Under the Sign of Fincher at Lincoln Center

Like Lincoln Center, we rang in the New Year with a movie by David Fincher. We chose The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, while Lincoln Center chose to devote four days to screening Fincher's films along with thematic "partners," picked by the director himself. He paired Fight Club with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Se7en with Mary Poppins, and Zodiac with Chinatown, the double feature we saw.

Beginning with the obvious: both movies take place in a California of the past. Both feature dangerous obsessions and are based on actual events. Both were directed by auteurs, devoted to style but filming from scripts written by others and within the studio system. Both incorporate lots of elements of different genres, but not enough to be categorically called one type of movie over another: Chinatown is noir and thriller, psychological and sociological drama; Zodiac is police procedural and whodunit, an exploration of the limits of journalism and a meditation on time. Both are shot in a kind of flat style, a formal embodiment of the heaviness weighing on each of the protagonists, one a seen-it-all PI and the other an aw-shucks cartoonist. Both thwart and upset viewers' expectations, one ending dreadfully and the other frustratingly ambiguously. Hearing directors (or any art-makers, really) talk about their influences can sometimes be lame and/or self-aggrandizing, but in this case the influence is both obvious and meaningful.

Photos: thanks and thanks