David Fincher is the man who famously said "There are two ways to shoot a scene, and the other one is wrong."
What better way to conclude this series, than with a man for whom perfection is paramount, and whose 2011 film won an Oscar for one of the embodiments of that perfection -- its editing?
In fact, this was Fincher's fourth (and so far final) film to be nominated for best editing. Se7en and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button didn't win, but The Social Network won just the year before. I couldn't have watched that for this series, because the repeat viewings in this series were designed as movies I'd seen only once before. I've seen The Social Network four times.
As you might suspect, you reach such levels of perfection by finding collaborators who help deliver your vision. Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall won those consecutive Oscars in best film editing, and they were also the nominated pair for Benjamin Button. Even when Se7en was nominated he was seeking out the best of the best, as the editor on that film was Richard Francis-Bruce, who was nominated the year before for The Shawshank Redemption.
But you know what? Baxter and Wall did design the famous titles for Se7en, so they have been with Fincher in some capacity the whole way. Baxter has continued to edit his increasingly lesser output of feature films, though Wall has not, and has no further feature editing credits to his name. I'm not going to dig into what happened there at this time, but don't worry, Wall has hung around as a producer. I also just noticed he graduated from my alma mater, Bowdoin College.
Well, all this build-up to the final film in the series really paid off. Although I had to watch The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in three sittings -- a symptom of this time of year and some of the things that have been going on that are not directly related to it -- at every moment I appreciated its superior craftsmanship, especially in terms of the editing, though the cinematography is also first rate and was also Oscar nominated.
This has been a series where I've meant to scribble down a lot of notes while watching, but in many cases found myself without the quantity of insights and observations in the moment that I thought I'd have. If you've been keeping up with my Understanding Editing writing this year, you've noticed that I've concluded on more than one occasion that I thought the film had won the Oscar because it was winning all the other Oscars already, and editing got swept up in the general furor. Which was never to say the editing was bad in those films, just that I rarely found the quantity of examples of why it was good that I thought I would find.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is basically nothing but examples of good editing. SPOILERS to follow. Here are some of the examples I jotted down:
1) I really appreciated the way this film conveys information just from people doing daily activities, like making a coffee or throwing a piece of food into the microwave. The film will convey this in basically three shots that are each cut off just a bit before the action seems to be fully completed, to convey momentum in an economy of storytelling, but also never to make you feel like you're being cuffed around by too many cuts. It's the sort of exact touch that you would expect other editors to notice and to nominate.
2) The cross-cutting is excellent. The initial example I noticed, which was repeated throughout in other ways, was when Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) is arriving at Milton Security offices to report her background check on Mikail Blomkvist (Daniel Craig). As Goran Visnjic's Dragan Armansky is profiling her to Steven Berkoff's Dirch Frode, we go back and forth between what the two of them are saying in that board room and her steady approach through various parts of the building, of course beginning with her arrival on her signature motorcycle. It's a great character introduction, both showing and telling, giving us an idea of the way she's different in "every way," as Armansky says.
3) The cutting on action is also excellent. Examples of this are Lisbeth closing the top of a laptop, which closes the scene and whips us to another, or her zooming motorcyle transitioning directly into Blomkvist, much later in the film, getting swept along the floor in the rig where he's held captive by the film's ultimate villain, Stellan Skarsgard's Martin Vanger, before Vanger intends to kill him.
4) The scene where Christopher Plummer's Henrik Vanger describes the sequence where his sister Harriet went missing is also expertly conveyed, interweaving his story with the images of it, doling out a perfect amount of screen time each time it switches between the present and the past.
5) There's a scene that is both funny from a narrative perspective and clever from a storytelling perspective that involves editing. Blomkvist is going through a written account of something that occurred four decades earlier, and he uses a highlighter to highlight each line of text. As he highlights the text, the images alternate to a dramatic interpretation of what's happening in the text. Although this was smooth and effective, I couldn't help but wonder: If you highlight each line of something, isn't that the same as highlighting none of it?
6) I noted how this film uses dissolves regularly. So even though it has examples of cutting on action that involve a sharp line of demarcation between two scenes in two different locations, it also has these languid transitions, which I think were more likely to be used to convey progression within the same scene. You wouldn't necessarily expect both of these things to be a feature of the same editing duo, but I suppose a good editor has all the tools at their disposal.
7) And yet this film also has examples of the sorts of editing that were prevalent in the last film I talked about in this series in November, The Bourne Ultimatum, which you will remember I didn't particularly care for. That film was a flurry of quick edits in fight scenes in a style that ultimately exhausted me pretty quickly, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo shows us how that sort of thing can work like gangbusters if it is used in moderation. The example of that is when Lisbeth tries to fight off a mugger on a train station escalator, ultimately dispatching him in a quick series of frantic shots before escaping back down and to safety.
8) The final thing I'll mention is the way Baxter and Wall edit together the final car crash that claims the life of our villain. Lisbeth is chasing him on her motorcycle, and when he veers off the road and crashes, she also sort of spins out on the motorcycle, though is never in the sort of mortal danger he is. The editors combine shots of the two vehicles in their separate chase terminus spots, all within a quick two seconds of footage.
If I didn't jot down more notes, it could be because my middle sitting was fairly late at night and I might have slept through some of it.
When I went to Letterboxd to see what I'd given The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I was sort of surprised to see it was only three stars. I knew that this was not among my favorite Fincher films, probably for a couple of reasons: 1) it's very long and reaches its dramatic conclusion about 20 minutes before the movie ends; 2) the ending is a little unsatisfying as an explanation to the central mystery Blomkvist is investigating; 3) also making their second Fincher film in as many years, and also winning an Oscar for the first one, my beloved Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross did not transport me with this score the way they did with their score for The Social Network. In fact, I'm wondering how much of my feelings about the movie are tied up in the fact that I bought the score before the movie was out, and I already knew the score was much longer than anyone needed to listen to (something like 80 minutes) and that none of it stood out for me as it had for The Social Network.
Having watched this movie specifically with a focus on its construction, via its editing, gives me a new appreciation for its quality, and I just luxuriated in how nicely put together the whole thing is. There's a reason we consider Fincher one of the masters of this form we love so much. Even when the movies he makes don't fully engage us -- which also happened for me with The Killer most recently -- they look absolutely astonishing, and Fincher has excellent taste in the collaborators he chooses.
So yes, I feel like I'm wrapping up with the experience I always hoped to have in this series, but rarely did. Even if I don't feel like the series unfolded exactly as I'd wanted it to, it may just be that the thing I've come to understand most about editing is that it remains an enigma. Sometimes, good editing is there for you to see and to grab hold of, with numerous examples like I've listed in this post. Sometimes, editing is the glue that holds everything together and delivers you a smooth viewing experience. It remains part of that enigma that other practictioners in the field are able to identify both forms and come to a consensus in rewarding them accordingly.
And one thing I'll say for sure is that Understanding Editing put a lot of great movies in front of my eyes, both those I hadn't seen and those with which I was already familiar.
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