For the week of January 13th, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is bringing Gone Girl to Blu-ray. The film marks director David Fincher's second big-screen adaptation of what one might charitably call a "beach read" - in their literary forms, both Gone Girl and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo function as high-toned trash, the kind of mildly disreputable yarns that blanket whatever high-falutin' ambitions they might have under a thick covering of plot-twists, violence, and sex. However, what makes Fincher's work in each instance so impressive is how he elevates this pulp into something greater without diluting any of the visceral thrills, not unlike Francis Ford Coppola's cinematic magic trick with Mario Puzo's Godfather bestseller. In that regard, Fincher's Gone Girl is even more noteworthy than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. On the page, it's a lurid mystery about how the disappearance of Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike, brilliant, and more than that I should not say) on her fifth wedding anniversary begins to reveal some very ugly things about her marriage to Nick (Ben Affleck), not least of which is Nick's possible involvement in her vanishing. To his credit, Fincher doesn't skimp on what made Gillian Flynn's original novel so addictive. Like...well, everything he's ever directed, Fincher maintains a deliberate yet relentless pace, with his longtime editor Kirk Baxter alternating between perspectives - Nick's following his wife's disappearance, and Amy's through her journal - as a means of delaying and orchestrating twists with Hitchcockian panache (and I'm not even spending much time on the performances, which are all splendid, particularly Carrie Coon as Nick's twin sister and Tyler Perry - yes, the Tyler Perry - as Nick's charismatic defense attorney). The comparison becomes all the more apt when taking into consideration Fincher's technical brilliance. As it was in Fight Club, The Social Network, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Jeff Cronenweth's cinematography is razor-sharp and expertly framed, and Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross' soundtrack layers in an additional level of digital dread; their work culminates in at least half a dozen virtuoso setpieces, including a beyond-grisly murder that feels like Fincher riffing on early Paul Verhoeven films (particularly his blackly comic thriller The 4th Man). As with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it is very possible to watch Gone Girl as pure entertainment. But Fincher is up to more than that, and it's in his handling of Nick's character that his social teeth come out. On one hand, Nick allows Fincher to indict the whole media system. Regardless of Nick's guilt or innocence, the media frenzy (personified by Missi Pyle's Nancy Grace-esque caricature) that surrounds him is a capricious, arbitrary beast, one that will support and maintain any story - no matter how ludicrous or gruesome - as long as it's entertaining enough. In that sense, Ben Affleck is the only person who could play Nick; it's not surprising to say he gives the performance of his life because he, too, has been as violently condemned and feted (in equal measures) by the public eye as Nick has been. Even more resonant is Fincher's handling of the gender war. The relationship between Nick and Amy drives each to do some horrible things, all of which grow from the unreasonable expectations that society places on men and women. With the Dunnes, sure, their actions go to extremes, but the nucleus is comprised of day-to-day slights and injustices. Gone Girl gets at a fundamental rot at the heart of American culture and value, but it's the most beautiful nightmare you're likely to see. In its own way, a perfect film.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review noted that "the intriguing Gone Girl, a film which plays upon preconceptions in an almost ruthlessly sly way. It's a bit hard to adequately discuss Gone Girl without at least hinting at some of the twists and turns both Gillian Flynn's original novel and her own adapted screenplay take, and so those not familiar with the story might want to stop right here, though I will endeavor not to provide any out and out spoilers. That said, there's little question that Flynn rather ingeniously toys with her readers, and by default her viewers, in presenting a story that is intentionally bifurcated between a supposedly objective narrative and a more subjective exploration of a wife's personal experiences courtesy of a journal she's keeping, but it's part of Gone Girl's structural scheme that everything is not exactly as it might seem at first glance. Gone Girl has tended to anger some readers, frankly mostly female, who felt Flynn's denouement was a slap in the face to years of struggle for equal rights, and even Flynn has suggested she had a moment of remorse shortly after the novel appeared, fearing she had (in her own words) 'killed feminism.' But putting aside any subtext like that, at least for a moment, Gone Girl is a thrillingly discursive take on an age-old story, one that moves at a deliberate but inexorable pace toward a rather unsettling conclusion."
From Universal Studios come the detective story A Walk Among the Tombstones. As with Gone Girl, this film is an adaptation of a popular genre novel, with writer/director Scott Frank bringing the tenth entry in Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder series to cinematic life. A Walk Among the Tombstones is the second time someone has decided to make a movie out of Scudder's adventures, and it is, by far, the most satisfying of the two big-screen iterations; Hal Ashby and Oliver Stone tried their luck back in 1986 with Eight Million Ways to Die, which starred Jeff Bridges as Scudder, and yielded incoherent, mostly unsatisfying results (to be fair, the film's production and post-production woes were legion - many have claimed that the stress of making the picture killed Ashby). Here, Frank has constructed a throwback of sorts to the small-scale crime dramas of the 1970s. When A Walk Among the Tombstones is at its best, it's focused exclusively on Scudder himself, and that's a good thing: as the broken-down alcoholic and unlicensed P.I., Liam Neeson gives his best performance since, no kidding, 2011's The Grey. He carries a palpable sadness with him - as the film depicts, Scudder is an ex-cop who got booted from the force for doing something awful - and that malaise follows him through everything he does. Whether he's bracing a pair of druggie brothers (Boyd Holbrook and Dan Stevens, once again doing everything he can to tarnish his Downton Abbey image) or humoring his de facto teenage sidekick TJ (the charming Brian Bradley), Scudder carries himself like an addict, one who does what little good he can in a desperate effort to atone for his sins, and you can sense Neeson's palpable joy at getting to sink his teeth into a living, breathing human being instead of some quick delivery system for junky action thrills. He's so good that, were A Walk Among the Tombstones truly committed to its 1970s mission statement, the film could work as a simple character study of a spiritually doomed person, not unlike Gene Hackman and Arthur Penn's great, nihilistic P.I. drama Night Moves. It's a shame, then, that Frank eventually concedes to genre demands, taking this rich character and stranding him in a serviceable murder mystery where a dead woman (Razane Jammal) puts Scudder on the trail of some bad men (Adam David Thompson and the very creepy David Harbour). This stuff is well done, but it's awfully familiar, and Frank allows the gory handiwork of his baddies to overwhelm the story in a way that, unlike in Gone Girl, serves no greater thematic or artistic purposes. Plus, he feints at the one moment the movie could use a little pulp energy: the end shootout, which Frank bungles through a terrible editing decision. Ultimately, A Walk Among the Tombstones has made a name for itself as a fine Sunday-afternoon diversion. But Neeson sure is great.
Kenneth Brown wrote that "Frank's hodgepodge tone and style doesn't really lend itself to tight pacing, with Tombstones veering from gripping, suspenseful, at-times unsettling first act to sleepy, erratic second to over-cranked, underwhelming third. Neeson weathers the wibbli-wobbliness well enough, though, and his Scudder is the best thing the film has to offer. Rather than resort to action-driven Taken fisticuffs, or elevating Scudder to nigh-invincible, bullet-dodging superhero, the streetwise ex-cop proceeds like a man acutely aware of his own mortality; a recognition his involvement in Alcoholics Anonymous serves to highlight (albeit to overbearing ends). A tortured soul paying self-imposed penance for a tragic shooting, Neeson's PI is a thinking man's detective; emphasis on detective, piecing together clues, following leads and closing in on the killers without much in the way of shootouts, car chases or 'splosions."
Another big literary adaptation this week is Men, Women, & Children, the latest film from Jason Reitman. Reitman took his inspiration from Chad Kultgen's novel of the same name, but the movie is less notable for its efforts of adaptation than it is for continuing Reitman's unfortunate filmmaking tailspin. Right now, he seems like a cautionary tale. After emerging with the one-two punch of Thank You for Smoking and Juno, Reitman seemed on his way to becoming the next Billy Wilder, especially after the success afforded to his Oscar-winning dramedy Up in the Air. Here was a whip-smart social satirist whose insights had teeth (for the best proof of that, check out his critically beloved but woefully underseen Young Adult, with its great and terrifying performance from Charlize Theron), yet beginning with last year's unintentionally hilarious and dangerously straight-faced soaper Labor Day, Reitman appeared to be jettisoning that acidity, a fear that Men, Women, & Children confirms. This anti-technology screed makes Labor Day look subtle - it's an alarmist look at technology and its perils, particular how the two weave throughout the lives of an unhappy married couple (Adam Sandler and Rosemarie Dewitt), a fame-hungry mother-and-daughter pair (Judy Greer and Olivia Crocicchia), an isolated teen (Ansel Elgort) and his concerned father (Dean Norris), and an almost psychotically protective mother (Jennifer Garner) and her sheltered teenage daughter (Kaitlyn Dever). That these people intersect with one another in different permutations probably shouldn't surprise anyone, but the shock is that, considering how subtle and finely wrought his first four films were, Reitman's protagonists here clash with a ludicrous hysteria reminiscent of Paul Haggis' much maligned Crash. As Reitman and his co-screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson depict it, technology is the stone root of all evils, condemning these characters to joyless lives of misery, whether it's through the terrors of *GASP* online chat-rooms and online pornography. That's right: Men, Women, & Children is to the Internet what Reefer Madness was to marijuana use. Worst of all, Reitman has forgotten to bring anything remotely resembling humor to the proceedings. It's a joyless slog, stocked with talented actors doing career-worst work (although Elgort, Dever, and Norris manage to escape with their dignity intact, Sandler sleepwalks his way through his role, and Garner plays a shrill harridan with no greater nuance). The Terminator movies are less pessimistic about the digital realm than this misguided belly-flop.
Martin Liebman wrote that "the film ultimately suffers from overzealousness, forcefully manipulating characters to extreme circumstances to make a point that's not at all filtered or even all that profound. The film is, frankly, far too poetic in its effort to demonstrate that what matters to one doesn't mean squat to someone else, thanks in large part to voiceover narration that at one point sounds like something from a sequel to Idiocracy and later turns into a soliloquy about the cosmos. Certainly it strikes a fire in the mind, leaving the audience pondering some of the greater questions out there, but only because they're force-fed rather than subtly or purposefully weaved into the story. It's too much exposure and not enough meaningful maneuvering, a shame because the movie can be enlightening and entertaining in chunks, even if that means it's largely uneven in tone whereby it's a borderline sex-comedy one minute and a virtual philosophy class the next. Then again, maybe that's the point; the digital life is messy and intrusive and unbalanced. Where else can one be reading about quantum mechanics on one side of the screen and find ads promising "one insanely easy trick to pay off your mortgage!" and 'Russian singles want YOU!' ads on the other. The picture certainly means well, and it enjoys strong pacing and some quality performances. Yet it feels fairly empty even as it tries to find meaning. In essence, Men, Women, & Children promotes an excellent topic for cinema exploration that's not given the polished, purposeful treatment it deserves up on the screen, feeling more like a time stamp rather than a timely exploration of the digitized human condition."
For the fourth book adaptation of the week, we have Lionsgate's new Blu-ray of My Left Foot, which takes inspiration from Irish artist Christy Brown's own autobiography. In relaying Brown's story - born with cerebral palsy, Brown learned how to paint and write only through the use of his left foot - director Jim Sheridan (In the Name of the Father, In America) hits pretty much every expected beat of the traditional biopic: we first meet Brown (played by Hugh O'Conor as a child and Daniel Day-Lewis as an adult) when he is a child; we watching him mature into adulthood while coping with the day-to-day struggles of his disability; and we see how his trials and tribulations helped shape both his art as well as his character as a human being. Now, Jim Sheridan brings a lovely, understated touch to the proceedings that keeps the film from getting too maudlin, and he's got support from a wonderful group of actors (particularly Ray McAnally and Brenda Fricker as Brown's life-force parents), but the template is still pretty rote - if those elements were all that My Left Foot had, it would be on the level of an above-average HBO movie. However, Daniel Day-Lewis' ferocious performance as the adult Brown elevates the film into the pantheon of great biopics. Even when he's recreating Brown's agonizing physical trials (and, true to form, Day-Lewis remained in character throughout production), Day-Lewis doesn't let in an ounce of sentimentality. Brown is a full character, as mad and brilliant and horny and turbulent as one could imagine, and his condition only energizes those traits. Day-Lewis won the first of his three Oscars for this role (Fricker also took home an Academy Award for this movie as well), which really marks the start of his total-immersion commitment to his roles. The same fearlessness runs through his epic turns in films like Gangs of New York, There Will Be Blood, and Lincoln.
Finally, the Criterion Collection is bringing Rainer Werner Fassbinder's brilliant The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant to Blu-ray. Although the iconic German filmmaker's career was cut too short (he died in 1982 at age thirty-seven of a cocaine overdose), Fassbinder was amazingly prolific during his relatively brief creative period; he directed forty feature-length films, and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant remains one of his finest efforts. This melodrama examines three women: fashion designer Petra von Kant (Margit Carstensen), her silent assistant Marlene (Irm Hermann), and Karin (Hanna Schygulla), a young aspiring model who pushes the already fraught tension between the women to twisted extremes. In particular, for all her fame and high status, Petra finds herself frequently at the mercy of the far more mercurial Karin. The film is an adaptation (there's that word again) of Fassbinder's own stage-play, but rather than try to open it up for the big-screen, Fassbinder and his great DP Michael Ballhaus (who went on to become one of Martin Scorsese's regular cinematographers, collaborating with him on such films as GoodFellas and The Departed) foreground the spatial limitations of the play. They trap us in Petra's loft, and so the physical confines become a thinly veiled representation of the psychological and emotional barriers that enslave the protagonists. Furthermore, Fassbinder and Ballhaus' aesthetic capturing of these environs recalls not just the stylization of the theater but also of cinema itself. Fassbinder is drawing on a wealth of psychosexual melodramas, starting with The Blue Angel and All About Eve (unsurprisingly, we get explicit references to both Marlene Dietrich and All About Eve director Joseph Mankiewicz) and then moving into far more surreal examples of the genre like Ingmar Bergman's Persona - one wonders if Robert Altman was aware of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant when he was conceiving his underrated thriller 3 Women. This is very much a movie-movie, yet Fassbinder still holds us in thrall. He takes the doomed relationship between his characters seriously, and their barbs have a potency even greater than the fever-dream atmosphere of the film's look.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov wrote that "the dynamics of the relationships are clearly inspired by those witnessed in Douglas Sirk's films. There is added depth, however, and the character transformations are far more intense. The women are also defined by the environment in which they are placed, much like many of the main characters in Sirk's films are. The end result is a stunningly stylish but borderline claustrophobic film. The abuse of power is observed from a number of different angles as the relationships between the women evolve. Instead of condemning or siding with any of the women, however, the film effectively forces the viewer to ponder the reasoning behind their decisions to commit to a relationship, their expectations, and ultimately their definition of love (feeling vs. possession). The film is based on a play which Fassbinder had completed earlier in his career. Also, portions of it imitate the dynamics of his relationship with Gunther Kaufmann (who was Karin's model in real life)."