging "I knew what you were when I married you," Hamer flagrantly disregarding Ma's "stay in Texas" orders and heading out of his jurisdiction, a haggard Gault seeing the pursuit of Bonnie and Clyde as the standard-issue One Last Shot at Redemption, and the usual banjos-and-fiddle soundtrack that's required by law for any crime drama set during the Great Depression or in Dust Bowl migrant towns. The most unexpected decision that Hancock and Fusco make is keeping the faces of the villains largely offscreen, with Clyde (Edward Bossert) seen fleetingly during speeding getaways and Bonnie (Emily Brobst) represented mostly by her dragging, injured left leg.
In some ways, Hamer and Gault almost feel like castoffs from THE WILD BUNCH, stuck in a modern era they don't quite understand and don't want to. Hamer has adapted better than Gault, who has no idea that the FBI can wiretap party lines, which becomes an amusing running gag throughout the film. Obviously, THE HIGHWAYMEN isn't on the level of BONNIE AND CLYDE, but it's reasonably entertaining and the stars are terrific together. It's easy to see Costner's Hamer as a morose, older version of his earnest, "Let's do some good!" Eliot Ness way back in 1987's THE UNTOUCHABLES, and looking past the actor's ill-fated hubris years that gave us WATERWORLD and THE POSTMAN, it's been a pleasure to watch him age into a top-notch character actor in his 60s, where he's carved himself a niche as the Robert Duvall of his generation.
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.
