Quentin Tarantino once said, in an interview I conducted with him in Los Angeles on the occasion of the release of “Jackie Brown”, that he is not jealous of David Fincher – he does not write the scripts for his films and therefore depends on the kindness of other people to write good scripts for him. There are many such directors in Hollywood, but Tarantino specifically spoke of him as someone who is considered a gifted filmmaker. In this respect, Fincher is like the great directors of classic Hollywood (1930s to 1950s), who managed to leave a distinct stylistic and thematic mark on the films they directed within the studio system, where they had no creative freedom. Fincher is mostly associated with thrillers that weave creeping horror in shades of gold and black, but every now and then he tries something different. His next film The Killer, about an assassin (Michael Fassbender) who begins to develop a conscience as his clients continue to demand his skills, sounds like a sort of autobiography. Two days ago Fincher celebrated his 60th birthday, and this is an opportunity to rate his films, from the mediocre to the excellent.
11. The Eighth Passenger 3 (1992)
After an impressive career as a music video director, the 29-year-old Fincher was hired to direct his first feature film. On the one hand, it was a great honor, because the two previous ones in the series were directed by Ridley Scott and James Cameron. On the other hand, it was the third film in the series, and Fincher had no control over the creation. He went into filming with an unfinished script, and left the production before the end of editing. However, already in the film where Ripley fights an alien on a distant planet that is used as a penal colony, you can see hints of the visual power that will take shape in his next films.
10. The Amazing Story of Benjamin Button (2008)
After a series of black-on-black thrillers that brought him fame and box office success, but no Oscars, Fincher seems to have decided to wink in this direction, and the result was an ambitious but emotionally barren fantasy. Inspired by a short story by P. Scott Fitzgerald about a man who was born old and kept getting younger, Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump”) wrote a script that has trouble connecting the historical events in the real world with the fantasy. Brad Pitt delivers one of the more pallid performances of his career, and the only characterization of his character is the strange physiological process he goes through, produced by an impressive combination of make-up and computer animation. The main point is in the rich and seductive cinematic language, but when the long film ends, we are left with too little. Because what does “The Wonderful Story of Benjamin Button” actually say about our lives?
Monk (2020)
Fincher, who as mentioned does not write screenplays, created this film as a tribute to screenwriters who don’t get the credit they deserve – his father Jack who wrote the screenplay in the nineties and died before he got to see it come to the screen, and Herman Mankiewicz who wrote “Citizen Kane” – one of the greatest and the most influential of all time – but the credit went to its director Orson Welles. What a shame that “Mank” is actually flawed in the script. The film rushes back and forth between the early thirties and those weeks in 1940 when Mankiewicz wrote “Citizen Kane”, and there are quite a few moments where there is a feeling that the transitions between times are made in the wrong places, and that the script needed editing. Gary Oldman is many years older than the character he plays, and his repetitious performance remains on the surface. As in “Benjamin Batten”, it seems that Fincher invested most of his energy in the (impressive) visual style of the film, which was shot in black and white, and although it is undoubtedly a personal project, it is less interesting and touching than it should have been.
8. The Room (2002)
Jodie Foster replaced Nicole Kidman who injured her leg during filming (then Foster found out she was pregnant). 12-year-old Kristen Stewart (in her second film) plays her diabetic daughter. After the divorce, the two move to a new apartment in New York. When three robbers (Forest Whittaker, Jared Leto and Dwight Yocum) break into the apartment in search of a safe full of money, the mother and daughter enter the security room and look for a way to save themselves. It’s a compact, efficient and tense thriller that Fincher used as a staging ground for spectacular camerawork.
7. Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
“Girl with a Dragon Tattoo” belongs to a parasitic type of cinema – a remake of a European hit (more precisely, another adaptation of a book that has already been adapted into a Swedish film adaptation that was a box office success two years before). Not only that, but Fincher’s film was meant to be the first in a trilogy, so the ending is not closed (Fincher was not involved in the second film, in which the cast also changed). But the story about the journalist (Daniel Craig) and the hacker (Roni Mara picked up an Oscar nomination) who investigate the disappearance of a woman forty years ago, is so well staged that the film penetrates the veins. He captures us already in the sensual and gruesome credits sequence, and does not let go throughout the brutal and mysterious journey.
6. The Game (1997)
Jodie Foster was supposed to star in the film as the daughter of Michael Douglas (who was 53 at the time), but he feared that it would mark him as an aging man, and demanded that she play his sister (even though she was 18 years younger than him). She did not agree, was replaced by Sean Penn and filed a multi-million lawsuit against the studio (details of the settlement reached were not published). Douglas plays a rich banker out of necessity who receives a special birthday present from his brother (whom he hasn’t been in touch with for a while) – a ticket to participate in a mysterious game specially tailored for him. The game turns out to be a trap (a sort of escape room, but without the room) that entangles him physically and mentally, and he begins to suspect that it is a conspiracy to destroy him. The convoluted plot hides a surprise around every corner, and Fincher directs everything with the skill of a master.
5. Gone (2014)
Gillian Flynn’s adaptation of the 2012 bestseller Peri Atta was critically acclaimed, but also accused of misogyny for the image of the demonic woman posing as a victim. Three years after the film became a box office hit, the era of me too broke out and it is hard to know if today “Gone” would have been approved for production. Rosamund Pike was nominated for an Oscar for her performance as Amy, who became famous as the inspiration for a popular children’s book series written by her parents, and Ben Affleck is her husband who was suspected in her disappearance. It’s a deceptive thriller that plays poker with the viewers’ identification by gradually revealing plot details and psychological layers.
4. The Social Network (2010)
Aaron Sorkin wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay about the gifted student from Harvard who developed a website to rate the attractiveness of female students, and proceeded from there to build a Facebook-like website. The phenomenal success leads to legal battles between Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and his various partners – the Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer in a double role) and the good friend Eduardo Severin (Andrew Garfield) who developed the initial algorithm. Sorkin’s staccato style fits like a glove with Fincher’s sharp direction, and the result is a masterful docu-drama, which makes a striking statement about predatory capitalism, and shapes Zuckerberg as a cold-blooded exterminator.
3. Fight Club (1999)
The satire on the crisis of masculinity in the age of IKEA was not a box office or critical success when it was released, but soon after it became the first DVD hit and the most prominent cult film of the end of the century. It’s a kind of brutal stream-of-consciousness movie, barbed and spectacular, with Edward Norton and Brad Pitt in iconic roles as the two sides of toxic masculinity – a theme that has only become more and more relevant.
2. Seven Deadly Sins (1995)
Fincher’s second film crowned him as the avatar of nihilistic thrillers. You can cut the air with a knife in the movie about a pair of cops – Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman – who try to hunt down a serial killer played by the creepy Kevin Spacey. Fincher embroidered in shades of black and mustard a modern variation on the classic film noir style, and created a cinematic text that is hard to take your eyes off of, even when he presents us with horrors, such as the unbelievable ending. The great success of the film pushed Hollywood cinema in a disturbing direction.
1. Zodiac (2007)
“Zodiac” is necessarily a frustrating film, because it tells a story without an end – the serial killer who laid waste to Northern California in the late sixties was never caught. Therefore, despite the laudatory reviews, the film was a disappointment at the box office. But if we are prepared for this to be the reality, it is the best of the movies, also due to its human nature. “Zodiac” works with a meticulous script by James Vanderbilt, and tells the story of a cartoonist (Jake Gyllenhaal), a journalist (Robert Downey Jr.) and a police detective (Mark Ruffalo) who for about 15 years tried to track down the killer . After the chilling opening that depicts the murder of a young couple on a date, Fincher recreates the style of the paranoid thrillers of the seventies, weaving a rich work that invites repeated viewings.