The Killer (David Fincher, 2023)

Michael Fassbender in The Killer

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Tilda Swinton, Charles Parnell, Arliss Howard, Kerry O'Malley, Sophie Charlotte, Emiliana Pernia, Gabriel Polanco, Sala Baker, Monique Ganderton, Daran Norris, Jack Kesy. Screenplay: Andrew Kevin Walker, based on a graphic novel series by Alexis Nolent and Luc Jacamon. Cinematography: Erik Messerschmidt. Production design: Donald Graham Burt. Film editing: Kirk Baxter. Music: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross. 

In essence, The Killer is a routine thriller about a hit man who screws up and then has to undo the consequences of his screwup. But director David Fincher, screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, and actor Michael Fassbender make it seem fresh and novel, not by departing from formula but by creating characters and giving them something fresh to say. Fassbender is The Killer (most of the dramatis personae are given labels rather than names), a lean, mean killing machine who rises above that cliché by a variety of quirks, including an addiction to maxims and mottoes that we hear from constantly in voiceover: "Stick to your plan. Anticipate, don't improvise. Trust no one. Never yield to an advantage. Fight only the battle you're paid to fight." Even by itself that constant voiceover could be annoying, except that Fassbender makes it amusing by intoning it in a flat American accent, and by occasionally failing to follow his own advice. Fincher spends a long time on the setup to the first kill, which makes it even more startling when the suspense is broken by the Killer's mistake. There's some swift action as he gets rid of the equipment used in the shoot, then boards a plane (using one of his many passports and credit cards, all carrying fake names borrowed from TV characters) for his home in the Dominican Republic, where he finds that he still has to keep running, eliminating not only those pursuing him, but also everybody else who knows his true identity. These incidents introduce us to a variety of characters, wittily played by, among others, Charles Parnell (The Lawyer, aka Hodges, who is a middle man between The Killer and his targets), Tilda Swinton (The Expert, a fellow assassin who knows his identity), and Arliss Howard (The Client, one of the few people The Killer manages to intimidate but not kill). All of this nonsense -- which is praise, not criticism -- is set to a variety of songs, mostly by the Smiths, whose dark humor perfectly complements the style of the movie. I could quibble about this being one of those films in which the big fight scene takes place in the dark, so you're never quite sure who's beating whom, but then moral ambiguity is the whole point of the movie. 

A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, 2011)

Viggo Mortensen in A Dangerous Method

Carl Jung: Michael Fassbender
Sigmund Freud: Viggo Mortensen
Sabina Spielrein: Keira Knightley
Otto Gross: Vincent Cassel
Emma Jung: Sarah Gadon

Director: David Cronenberg
Screenplay: Christopher Hampton
Adapted from a play by Christopher Hampton based on a book by John Kerr
Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky
Production design: James McAteer
Music: Howard Shore

Sometimes, as Freud said, a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes, as Viggo Mortensen, playing the man himself, demonstrates, a cigar is a prop that can help you win an acting contest. Because too often a costume drama based on a play becomes just that: a contest among actors to show who can come out on top, especially when the cast consists of actors like Mortensen, Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, and Vincent Cassel -- none of them exactly shy of showing what they can do before a camera. When I heard of it, I thought Mortensen was a decidedly off-beat choice to play the father of psychoanalysis, and he was in fact the second actor to be cast in the role, after Christoph Waltz, an almost inevitable choice, found he had a scheduling conflict. Mortensen had worked with director David Cronenberg twice before, but playing men of violent action in Eastern Promises (2007) and A History of Violence (2005), not a pre-World War I middle-European Jewish intellectual. And yet Mortensen gives a delicious performance as Freud: puckish, proud, intellectually combative. And the cigar helps, whether brandished elegantly or plugged defiantly in the middle of his face. By contrast, everyone else seems a little over the top. Fassbender (who was second choice after Christian Bale) is his usual handsome presence, but he frets a little too visibly and never quite establishes Jung as the challenger to Freud's authority that Freud seems to have thought him to be. Keira Knightley acts the electrons off the screen as Sabina, almost popping out an eye and dislocating her jaw in her mad scenes, but recovers nicely in her later moments in the film. And Vincent Cassel, as the mad Otto Gross, takes his role to the extreme as the man who carries Freud's theories about repression to their logical extreme: Don't repress anything. Ever. The film's battle of ideas gets a little bit lost in all the emoting, and as so often happens in filmed costume dramas, the scenery and the sets capture the eye when the words should be capturing the mind. But Howard Shore's evocation of the melancholy side of Wagner's music is perfect for the era in which the film is set, the transition from 19th-century Weltschmerz into 20th-century bloodshed, a time when, as Joyce punned, we were Jung and easily Freudened. Jung's prophetic dream of a bloody tide sweeping over Europe is cited in the film, as a warning that all of this intellectual (and sexual) ferment was about to be inundated by war.  

Watched on Starz Encore

X-Men: Apocalypse (Bryan Singer, 2016)

Oscar Isaac is one of my favorite actors. I loved his work in Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2013), A Most Violent Year (J.C. Chandor, 2014), Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015), and on the HBO miniseries Show Me a Hero (2015). He even managed to stand out in all the whiz-bang and nostalgia of the latest Star Wars installment. But I sat through the entirety of X-Men: Apocalypse without realizing, until his name appeared in the credits, that he was the one beneath all the makeup and prosthetics as En Sabah Nur, aka Apocalypse. Which makes me wonder: Why bother? Casting an actor of such skill and versatility in a role that could have been played by anyone willing to sit through hours of applying and removing body paint, silicone, and foam latex seems to me a waste of valuable resources. But I guess the same thing could be said about the entire film if you ignore the return the producers got on their estimated $178 million investment. When a film this size feels routine, something has gone awry, and X-Men: Apocalypse is nothing if not routine. There are things I enjoyed about it, like the special effects when Quicksilver (Evan Peters) rescues almost everyone from the explosion that destroys the institute. The trick of seeing everything as Quicksilver sees it -- i.e., as time standing still while he moves at superspeed, dashing from room to room to haul occupants to safety -- is nicely done. And there are good performances from Peters, from James McAvoy as Charles Xavier, Michael Fassbender as Erik Lehnsherr, Jennifer Lawrence as Raven, Nicholas Hoult as Hank McCoy, and Kodi Smit-McPhee as Nightcrawler. I enjoyed seeing Sophie Turner (as the latest iteration of Jean Grey) in something other than Game of Thrones and Hugh Jackman in an unbilled (and extremely violent) cameo as Logan/Wolverine. But there's a kind of heartlessness and thoughtlessness about it, too often characteristic of the superhero blockbuster movie genre, that my experience amounted to a kind of déjà vu. I just hope Isaac got paid well.  

Macbeth (Justin Kurzel, 2015)

Translating a play from its theatrical mode into a cinematic one is never easy, but Justin Kurzel and his screenwriters, Jacob Koskoff, Michael Lesslie, and Todd Louiso, do several smart things in their adaptation of Macbeth. They open the film with a scene not in Shakespeare's play, the funeral of a small child presumably born to Macbeth (Michael Fassbender) and his Lady (Marion Cotillard), an extrapolation from Lady Macbeth's later claim that she has "given suck" to an infant. It establishes the sense of unsettling loss and grave disorientation that feeds the Macbeths' ambition. The film also scraps the witches' cauldron scene, its "double, double, toil and trouble" and "eye of newt" incantations, which can become ludicrous even in a well-done modern production, turning the witches into Halloween hags instead of the eerie prophets Shakespeare portrayed. In their place, the witches become three peasant women, one of whom has a baby in her arms, accompanied by another child. They seem indigenous, gifted with the air of prophecy attributed to those close to the land. Another problematic element of the play, the movement of Birnam Wood to Dunsinane, which can look silly on stage, with soldiers carrying branches in their hands, is resolved into something terrifying: Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane in the form of ashes and sparks, after the forest is set fire to by the troops of Macduff (Sean Harris) and Malcolm (Jack Reynor). This also creates a hellish landscape for the final duel of Macbeth and Macduff. There are some other touches that, though cinematic, don't work quite so well. Lady Macbeth's line, "screw your courage to the sticking place," is turned into a kind of dirty joke: an encouragement for Macbeth to penetrate her sexually. The banquet scene and the appearance of Banquo's ghost (Paddy Considine) is awkwardly staged. The lady's sleepwalking scene is shorn of its witnesses, and despite Cotillard's fine performance, it becomes a disjointed monologue in which she returns to the scene of the original crime, the murder of Duncan (David Thewlis). And worst of all, I think, the fear that speaking Shakespeare's verse aloud could become "stagey," leads Kurzel to reduce much of the dialogue and soliloquies to murmurs and whispers. The "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech is barely coherent when Macbeth mutters it as he hauls Lady Macbeth from her deathbed. Fassbender and Cotillard are formidable actors, but they have been done a severe disservice by not allowing them to use their voices to full effect.