David Fincher, "Zodiac," the class of 99

David Fincher is a member of that generation of director that seemed poised to take over the world in 1999 - the year when the Wachowskis rewrote sci-fi with "The Matrix," PT Anderson delivered the Altman-on-speed "Magnolia," Spike Jonze exploded brains with the mega-meta-mindfuck "Being John Malkovich," David O. Russell lampooned one Iraq war and anticipated another with "Three Kings," Kevin Smith turned his slacker aesthetic into gonzo religious satire in "Dogma," Kimberley Peirce produced "Boys Don't Cry" and made Hilary Swank's career, and M. Night Shyamalan turned "The Sixth Sense," a quiet little cerebral ghost story, into one of the true audience sensations of the decade. Throw in Darren Aronofsky and Chris Nolan, whose "Reqiuem for a Dream" and "Memento" came out in 2000 to inspire a generation of new filmmakers with their hyperactive editing (Aronofsky) and narrative (Memento), and you've got a whole bunch of Next Big Things just waiting to pop.

In 1999, David Fincher delivered "Fight Club." I was 14 - a freshman in high school. I had seen "Seven," and like everyone, had been impressed by it - by the unremitting nihilism, rendered in such beautiful darkness. "Fight Club" was supposed to be an action movie. The preview showed alot of fighting and what looked like a plane crash. I have no idea how I got into the theater - this was a few months after Columbine, remember, and most big theater chains were cracking down on underage moviegoers. The AMC theaters were the worst - at every ticket station they'd posted copies of an ID belonging to Bobby Teenager, that freckle-faced judas narc from Anytown, USA, grinning about all the crappy PG-13 movies he was going to see with his fundamentalist virgin girlfriend. The Century theaters were easier - I forget if we reserved the tickets with credit cards, if I made sure to go with lenient parents, or if the clerks were just more chill.

Whatever: my friend Ryan and I saw "Fight Club" on opening night. Everything about the movie felt new, then - Ed Norton's weird combination of boredom, sweetness, and sociopathy; the techno-beat soundtrack; the speedy thrust of the story, carried along by Norton's deadpan narration; the trashy-gloss aesthetic, where every bit of dirt and grime looked beautiful. I can remember reading a horrifically negative review by Lisa Schwarzbaum, one of the first film critics I read religiously. It was like she'd seen a totally different movie - she talked about ideas (male disenfranchisement, consumerism, Nazism). What I remember most about the movie was laughing - constantly. It was dark-as-a-black-hole comedy - suicide, drug abuse, castration, and splattered gore - but it was undeniably hilarious.

"Fight Club" didn't make any money in theaters. But its DVD was a megahit, and brought both the movie and the DVD medium into the mainstream. In my opinion, it has not aged well. Like all films about the plight of the upper-middle class white male ("Falling Down" and "American Beauty" among them), it seems irretrievably ancient - a reminder of the time when we had nothing more important to worry about. The look of "Fight Club," that shiny gunmetal bleakness, has been absorbed by TV advertisements. More and more, it strikes me that the perfect time to see the movie is when you're 14. I know plenty of kids who started their own Fight Clubs after seeing the movie - none of them ever became baldheaded anarchists, of course, but as recently as a year ago I was getting into an argument with a pair of fraternity brothers, both very intelligent Stanford students.

"That movie is so spot-on," said Harry, who came from an incredibly wealthy family and often used his father's money to purchase nose candy. "Like, every time you stick your card in the ATM, that's a bit of your soul that the corporations are taking."

I rolled my eyes. "Fight Club" is an undeniably fascinating film because it presents such an adolescent view of adult themes - corporations, manhood, women, even the whole idea of what an "adult movie" should look like (dark, bloody, lots of swears and sexy violence). And it's an undeniably terrible film because it can't decide whether it's a satire or an exhortation. Tyler Durden decries how modern society is feminizing men, delivering his speeches shirtless, perfect six-pack on display - watch the movie with women, and listen to them coo. "Fight Club" presents us with a whole new species of man: the metrosexual misogynist.

If "Fight Club" hasn't aged very well, neither have most of the directors of the class of 1999. Not because they've made especially bad movies. They just haven't made ANY movies. Jonze delivered "Adaptation" in 2002 and nothing since; the same year, PT Anderson made "Punch-Drunk Love," then took 5 years to produce the upcoming "There Will Be Blood." David O. Russell took the same amount of time after "Three Kings" to make "I Heart Huckabees," and rumors of the director's rage problems and general assholity dogged the production. Kimberly Peirce is finally delivering "Stop Loss" 8 years after "Boys Don't Cry." Darren Aronofsky finally delivered "The Fountain" after 6 years of toil.

It is not necessarily a bad thing to take your time with projects. All of the above films were interesting, if not entirely successful - personally, I'd rate "Adaptation" as the only truly great film, with "Punch-Drunk Love" and "I Heart Huckabees" interesting small projects and "The Fountain" one-third awe-inspiring and two-thirds awful. Making more movies isn't necessarily the answer. Kevin Smith took several steps backward from "Dogma," producing the in-jokey cartoon farce "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" and the annoyingly plain "Jersey Girl" before rediscovering a bit of his conversational magic with the overly sweet "Clerks II." The Wachowskis poured all their love into "The Matrix" sequels, to diminishing returns and exploding budgets - remarkable, to think that the original movie cost only $60 million, compared to an combined total of $300 million for the sequels. Like the Wachowskis, Shyalamalan seems to have let overconfidence get the better of him - "Unbreakable" and "Signs" both demonstrate his genius for mixing light comedy with high suspense, and "The Village" is a visual marvel, but it can't hide a horrible script or defend an awful ending, and "Lady in the Water" indicated a Wellesian ego combined with early-Spielberg sincerity - a narcissistic, unwatchable mix.

Of the class of 1999, only Chris Nolan has combined quantity with relative quality - and even he's only managed three films since 2000, the forgotten gem "Insomnia," a twisted thriller of ideas called "The Prestige," and "Batman Begins," probably the finest comic book movie ever made. An impressive list - yet it's worthwhile to consider that, in the same time span, Clint Eastwood (who, in 1999, was hard at work on "Space Cowboys"), directed "Mystic River," "Million Dollar Baby," and the Iwo Jima duology - films with straightforward narratives, a reserved video style, long-takes, no quick-cut editing. You can't quite call them old-fashioned - "Flags of our Fathers" has a non-linear plot - and you could argue that none of them are perfect, but they're all pretty damned excellent, and all much more watchable than "Huckabees" or "The Fountain."

Or look at Steven Spielberg, who, between 2001 and 2005, produced "AI," "Minority Report," "Catch Me If You Can," "The Terminal," "War of the Worlds," and "Munich" - six movies in as many years, with "Catch" opening six months after "Report," the same time between "Munich" and "War." Every one of these films carries Spielberg's distinctive mark; all of them after "AI" seem intensely concerned with the post-9/11 world, most directly "War of the Worlds," which imagines suburban as a destroyed bizarro-Iraq (corpses in a river, whole cities levelled, Tom Cruise covered in ash that used to be people), and "Munich," which analyzes the birth of modern terrorism ("We kill for peace.")

Maybe it's wrong to compare young directors working mainly in independent filmmaking with Spielberg, who can do practically anything he wants in Hollywood. But you could just as easily look at the emergence of the Mexican trio - Inarritu, Cuaron, and del Toro - all of whom have worked within and without Hollywood without losing a bit of their distinctive filmmaking edge, all of whom are taking provocative forward leaps in form.

So where does this leave David Fincher? He took three years to make "Panic Room" - an interesting film, focused through Jodie Foster's particular brand of maternal badassity. Yet you almost felt like Fincher was using a thin story to show off the most visual tricks conceivable - the camera moved through windows, down stairwells, into door locks and through teacups. (Fincher was one of the first directors to utilize digital effects for non-sci-fi movies). Then nothing, until now.

Most critics who liked "Zodiac" tended to focus on how much different the film was stylistically from those earlier films - you'll finds words like "subdued," "classical," and "near-documentary realism" in positive reviews of the film (meanwhile, David Thomson accuses Fincher of losing his energy.) Yet it seems to me that "Zodiac" is Fincher's most idiosyncratic movie to date. Jake Gyllenhaal, the film's nominal lead, seems like the seventh or eighth supporting lead until 90 minutes in; Robert Downey Jr., playing the film's flashiest character, barely appears in the last hour. The plot covers over 20 years without any time tricks, skipping ahead weeks, months, and years with all the unstructured irregularity of real life. "Seven" had a relatively classical structure of rising action, horrors building upon horrors to a final climax. "Zodiac" begins with one horror after the other - three murder sequences in the first half hour - then spends the rest of its running time soberly investigating and meditating on those acts of violence.

It's true that Fincher's camera doesn't swoop-swoop as much as it did in "Fight Club" and "Panic Room" - though there are plenty of scenes which you can only imagine coming from Fincher, like the time-lapse shot of the Transamerica Pyramid being built, or the way the camera stares directly into the actors' faces when the police interview an incredibly suspicious suspect. And it's true that Fincher eschews the cut-slash-boom editing style in favor of longer takes.

Yet those longer takes don't so much create "realism" as constantly question reality - a paranoid aesthetic which fits perfectly into a film about discovering a truth that can't be found. In an early scene, a couple laze by a lake in broad summer daylight; suddenly, a man appears behind them, wearing a comical costume with a black KKK hood over his head, holding a gun. The scene moves delicately between fear and farce - the Zodiac, if that is who he is, looks foolish, and so we (and the characters) are unsure how seriously to take the scene. It's like something out of Bunuel. Fincher reminds us what real suspense is - compare this little wonder to the torture scenes from the "Hostel" series, which begin with horror and spiral down from there.

Most critics have compared the film to the no-nonsense thrillers of the 70s like "All the Presidents' Men." Certainly, there is that same pokerfaced approach - we learn just a little about the characters lives, just enough to see how the real story, the Zodiac mystery, destroys them all. But I think the better comparison is to Spielberg's "Munich," which has a similarly fascinating genre-tripping narrative - beginning as an anti-terrorist thriller; devolving, with the passage of time, into paranoia and suspicion. The protagonists of both films begin to suspect death around every corner - and Fincher is far more talented at balancing the humor of unlikely suspicion ("There's no way he's the Zodiac!") with the terror of possibility ("But if he is, should I really follow him into his poorly-lit basement?").

Simply put, "Zodiac" wanders in tone and plot - encompassing pinpoint observations about 70s San Francisco, the media, Hollywood, journalism, pre-digital bureaucracy - all while following a delicate through line of remorseless chronology. It becomes, finally, a tragedy of time passing - with years wasting away before your eyes. Colorful drunks become drug-addicted wrecks, double-puffing on oxygen tanks and cigarette butts; new love turns into another failed marriage; people grow old, go gray, get drunk, and die. Gyllenhaal becomes the main character only by process of elimination - everybody else moves on or moves out.

How much more radical can you get - a thriller about the search for identity, where the main character, who consumes every scene, is a construct of the fertile imagination of every other character onscreen. Lots of people could be the Zodiac - Fincher seems to arrive at a conclusion, but so do alot of other people in the film. In its combination of open-endedness and precision, its fascinating depiction of intractable bureaucracy, "Zodiac" has more in common with HBO's "The Wire" than anything in theaters right now. Alone among the class of 99, Fincher has produced a film that confirms all his early promise - mixing classic styles with modern technology (the film was shot on Hi-def video), recombining old genres into new, almost postmodern narratives. "Zodiac" might just be the quietest great film in years.