David Fincher's newly impervious, lead-lined rep rests upon his enviable status as a visual savant. He's an idiosyncratic seer of visions (rather than an overt visionary -- he's more of a hyperbolic pragmatist than a dreamer of grand dreams a la Kubrick) eliciting images that only someone with that eye could extract and isolate from the million others pummelling their retina daily.
Finally catching (unlike his new picture's "heroes" Graysmith or SFPDs finest were able to do) the Zodiac last night, it struck me that Fincher is in possession of not only a painter's eye but a Mozart-like ear as well. The talented fucker.
I have to confess that, amid the quietly, though audaciously, staged carnage and slathering of period minutiae about the scope frame, what jazzed me most about the picture was just a simple phone call. Or should I say a raft of simple phone calls. Or perhaps I should really specify half of a raft of simple phone calls. For all the myriad, exasperatingly dense detail being exposited upon the eavesdropping viewer during countless scenes of telephonic investigation and reportage by Jake Gyllenhaal's Graysmith, Robert Downey's Avery and Mark Ruffalos' Toschi, the sound design of the person on the other end of the phone was what gave me the most pleasure for those two and half quite mesmerising hours. It's just so emblematic of Fincher's dedication to a sequence's particularity. Sure, the wide angled, deep focus newsroom and sanguine-in-the-face-of-it-all editorial meetings is a fine nod to All The President's Men. But the more tacit (or should that be simply "more subtle"?) homage to Pakula's incredible thriller was the timbre and breathy tension of those piecemeal 'deepthroat' conversations.
Call it one of those intensely personal cinephiliac moments, call it fastidious but I find myself with a need to call it. Here, amid the ebbing mood board Fincher constructs as his aural landscape, the myriad sounds of an compulsively, obsessively existence-eclipsing investigation enshroud us as much as the era's languid funk, as realised by Donovan, Gordon Lightfoot, Issac Hayes and the whole gang. He has inspired some fine co-conspirators.
Sound designer Ren Klyce has been with Fincher as a sound effects editor since Se7en (yes, "7", it's how the credits spell it -- damn the stigma of such pedantry all to hell) and Richard Hymns, also Fincher's regular sound editor since Fight Club, has a career stretching back to Lucasfilm in the 1980s and across an impressive array of Spielberg productions, riding (no doubt thunderous) shotgun alongside Gary Rydstrom and Ben Burtt and winning 3 Academy Awards and nominated for a further 4 for his toil.
That simple, clipped static effect on the end of a phone meant the difference to me, between a good picture and a great one.
Here are five more scene stealing aurals:
1. Blow Out: without a shadow of a doubt (Hitchcock allusion intended) De Palma's elegantly tragic thriller is one of my most favourite pictures (see the side bar to your right). An exploitation heart pumps the chilled blood round its celluloid story of John Travolta’s skilled b-movie soundman, Jack Terry, who toils away his days, and more often his nights, creating sounds and screams to supplant the obtuse effect of derivative visuals and vapid starlets in a host of terrible slasher films with titles like "Co-ed Frenzy”. During a routine sound scout, he witnesses what appears to be a tragic car accident. But after rescuing the sole survivor of the crash, Sally (Nancy Allen), he’s drawn into the incidents aftermath and it appears much more is afoot than mere misfortune. His inquisitive (and, it’s revealed, somewhat self-destructive) sensibilities pull Jack and his new ward Sally further into the sinister and murderous affair involving corrupt senators, sleazy snitches and a maniacal killer played with admirable salaciousness by John Lithgow.
Aside from being a rollickingly tense thriller, Blow Out is simply an unsung masterpiece of films about film. It’s a perfect distillation of every film nut's fear that eventually, as sure as day follows night, their obsession will consume their every waking thought, action and emotion. It's a portrait of the filmmaker's purgatory, deliciously grandiose, operatically tragic and hysterically funny all at the same time.
It's inconceivable that De Palma wouldn't have at least talked this idea over with Paul Schrader at some point, given he and Schrader’s collaboration on the similarly fraught tale, Obsession. It’s fortuitous then that Schrader didn't lend is scripting abilities to this project because his tautly puritanical, Protestant leanings would have stripped all the ripe hyperactive emotion with which De Palma's achingly Catholic guilt imbues his own screenplay. Horror is often emotional truth disguised as fantasy. Here, that truth, as played by Travolta, is laid bare with a raw honesty and genuine compassion quite unexpected in an essentially glossy skid row thriller. The dazzlingly controlled camera work and cutting by Vilmos Zsigmond and Paul Hirsch respectively parries with a score by Pino Donnagio that’s laced with romantic catastrophe the picture rolls, reels and eddies its way toward a punch line as mesmerising, audacious and devastating as Oldboy. In the picture's final seconds, a simple grimly ironic sound gag encapsulates one man's spiritual destruction and despair at a modern world full of bastards and liars. You’ll never think of scream queens in quite the same way again.
2. Inferno: halfway through Argento's kaleidoscopic fever-dream, Gabriel Lavia (something of a whipping boy for Argento in the late 70s -- though not quite to the extent John Morghan was for Lucio Fulci) is demonstrating his chivalrous nature, keeping neighbour Irene Miracle company as a storm ravages the electrify supply in their sumptuous and preposterously gothic New York apartment block. As Verdi churns merrily away on the funky retro turntable in an effort to calm the undulating atmosphere, the power flicks on and off at irregularly patterned intervals, the music and light dipping and ebbing away in stark unison. Through the unease of this disconcerting aural assault Lavia wanders away down a tenebrous (...sorry about that) corridor to investigate the fuse box, chirping reassuringly that Miracle has nothing to worry about while he's there. Until his voice disappears amid the staccato throng of Verdi's chorus and the apartment's faulty wiring. It's such a simple effect, but coupled with the almost impenetrable blue and red tinted gloom, it makes for one of Argento's most unsettling sequences of pure fright.
3. Come & See: there's a device in Elim Klimov shattering masterpiece which was appropriated, no doubt reverentially, by Steven Spielberg for his beach-storming précis to Saving Private Ryan (and subsequently filched by all and sundry from that blockbuster with, even less doubt, little interest in its forebears). It's partway through Klimov's picture that the central character( Florya)'s, ability to hear is blunted during the ferocious heat of battle, demonstrating the beginning of this teenager's wrenching transformation from boy to somewhere between man and lost and wretched animal.
With its impulsive, ramshackle charm and woozy innocence, the depiction of Florya's uncomprehending desertion from the WWII Byelorussia resistance movement in which he is caught up must have been an influence upon Terence Malick's later The Thin Red Line (as Badlands may well have been to Klimov, with its scenes of unnervingly incongruous youthful frivolity). Certainly the jagged disruption of the bucolic harmony (no matter how war torn the landscape in which it plays out) where Florya and his female playmate enjoy an almost magical seclusion is mirrored more than once in Mallick's quiet epic demonstrating both filmmakers' disarming power. In Come & See Florya's face becomes etched with metaphorical scars aging him to the point of abject madness. It reaches a point where he is completely disoriented as a human being, let alone as his own vulnerable self. Pulling the sound from his ears is a masterstroke of empathy, not only in generating fear at his literal and perilous geographical situation or the fog of war surrounding him but for the way it so easily elicits our instinctual desire to protect this poor boy.
It's possible Klimov may well have witnessed a similar, more experimental version of this device in Stuart Cooper's Overlord, but here, it's hypnotic and powerful to dazzlingly cumulative effect.
4. Once Upon A Time In America: lustful both in its appetite for violence and aggravated sexuality as well as being capriciously torn between a yearning remembrance of things past and wishing perhaps they had somehow been different, Leone's epic is repellent and deeply beautiful in equal measure. Which of course lends it the scope of its humanity. Goodfellas is harsh and ugly in parts but Leone's delirious and sprawling epic aims to reveal all sides of a life's journey -- not simply a series of masterfully orchestrated snapshots delineating the peaks and troughs of in life with the gangsteratti. It is flawed like its characters: repugnant, frustrating, enlightening, charming, audacious and full of the aforementioned lust.
And like the elliptical nature of memory and the narrative here, the presentation of these characters, most notably our emphatically troubled protagonist, David 'Noodles' Aronson, is lucid, perceptive, hallucinatory -- and perhaps unique ? I wouldn't suggest the resume of my picture consumption is broad enough to make that last brash claim. It's possible, though. There is no better example of this in the picture than during the opening moments, after the mellifluous longing of Morricone's theme has faded, and Noodles lies, prone in the dense fog of an opium den. The soundtrack is assaulted by a coarse ringing. It's a phone, it's an alarm, it's a warning, it's a signal, an epiphany...It's all of these things and Leone maintains its shrill intrusion for what seems like an eternity. We move from the opium den to a police incident room to a rain-swept crime scene to a dingy hideout pad, not knowing from where this clarion call emanates. More than once, we see a telephone being picked up, answered and still the ringing continues, taunting us. Noodles, whether physically in each scene, or simply aware that it must be taking place given the twists of fate that seems to have left a number of freshly charred corpses confronting him and a gaggle of onlookers on the streets of New York in one shot, is being hounded across the passage of time by this shrill tone. Over the course of the next 220 minutes we are given a sprawling (if never explicit) indication why that might be the case, of what course this man's life has taken, who he has betrayed, who has betrayed him, what he has gained and lost. Says Dana Knowles "[Leone's] transitions are visual and aural, directorial mastery ringing through them like the telephone that nags and nags at Noodles and ignites his memory in that opium den." Is there a better expression of guilt in cinema than that kaleidoscope of images and sound of the phone calling out to Noodles incessantly through the ages?
5. Singin' In The Rain: "madcap melancholy" might seem a strange assessment to level at this wonderfully vibrant musical celebration, but I'd argue passionately that it's right there. Singin' In The Rain is a film of naturally cynical dichotomies. It celebrates a time when silent film was a giddy, carefree romp that managed to uncaringly squash its mismatched and estranged screen couples uncomfortably together in ever effusive tabloid hysteria. It also explores the rush of the liberating and electrifying technological advancements that transported the industry into the sound era yet paved the way for ruthless exploitation/sacrifice of once great billboard names and their rather bitter aftertaste of post-oral fame. It's all undercurrent to a magical, elegant, pitch-perfect love-story-cum-rollicking-fantasy of course -- one of the best. It's an undercurrent however that, like the tantalisingly presented ageism in The Band Wagon, lends a real depth of bite to an otherwise grand old time. More madcap than melancholy, to be sure then, but it's that layer that ensures the picture resists dating/dulling the way a lesser musical of the period, like Stage Door Canteen, might.
So effortlessly is Singin In The Rain entwined with notions of the power/dominance of sound/performance, it's difficult to extract specific peaks amid a breathless flurry of such high points. Yes, the unerringly romantic reveal of Jean Hagan's utter humiliation forming the back drop and Gene Kelly/Debbie Reynolds reconciliation (after one of the most fleeting obstacles/break-ups in romantic comedy history?) is a high point. But the most sparkling, ingenious incident is the culmination of that initial, deeply unsuccessful experiment in sonic theatrics: the preview screening of "The Duelling Cavalier".
A sight gag worthy of The Marx Bothers -- and Comden and Green could certainly count themselves alongside the most literate and witty quipsters of the century -- plays out with simple precision timing by Donen the director and Kelly/Hagen as performers, as a mag-track hitches in the projector and his 'n' her words become entangled in the mouths operating with such furiously dramatic abandon onscreen. It's a startlingly sophisticated, almost post-modern sequence and, in its brief duration, infinitely more amusing than the anything whipped up by the execrable MST3K band or a curiosity like Hercules Returns.
