New movie review: The Killer

Michael Fassbender, in The Killer

It would be a lot easier to be a big fan of the collected works of David Fincher. There is nothing controversial in proclaiming The Social Network one of the best films of the 2010s. No one bats an eye if you observe that Zodiac is a top-shelf crime procedural. There is, of course, the cult of Fight Club. The director is famed for his numerous takes, and over the years, his dedication to his process has become its own sort of mythology. I’m very happy for everyone, but it’s also okay to want more.

Speaking of wanting more, enter: The Killer. Fincher’s latest is a sleek little thriller that sure seems to be a lot of fun. After all, who doesn’t want to watch a globetrotting assassin story with Michael Fassbender at the center? Insert your Assassin’s Creed jokes here. The performance is great. The pictures are pretty. There is, however, an emptiness at the film’s core different from that intended by Fincher and screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker.

The film is nihilistic to a fault, which in and of itself feels a tad “been there, done that” from the guys who made Se7en. But, at the end, this was not the emptiness I felt. Rather, I sensed a thematic void. The movie spends a lot of words – a lot of words; truly, Fassbender’s Killer is almost shockingly loquacious – saying virtually nothing at all. Its defenders would have you believe this is a feature, not a bug, but I’m not buying it.

I have heard the lead character is intentionally dull, that the point is the dullness. This would hold water if not for the fact that when push comes to shove, the unnamed killer pulls out enough Jason Bourne- and John Wick-style tricks to seem sufficiently badass for a college dorm room poster. Indeed, the image of Fassbender pointing his gun directly at you will make a nice companion piece to that Tyler Durden poster your freshman year roommate definitely had.

There is no point in penalizing a filmmaker for an audience misunderstanding his work. It is not Fincher’s fault that Project Mayhem now carries a lot of Proud Boy baggage for those who lack a sense of irony or self-awareness. Still, the director seems to have ascended in the culture to that rarified air where his weak spots are declared intentional satire, and detractors are accused of not getting the joke. Make no mistake, there are jokes, and I get them. It’s just that no amount of humor can cover for what’s lacking underneath.

For instance, it’s very funny that we hear the Killer repeatedly recite a set of rules for pulling off an assassination, then proceed to break every one of these rules and never pull off a successful assassination. But, that’s it. That’s the joke. It doesn’t mean anything that he tells us, in that incessant voiceover, he is one of the best assassins in the world, then proceeds to fail at the one thing at which he’s supposed to be an expert. At best, it’s a weak joke, and at worst, it’s a story flaw.

It gets worse the deeper you dig – and from here on out, spoilers if you intend to watch The Killer – so let’s dig. After the Killer botches the opening assassination, he is targeted for elimination by some other hired guns. Those hired guns show up at his house in the Dominican Republic and badly injure – but don’t kill; I guess they’re not very good either, despite us being told they are – the Killer’s girlfriend. 

We will never learn much about this girlfriend. Her name is Magdala, and she is played by Sophie Charlotte, who is given nothing to do. She’s just a function of the plot, a reason for Fassbender’s assassin to go on, what Tarantino might call, a “roaring rampage of revenge.” Ah, but therein lies the rub. See, one of those rules he lives by is to “fight only the battle you’re paid to fight.” He will spend the rest of the film working pro bono. Again, funny, but empty.

Finally, there is the movie’s most curious choice, one I have not been able to stop thinking about and pondering, ‘Why?’ The Killer does, in fact, kill a lot of people, and every single one of them is a woman or person of color. He is hired by a white, male billionaire to kill another white, male presumably billionaire, neither of whom ends up dead. So, where does that leave us? I see two options.

One, it’s a mistake of casting. The Lawyer (Charles Parnell) doesn’t have to be black. The Expert (Tilda Swinton; we’ll come back to her) doesn’t have to be a woman. The Brute (played by Sala Baker, who is Kiwi) does not have to be ambiguously non-white. Maybe it just happened to work out that way. But, I don’t think so. The famously meticulous Fincher doesn’t leave anything to chance.

This leaves option 2: It’s intentional and meant as commentary. I’ll take a stab at it: When the elite clash, marginalized people suffer. Fine. It is perhaps marginally subtler than Fight Club in its messaging, but there is no more meat on the bone. The Killer represents whatever function of capitalism you wish to rage against, but he’s still fun. He’s still the POV character, and Fincher and Walker position him as the person we’re meant to root for, without reservation.

It is the Tyler Durden problem once more. Fincher, a consummate stylist, simply can’t make the character anything less than cool. With his keto diet, Smiths playlist, and eighth-grade nihilism, he certainly seems like someone who would listen to Joe Rogan. This is a person I know for a fact Fincher hates, but the script and filmmaking lack the restraint of style to make the critique stick.

A quick word on the performances: I will highlight two in particular, though everyone else does lovely work. Fassbender is in nearly every frame of this thing, and he is magnificent, reminding us why we loved him in the first place. Coming off a rough stretch (including The Snowman, X-Men: Apocalypse, Assassin’s Creed, and X-Men: Dark Phoenix, all reviled) and time away from acting to raise a family and race cars, this will be seen as a huge win for the actor. Warmly received and popular on streaming, if not at the box office, we can say that Fassbender is back, and hopefully, he gets more chances to do his thing.

Swinton, meanwhile, anchors the film’s finest stretch. As one of the assassins hired to kill the Killer, she is sitting down to a quiet meal alone in a fine-dining establishment when the Killer takes a seat across from her (along came a spider who sat down beside her). The dialogue is no great shakes, but Swinton and Fassbender sell the hell out of it. And for once, Fincher lets the actors lead, setting his camera down and just watching these two great performers work together. I could have watched 90 minutes of just this scene, but alas, there was more to be done, none of it equalling these heights.

Ultimately, maybe I’m not criticizing the movie Fincher made so much as the movie people will see. But, you would think the guy who made Fight Club would have learned to be a little more careful with his aim. As the Killer would know, the ricochet can be brutal.

New movie review: Albert Brooks: Defending My Life

Albert Brooks (left) and Rob Reiner, in Albert Brooks: Defending My Life

“You think I see two roads.” – Albert Brooks, in Albert Brooks: Defending My Life

Albert Brooks has been with me my whole life. I can’t say what the first thing I saw him in would have been, but I know it was early. It could have been The Simpsons, where he made his first guest appearance in 1990. Maybe it was The Scout, a 1994 baseball movie that would have been on the shelf at the video rental store at the exact moment in my life that I was watching every baseball movie in existence. The true beginning doesn’t matter. What matters is that he’s been there.

Rob Reiner’s new film, Albert Brooks: Defending My Life, is a documentary about Brooks, yes, but it’s also a chronicle of all the ways he’s been there and all the people he inspired along the way. Reiner, who has been best friends with Brooks since they were in high school together, takes us through every stage of Brooks’ amazing career.

We see the early variety and talk show appearances, which presage what we would now call the alt-comedy movement. We see the early short films he made for Saturday Night Live, a tradition that continues on the show to this day. There is a brief standup career, which serves as proof that a mind like Brooks’ cannot be confined to the stage. No, this act must be presented before the largest audience possible, which means TV and, of course, the movies.

The movies. The first Brooks-directed film I saw was Defending Your Life, a staple of TBS in the late ‘90s. About a man who arrives in Judgment City, the way station between life and the afterlife, the premise held much appeal for a kid who was scared of dying. We don’t know where those trams are going at the end of the movie, but they must be headed somewhere, and anywhere would be better than the void. It’s a wonderful fantasy.

Brooks tells Reiner that Meryl Streep approached him at a party and (maybe) jokingly asked if there was a role in the movie for her. He demurred, then realized, ‘Well, yeah, of course there’s a part for Meryl Streep.’ She is, naturally, excellent in the film.

Reiner’s documentary is full of these kinds of Hollywood stories and behind-the-scenes anecdotes. Much of the film is told by Brooks to Reiner as they sit at a restaurant booth together, á la My Dinner with Andre. There are clips from just about everything Brooks has been a major part of, and there are interviews with everyone from David Letterman to Neil DeGrasse Tyson to Steven Spielberg. It’s a tremendous boon to the film that Reiner can call upon his famous friends, but the stories make it clear that for most of the interviewees, the privilege is theirs to be able to honor Brooks in this way.

Along with Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, Albert Brooks absolutely deserves to be in the conversation as one of the best comedic filmmakers of the 1970s and ‘80s. Allen had the accolades and the prodigious work ethic, while Mel Brooks had the bigger-than-life spoofs and outrageous gags. Albert Brooks instead flew under the radar, working rarely and often with little help from the studios. A number of the doc’s best stories involve Brooks getting studio notes, then ignoring them to his films’ great benefit.

So, Brooks has never won an Academy Award nor had a particularly big box office hit. He is what we would refer to as a “filmmaker’s filmmaker.” Other artists love him because they get it. Brooks is simply always ahead of the curve. With hindsight, though, it seems apparent that Brooks’ first three films – Real Life (1979), Modern Romance (1981), and Lost in America (1985) – serve as the sharpest critique of yuppie culture that we have. Each remains relevant today, and in many ways, they grow more relevant every day.

Watching these early films makes you feel like you are in on a secret, and no matter when you discover them, you feel that Brooks is speaking directly to you about the world you occupy. Twenty-one years before Survivor landed and changed the television landscape, there was Real Life, a perfect distillation of what reality TV would become. Give the two leads in Modern Romance a couple iPhones and it becomes virtually indistinguishable from dating in the 2020s.

Lost in America was explicitly about the post-Vietnam generation of yuppies who were too busy consuming to concern themselves with the bigger questions. But, release it today and see what millennial doesn’t identify with the desire to chuck it all and start over, while feeling trapped by the relentless grind of life. There is no generational divide when it comes to middle-class, middle-aged ennui.

Ahead of his time at every turn, Brooks is very obviously a genius, but he is also a comedic genius, and one thing I am underselling is just how damn funny this movie is. Whether it’s your first time seeing the ventriloquist act or the 50th, it remains riotously funny. Even today, the 76-year-old Brooks, né Albert Einstein, is as quick-witted as ever, cracking up Reiner at every opportunity.

There are brief sections, as well, on an acting career that features pitch-perfect supporting turns in everything from Taxi Driver to Drive to his Oscar-nominated performance in Broadcast News. Obviously, he is a top-tier guest star on The Simpsons, serving as the best part of one of the single greatest episodes of perhaps the greatest television show ever made (Hank Scorpio, “You Only Move Twice”; enjoy).

For me, though, it all comes back to the movies and wishing we got more than just the seven features written and directed by Brooks, including just one this century. That would be 2005’s Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, another biting satire about looking for connection in an increasingly disconnected world. Of course that film would face difficulties, coming as it did in the midst of the “War on Terror,” and Brooks found himself at odds with the studio again.

In the closing moments of the documentary, Brooks says to Reiner:

“I had a very famous agent, and he said to me, ‘I don’t know why you always take the hard road.’ And, my answer was, ‘You think I see two roads, and I don’t. If there was an easy road, I’d have a house there.’ I said, ‘What do you think? I get up. I can’t wait for the goddamn trouble I’m gonna get into.’ I said, ‘... I see one road.’”

This hit me hard. I’m no longer a kid, afraid of death. I can accept the void. At 35, if I’m very lucky, maybe I have a little more life in front of me than behind me, but there’s only one road, and it only goes one direction. That’s true for all of us, and all we can do is the best we can. And, hopefully, if there is a Judgment City out there, our best is enough.

New movie review: Anatomy of a Fall

The first thing we see is a tennis ball haphazardly tumbling down the stairs. We never see what caused it to tumble, who might have thrown it, dropped it, or perhaps accidentally knocked it. We accept the mystery because in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter. Anatomy of a Fall will ask us to accept the mystery many more times over the course of its story, and we will learn bitterly that some mysteries are easier to accept than others.

Director Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning drama forces us to confront the way our culture has turned murder into a spectator sport by way of true crime podcasts, sensationalized media, and our own need for tidy endings and easy answers. It is a brilliant piece of work that instantly joins the pantheon of that ever-vaunted genre: the legal thriller.

And yet, it stands above such genre trappings. Triet employs a sense of style rare among courtroom dramas, and even the best American legal thrillers can tend toward formula. Anatomy of a Fall is anything but formulaic. Yes, it helps that to outsiders, such as myself, the French trial process will seem downright bizarre, but the film’s specialness goes beyond any cultural oddities. Its genius lies in the multitude of small, human interactions it gets right, in its deft handling of the subjective and objective points of view, and in the wonderful performances Triet gets from her actors.

Chief among these, of course, is German star Sandra Hüller, whom you may recognize from the international breakout hit Toni Erdmann or 2021’s lovely I’m Your Man. Here, Hüller is given the unenviable task of playing a woman so convinced of her own righteousness that she can seem aloof or unfeeling. In her most private moments, however, we can see that she is anything but. Rather, she simply seems tired of participating in the games so many others are committed to playing. Her Sandra wants what she wants, and right or not, she is willing to take it.

In a subtle bit of foreshadowing, we hear Sandra before we see her. Over images of that falling tennis ball we mentioned, we hear Sandra talking to a student who hopes to base her thesis at least in part on Sandra’s work. Sandra is an author who has based much of her fiction on circumstances from her own life, as many authors do, but she comes off as strangely unaware of the many parallels that exist. 

Their conversation, which is being recorded for the student’s notes, can be read two ways, and Hüller plays that space between perfectly. On the one hand, Sandra is a German woman who has moved to her French husband’s small hometown, and with few, if any, friends, she could be seeking comfort in a genuine human connection. On the other hand, as she drinks what is not her first glass of wine this afternoon, the bi-sexual Sandra may be trying to seduce the student, literally right under the nose of her husband, who is working upstairs.

Friendship or seduction? It could be either, and this is the first time but not the last that we are asked to live in the mystery. This same tension underlies everything that follows, emphasizing just how ephemeral the idea of objective truth really is.

Triet drives this point home in the film’s standout scene, one of the best scenes in any movie this year. Sandra is on trial, accused of murdering her husband, Samuel (a superb Samuel Theis), and the prosecution reveals it has a secret recording of a fight between the couple that occurred the day before Samuel’s death. The fight takes place in English, so the members of the court are provided a French transcript so that they may follow along with the recording.

For the first time in the film, we get a true flashback. We finally get to meet Samuel, who has been a ghost haunting the film up until this point. We see the husband and wife argue. It starts off small, turns petty, then explodes, as arguments between long-term couples with simmering resentments are wont to do. 

From a filmmaking standpoint, it is a bravura sequence, with Hüller and Theis delivering wonderfully lived-in performances, convincing as two exhausted people who have been through this before, too many times. The writing is a masterstroke of observation, exemplifying the ways small grievances fester and turn toxic, poisoning a relationship. In this one scene, we learn everything we could ever need to know about who these people were, who they are, and how they got this way.

It is absolutely devastating to witness these two people verbally tear each other to shreds. Then, at the peak of the emotional tension, just as it is about to boil over into physical violence, Triet cuts back to the courtroom. On the recording playing for the jury, we hear glass break, a slap, more breaking glass and possibly dishes, and more physical violence.

The director does not cut away here to shield us from the brutality that is evident. The film is unsparing in what it chooses to show us. Rather, once the confrontation turns physical, it exits the world of objective truth and becomes something subjective. The transcript, the recorded words, this is all that can be known for sure, so we are allowed to see it. What happens outside of that must be interpreted, guessed at. Sandra provides an explanation, but it is only her side. We are not allowed to see it because that would be the film showing us something that cannot be known.

The argument sequence is one of those rare, magical moments in cinema when everything – the writing, the themes, the performances, the filmmaking – comes together at once to crystallize whatever the filmmaker is trying to say. Every single person I have spoken to about the film has mentioned this scene. It has a way of sticking with you long after you leave the theater. You feel compelled to play it back in your mind, thinking through the twists and turns, looking for some clue that explains it all. I’ll save you the time: No such clue exists.

This is Triet’s and co-writer Arthur Harari’s final trick. The media are filled with lurid true-crime tales and murder-of-the-week stories that teach us to look for the signs, to be junior detectives, parsing every detail for information. Generally, at the end of these stories, the clues add up, the murderer is caught, and we are satisfied that wrongs have been righted and justice prevails. Anatomy of a Fall exposes these stories for what they are: wish fulfillment. Life is so often messier, and Triet and Harari understand this.

Sandra’s attorney has argued that Samuel killed himself, though Sandra herself doubts this theory. At one point, a TV commentator says plainly that a famous writer murdering her husband is a lot more interesting than a sad teacher killing himself. During the trial sequences, Triet often cuts to the gallery, filled with spectators who have no skin in the game but their own fascination with a dead man and an accused woman. They are invested in a story of a murder, not a story of facts and truth.

Among these spectators sits Daniel, Sandra and Samuel’s preteen son. Played by Milo Machado-Graner, in one of the greatest child actor performances you will ever see, Daniel is the collateral damage of a marriage turned sour, a culture turned cold. The final half-hour turns on what Daniel may or may not remember and what he chooses to do with that memory. His process is gut wrenching to witness, and we know that no matter what choice he makes, he will never be the same.

At the end of the day, when we cannot know the truth, all we are left with is a choice about what to think and whom to believe. In general, movies are a safe space because filmmakers are omnipotent. Even the best, most subtle films offer us objective stories wherein we can feel secure because we will be told what is real and what to feel. Anatomy of a Fall is anything but a safe movie, and therein lies its power.