culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Gone Girl, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and The Case Against 8
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
At rep cinemas this week: David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling mystery thriller, a classic of German Expressionism, and a look at the fight to overturn Proposition 8.
Gone Girl
Directed by David Fincher
Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
Early in David Fincher’s Gone Girl, surely the most rancid film about marital discord since Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, our soon-to-be-beleaguered hero Nick (Ben Affleck) waltzes into the bar he co-owns bearing a new board game, Mastermind. His sister and business partner Go (Carrie Coon) files it away with staples such as Let’s Make a Deal and The Game of Life. You could think of that sly introduction as a moment of foreshadowing, gesturing toward what will happen to Nick once he finds himself charged with the possible murder of the titular missing woman, his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike), famous for her intricate schemes and micromanaging skills, and possibly in the middle of her best game yet. Or you could read it as Fincher’s own none-too-subtle nod to his reputation as a puckish control freak who loves to mess with his audiences as much as his characters—a way of positioning himself as a surrogate for his missing co-lead.
To say much more about Gone Girl—working off a script skillfully and ruthlessly adapted from her own novel by author Gillian Flynn—would risk spoiling its and-another-thing page-turning charm. Suffice it to say, it’s at once one of the most effective pulp thrillers of the year and one of the most uproarious black comedies, carefully attuned to the way bad marriages often play out like sustained delusions shared by two actors working with an increasingly dodgy script.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Directed by Robert Wiene
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Like F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the sort of film audiences tend to absorb through other works—the loving tributes of Tim Burton’s warped fantasias, or the direct nods in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island—before they see it outright. That’s a shame, because Robert Wiene’s horror classic is as psychologically nuanced as it is beautifully designed. It’s both influential, in the fusty old academic sense, and compelling.
As any undergraduate class in film studies is sure to point out, Wiene’s film is the most famous example of the German Expressionism that dominated the 1920s, and perhaps the purest case, years before signature directors such as Fritz Lang took their talents to Hollywood, and longer still before quirky filmmakers such as Burton bent the style to suit their kinder and gentler projects. Thumbing their noses at the codes of realism, expressionist filmmakers refused the burden of representing the world, turning their sets into hyper-aestheticized expressions of their cracked characters’ emotionally heightened states. Few of their works were as successful in that regard as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which amplifies the intensity of the titular quack’s world before pulling back the curtain to reveal that vision as the paranoid fantasy of the straitlaced male lead.
Although a heady modernist streak certainly runs through the movement, you can see why Wiene’s film has proven accessible to such disparate artists over the years. If the deliriously winding roads and geometrically impossible backgrounds, which are painted onto the walls, don’t quite seem real, they nevertheless suggest a heightened form of reality all too recognizable for us paranoid spectators as the stuff of dreams and cinema.
The Case Against 8
Directed by Ben Cotner and Ryan White
Bloor Hot Docs Cinema (506 Bloor Street West)
Early in The Case Against 8—Ben Cotner and Ryan White’s documentary about the Supreme Court decision that overturned Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriages in the state of California—attorney and conservative hero turned marriage-equality proponent Ted Olson announces that this is one of the most important civil rights cases in United States history. Perhaps out of a certain reverence for that significance, the film itself is a relatively safe bet, nicely illuminating the case’s behind-the-scenes process and its personal and political significances for the four co-plaintiffs without doing much to rock the boat.
Like most television documentaries about big issues, The Case Against 8 is limited by its form. There’s a TV-ready schmaltz to the filmmakers’ decision to depict the substance of the trial by having its participants read from their own transcripts over a swelling string score. The slickness of the packaging also minimizes a number of interesting points of contention. One comes away, for example, with the not terribly convincing impression that Olson took the case out of the goodness of his heart, and that the gay-rights groups who initially protested his involvement were merely partisan spoilsports, unable to see the forest for the trees. No doubt those activists would tell a different story if they were interviewed.
Whatever its weaknesses as a nuanced piece of LGBT history, the film is indispensable for process wonks curious about the way such human rights cases are assembled. Its tidiness aside, it’s also moving as a portrait of two dedicated couples fighting for their access to a basic human right.