“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” an old-school Hollywood romance with an eccentric streak, provides an occasion to ponder the curious case of David Fincher, a big-budget filmmaker with a taste for perversity.
In a series titled Under the Sign of Fincher, which runs through Sunday, the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center is showcasing “Benjamin Button,” Mr. Fincher’s seventh feature, alongside three of his earlier works — “Seven” (1995), “Fight Club” (1999) and “Zodiac” (2007) — and three other movies that he considers formative touchstones. On Sunday a screening of “Benjamin Button” will be followed by a conversation between Mr. Fincher and Kent Jones, the associate director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
Though he has always been something of a polarizing figure, Mr. Fincher, 46, is ensconced within the creative elite of Hollywood auteurs, in the company of Steven Soderbergh, Christopher Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson and a handful of others, who are able to maintain artistic control within the studio system. In many ways, however, he does not fit the standard profile of a personal filmmaker, which may be why it has taken critics a while to warm up to him. He does not write his movies and generally sticks to genre fare. His feature directing career began with the third installment of the “Alien” franchise, and before “Benjamin Button” all his movies were noirish thrillers of a sort.
There is also the matter of his technical virtuosity, which tends to inspire both admiration and suspicion. A teenage apprentice at George Lucas’s effects house, Industrial Light and Magic, and then a hotshot director of commercials and music videos (including a brace of enormously influential ones for Madonna, at the height of her image-making powers), Mr. Fincher has always been in the business of expensive illusion and manufactured beauty. To call him a superficial stylist misses the point; in many of his films the surface is the substance. It is easy to get lost in — and perhaps as a result, to underestimate — the sheer sensory pleasures of his movies: their dynamic compositions and kinetic rhythms, sinuous camera movements and seamless digital wizardry.
“Alien 3” (1992) was a baptism of fire for Mr. Fincher. He butted heads with the studio, 20th Century Fox, over the script, the budget, the edit — the experience was so traumatic that he distanced himself from the film and told interviewers he might never work in movies again. The project that lured him back was, of all things, “Seven,” a sick-joke thriller about a serial killer-cum-conceptual artist who poses his victims in macabre tableaus modeled on the seven deadly sins.
It is Mr. Fincher’s fastidious, even baroque handling of the material — and his suggestive approach to the violence — that elevates it far above exploitation. Working with the first-rate cinematographer Darius Khondji he cloaked the film in overwhelmingly dank and baleful atmospherics, even subjecting the celluloid to a chemical process that rendered the dark hues denser and murkier. Most of Mr. Fincher’s films, from the claustrophobic gloom of “Alien 3” to the textured nightscapes of “Zodiac,” are variations on the art of making darkness visible. (The Lincoln Center series opened Thursday with a mischievous double bill of “Seven” and “Mary Poppins,” the first film Mr. Fincher saw, at the age of 3.)
He hit his stride again with “Fight Club,” a film about the fragile, vain and divided male psyche that was itself a provocative paradox: a seductive commercial for anti-consumerism. Still, this adrenalized jolt of designer nihilism tapped right into late-capitalist disaffection and premillennial anxiety.
As with most of his other films, including “The Game” (1997) and “Panic Room” (2002), the dominant mood is paranoia, but the source novel, by Chuck Palahniuk, with its crisis-of-masculinity pathos and hysteria, also occasioned the first semblance of emotional investment in Mr. Fincher’s work. “Fight Club” screens Friday night with another era-defining buddy movie, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969).
Just as the anti-materialist salvos of “Fight Club” seemed to repudiate the very values Mr. Fincher has had to perpetuate as an occasional corporate pitchman, “Zodiac” functions as a rejoinder of sorts to “Seven.” In this detailed, jigsawlike procedural, which cracks open the unsolved case of the symbol-mad killer who taunted and terrorized the Bay Area in the late ’60s and early ’70s, the thrill and confusion of the chase gives way to the slow burn and the haunting clarity of defeat.
Paired at the Walter Reade with Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” (1974), another panoramic California crime story, “Zodiac” is a monument to obsession, and on some level a self-portrait of this most methodical and fanatical of filmmakers. It prefigures the big themes and sweeping scale of “Benjamin Button” and may come to seem a turning point in Mr. Fincher’s career: the moment that this ingenious manipulator of screen space turned himself to the challenges of time.
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