NYFF 2014: Gala Screenings

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 14 October 2014 14:52

Written by Jack Angstreich

David Fincher was already a filmmaker with a significant body of work by the time he made Zodiac, but with that work, and the subsequent The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, he established himself as one of the best directors in Hollywood. (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, though highly accomplished in many respects, was too flawed to be more than resolutely minor.) His newest opus, the satirical mystery Gone Girl, the opening night selection of the New York Film Festival, adapted from a brilliant, disturbing screenplay by Gillian Flynn, is of comparable stature with his most recent efforts and cements his reputation as one of the most remarkable of contemporary artists of the motion picture.

The ingenious if self-consciously preposterous plot of this movie is best left as a surprise; however, one can say that Fincher elicits enthralling work from his terrific cast, including Ben Affleck, in one of his best performances, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry, and the impossibly glamorous Rosamund Pike. (The presence of Emily Ratajkowski — the luscious object who acquired fame upon her appearance in Robin Thicke's celebrated "Blurred Lines" video — in a small role, is another bonus, while Sela Ward has a glorious cameo.)

Mesmerizingly shot in widescreen and seamlessly edited, Gone Girl displays a consistent visual mastery, although I have some doubts that at the screening I attended the projector bulb was bright enough for the dark vision of the director and his cinematographer, the astonishing Jeff Cronenweth — it will be necessary to see this under better conditions to be sure that this film confirms Fincher's status as one of the greatest practitioners of shooting in digital. (Gone Girl also features an excellent score by the filmmaker's regular collaborator, Trent Reznor.) All in all, this is one of the strongest works in this festival.

Also of interest, if not of quite the same level of eminence, is this year's Festival Centerpiece, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, an adaptation of a recent novella by the celebrated author, Thomas Pynchon, a paranoid, comic yarn about a hippie private eye — brilliantly played by the extraordinary Joaquin Phoenix, who also excelled in the filmmaker’s previous feature, The Master — in southern California in the 1970s. The director is one of the most distinguished stylists in contemporary Hollywood but, here, his mise-en-scène is not quite as dazzling as in The Master. (Anderson has also not yet mastered the digital format — in both this film and his last, he has elected to shoot in sunlight with many images unable to sustain the extremes in contrast.) Inherent Vice is most remarkable for its eccentric, sometimes hilarious, humor and for its star-studded cast, including Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Katherine Waterston, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio del Toro, Jena Malone, Maya Rudolph, Martin Short, Eric Roberts, Jeannie Berlin, Jefferson Mays, and Joanna Newsom. The effective score is by Johnny Greenwood, Anderson’s regular collaborator.

The terrific closing night film, which screened on October 11th, was Alejandro Gonzalez-Iñárritu's brilliant Birdman, about a washed-up Hollywood action star — played, in a bravura performance, by Michael Keaton — who attempts to stage a comeback by appearing in a Broadway play. The director is a favorite of the festival, having been featured here with his debut, Amores Perros, as well as the excellent 21 Grams. Shot in complexly choreographed long takes with a liberal employment of special effects and magical realist elements, the new film is a tour de force of Emmanuel Lubezki's extraordinary cinematography, a body of work that has attracted the attention of cinephiles especially for an astonishing recent collaboration with the great Terence Malick. Birdman effectively deploys several masterpieces of Western classical music in its soundtrack and also boasts a superb supporting cast, including Zach Galifianakis, Edward Norton, Andrea Riseborough, Amy Ryan, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts, and Jeremy Shamos.

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