David Walsh Reviews David Fincher's The Killer

David Walsh has recently penned a review of David Fincher's Netflix film, The Killer, and taken the film as an occasion to consider Fincher's now three decade-old record of directing feature film, paying particular attention to such movies as Fight Club, The Social Network, Gone Girl, and the more recent Mank. Walsh argues that while "each of [Fincher's] films has intriguing and even insightful moments," Fincher tends overwhelmingly toward superficiality, particularly evident in his "predilection for brutal, irrational behavior," and identification of "certain alienated moods," while never having much to say about "their origin or trajectory," and certainly not their "social sources." All in line with a "shortsighted, limited vision of humanity and society" apparently consisting of little but "general misanthropy," "pervasive darkness," and "the desire to make people uncomfortable" it is not, but only by the credulous confused with, "criticism of capitalism, corporations, contemporary civilization . . . modern marriage" that leaves us with the "chilly and banal" at that level, only underlined by the "style" over which Fincher fans gush so much.

I cannot say that I have tried to follow David Fincher's work, but I have seen a fair bit of it all the same, and going by that Walsh seems to me to do an exceptional job of summing up the (very limited) strengths and (considerable) weaknesses of a filmmaker who, in spite of the plaudits with which les claqueurs of the entertainment press lavish him, has a "body of work" with "many more minuses than pluses in" it, just as Walsh seems to me to have been one of the few to grasp the profound limitations of Quentin Tarantino's work (especially as his career went on).* Walsh seems to me equally correct in treating Fincher's outlook and its limitations as not merely his own, but characteristic of that cohort of filmmakers that emerged in the '90s, and has increasingly dominated the American cinematic scene ever since, of which Fincher is a star.

* The few others who did grasp Tarantino's limitations include Gary Groth, and James Wood. It seems significant that neither is by profession a film reviewer, and that neither seems to have been much heard from since regarding Mr. Tarantino.