January: the most miserable of months, a time to seek out colour, light and general bonhomie, any small flicker of joy that might sustain us until spring. Anyway, some wag in high office has decided this is the ideal occasion for a David Fincher retrospective, beginning this weekend with a 30th anniversary reissue of the director's breakout hit. 1995's Se7en was born of a particular moment in Hollywood: post-The Silence of the Lambs (and its Oscar triumph, making psychological horror respectable again), when writers found themselves in bidding wars for their higher-concept scripts, and the movies were getting ever more ravenous for new ways of dramatising the extremes of human behaviour. Entering this arena as one of the many who'd enjoyed considerable success in the field of pop promos through the 1980s and early 1990s, Fincher's contribution was to intensify: Nine Inch Nails-scored credits, an urban setting plagued by Biblical (or apocalyptic) rain, seven murders in seven days informed by the seven deadly sins, everything headed towards a dread ending that confirmed we were right all along to fear the worst. This script, by the briefly prominent Andrew Kevin Walker (coming off 1994's Brainscan and 1995's Hideaway, heading to notably bigger bucks for 1999's 8MM and Sleepy Hollow), was pulp fiction, pairing a seasoned cop (Morgan Freeman) with an impetuous young hothead (Brad Pitt) in the search for an especially twisted killer. But it was pulp its director worked over, pulp refined and finessed - you'd call it elevated, were that not such a contentious term in film circles. Either way, it made for a hell of a debut, from a time when our multiplex movies were still actively soliciting adults rather than excitable children.
Revisiting early Fincher - I'm thinking here specifically of last year's 25th anniversary re-release of Fight Club - has so far largely been a matter of monitoring how quickly a particular style dates. It's achieved in brisker, more vigorous strokes - those of a director used to telling stories in four minutes or less - but one now spies in Se7en something of the worldbuilding that would become so laborious and resistible in 21st century cinema: its anonymous, waterlogged cityscape seems to anticipate the Pattinson/Reeves Batman, to name but one. What's crucial (redemptive, even) is how Fincher inhabits and populates it. His facility with the Steadicam, ever moving and involving us, was already becoming the stuff of legend; so too his black wit and eye for macabre detail. (I hadn't previously noticed the song playing in the diner scene: Haircut 100's "Love Plus One", which is pretty funny, in this context.) In the shadow of hideous death, Fincher keeps finding life of sorts. Never more so than in the quiet reverence this director demonstrates for his performers: those grounding supporting players who give the action weight (rollcall: R. Lee Ermey, John C. McGinley, Reg E. Cathey and a trio of Richards, Portnow, Roundtree and Schiff), the woman (the glowing 1995-era Gwyneth Paltrow, rare source of light and warmth) who - as in Fight Club and Mindhunter - allows us to better see how men are. Like the killer, Fincher is supremely patient, carving out scenes that allow us respite and to consider the way society was heading, but he also knows exactly when and where to strike, and his players permit him to be structurally adventurous. Freeman eases us in before threatening to go on gardening leave; the killer reroutes the film at a critical juncture.
The identity of the latter is, of course, the one thing Fincher couldn't control here: he merely cast a brilliant actor who could talk a film into a whole new shape, and who knew better than most how to fuck with us, and fuck us up. Three decades' further intelligence has left Pitt himself, at the time considered the most beautiful man in the world (or at least its movies), looking ever more tarnished and compromised - but, oddly, that now seems to work in Se7en's favour. Pitt's Mills is the hot mess a non-Fincher might have made of this script: rash, slapdash, prepared to cut any corner to get a result. Freeman's Somerset is the movie Se7en still is: methodical, deliberate, yet sincere where it matters, forever alert to the tragedy of it all, and determined to get things right. (One reason the idealism-versus-experience debates of Fincher's later Zodiac and Mindhunter were so satisfying: they'd already been rigorously rehearsed here.) What we witness is a filmmaker doing everything within his emergent powers, both on set and in the behind-the-scenes confabs, to make the ending seem inevitable - this story's dark destiny, the completion of a warped grand design. One especially devilish detail, which speaks to modern life - and encapsulates the Fincher outlook - as resonantly as anything else in Se7en: the delivery driver in the final scene has been hired to show up at 7pm exactly. He arrives several minutes late.
Se7en returns to cinemas nationwide from Friday.
No comments:
Post a Comment