Glass Onion

If, like me, you had the means to watch Glass Onion but for whatever reason had been procrastinating, I advise you to jump on in. This franchise, which began with 2019’s Knives Out, is shaping up to be a perfect delight. (You don’t need to have seen the first movie to follow this one.) The films take their cue from Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), the sharp, drawling detective at their center, whose raciocinative acumen narrowly tops his keen sense of fashion. Here, Benoit goes to a private island owned by tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton), who has sent out puzzle-box invitations to a murder-mystery party he has planned. Of course, the plot is a bit more complicated; the preceding sentence is not to be trusted fully — it describes what happens but, of necessity, omits a lot.

The first sequence introduces us to all the suspects, who know Miles from back before he was really Miles Bron. (Rian Johnson, who wrote and directed Glass Onion as well as Knives Out, assures us that Miles’ similarity to Elon Musk is coincidental.) There’s governor Kathryn Hahn, model/fashionista Kate Hudson and her assistant Jessica Henwick, masculinist YouTuber Dave Bautista and his girlfriend Madelyn Cline, scientist Leslie Odom Jr., and former Miles associate Janelle Monae. We’re led to believe any of them might have a motive for killing Miles. That may well be, but Benoit Blanc suspects the truth is more tangled.

Stories like Glass Onion are hard to review without spoiling them, so that’s about all I’ll say about the goings-on. I would chat a bit about the small pleasures tucked away in the margins, but that would give away all the jokes — the Benoit Blanc films are as much comedies as mysteries. So what’s left? I can praise how it’s told and the tools used. Johnson (who got his start in features with the neo-noir Brick) writes and directs these movies with grace and wit; his camera follows the lead of the script, every move and pan in place to support — or buttress, if you will, a word favored by our courtly Benoit — the tale. And since that tale gets a little convoluted, with an extended flashback, Johnson knows that absolute filmmaking clarity is vital to our understanding.

Glass Onion cost $40 million, a pittance in Hollywood terms today, but has a posh, expensive look. Cinematographer Steve Yedlin, who’s been working with Johnson since Brick, lights the characters warmly as contrast with their cold glass surroundings. His burnished images, wedded to Nathan Johnson’s rich, old-school score, take us to a comfortable past when money was still spent on divertissements for grown-ups and no expense was spared to make everything and everybody look good. If nothing else, the Benoit Blanc movies have an effortless style (wherein a ton of effort goes into making it all seem effortless) that a viewer of a certain age can take in without feeling insulted or visually tricked. The puzzle boxes may look implausible in real space, but these movies tweak reality ever so slightly. It’s still recognizably our world, but with charming little filigrees like a gag-inducing throat spray that presumably offers protection against COVID (the film is set in the first few months of the pandemic). 

Daniel Craig was always a better actor than James Bond allowed him to be. Anyone who knew that will be happy to see him amiably flourishing post-Bond as the suave master detective who, at a loss between cases, sits in his tub playing online mystery games with celebrities associated with mysteries. Craig lifts up anyone he’s sparring with, too; Edward Norton sprinkles some intellectual insecurity onto his not-Elon Musk, and if Netflix had allowed Glass Onion to play longer in theaters the film might have done for Janelle Monae what its predecessor did for Ana de Armas. Monae is terrific, fully popping, at last, as a movie star. All the actors here, really, seem snuggled by the warm camera eye. These movies know that even if a character is an irredeemable murderer, that doesn’t mean they can’t be fun to watch.

Knives Out

Rian Johnson’s amiably masterful Knives Out has been a surprise sleeper hit in the past few weeks, and I think I know why: It takes a lot of tensions and absurdities of today and turns them into a comforting evening’s entertainment. The genre is murder-mystery, and the tone is somewhere between wicked and tongue-in-cheek, but the message is an odd partner to all that: “Kindness will win.” Beyond that, I owe you the courtesy of saying practically nothing about the plot, other than that wealthy mystery-novel writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) dies under suspicious circumstances and there are many people who could be responsible.

Except there aren’t, because we see fairly early on how Harlan died — except for the parts we don’t learn about till later. Harlan’s family comes to his mansion for his 85th birthday, and all of them are terrible. His grim-faced daughter (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her sleazy husband (Don Johnson); their black-sheep son (Chris Evans); Harlan’s saturnine son (Michael Shannon) and his racist wife (Riki Lindhome); Harlan’s GOOP-like daughter-in-law (Toni Collette) and her performative-liberal daughter (Katherine Langford). Harlan’s only friend is his personal nurse, Marta (Ana de Armas). When Harlan turns up dead, someone calls in the famous detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), and we’re off.

Johnson writes and directs with speed and clarity; this thing ticks along beautifully. The dialogue, especially that which has little to do with the mystery and everything to do with establishing character, is sharp but juicy enough to push this into the arena of comedy. The character work is as crucial as the mystery plot, because Knives Out doesn’t, as you’d think, center on the grandly hypothesizing Benoit Blanc (though oh what fun Daniel Craig has with the accent, the intonations, the expansive wave of a cigar). It focuses on Marta, who has very real motives, rooted in current pain, to do what she does. Benoit finds her so trustworthy — for she literally cannot tell a lie, or else she’ll vomit — he enlists her as his Watson.

I guess I’m a Rian Johnson fan — I’ve seen four out of his five movies (Brick, Looper, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and this) and enjoyed them. They are truly ornaments to their respective genres, but they also share a certain regard for decency in surroundings that don’t always reward it. Johnson has, with Knives Out, made a liberal fable disguised as a murder mystery, a fable where the characters run the spectrum between Nazi and SJW, between skeptic and mystic, and like most of us are flawed and complicated. The nice thing about Marta, the movie’s one true hero, is that she’s drawn so skillfully as a selfless person of the type that’s usually incidental to someone else’s story. Harlan’s family, selfish jerks all, envision themselves as the center of their story — don’t we all, though? And Harlan himself, he gets to go out in the most triumphant way a man like him can. But he is the object of the story; Marta is the subject. Ana de Armas’ soft features and Margaret Keane eyes can’t hurt her credibility as an angel among demons. Marta is humble, smart, reflexively compassionate; we gravitate to her. Even the great Benoit Blanc seems a little full of himself.

Given how much the movie pits itself against Trumpism, explicitly in dialogue or subtextually, its success has been heartening (after its third weekend in theaters it was still in the top three). Knives Out speaks for kindness, intelligence, generosity, truth, and sharing the wealth. The way it’s been marketed is a little tricky, though — for one thing, it de-emphasizes Marta, and makes this look like the sort of white-people murder-mystery dinner that might put off the same viewers who would really dig where it actually ends up. On the other hand, it’s going to lure in a bunch of well-to-do white folks, attracted by the delectable promise of a genteel genre piece, only to spit full in their faces. Or vomit, as the case may be.

π

Darren Aronofsky’s feature debut π, which observes its 20th anniversary on July 10, follows in the tradition of other artsy first films like David Lynch’s Eraserhead, Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo the Iron Man, and E. Elias Merhige’s Begotten. It’s short — mercifully short, we might say, while acknowledging its ornery brilliance — visually harsh, shot in grainy, high-contrast black and white that eventually rubs sandpaper-like against the eye. And it is entirely devoted to its own vision, its own interiorized world. It’s probably not coincidental that anguish and mutilation are on the menu in all four of these movies; you have to be a certain kind of viewer to want to watch them very frequently. Of the four, though, π seems the most interested in the world outside itself, even if only fleetingly and fearfully.

An exacting artist, Aronofsky has made only six films since this one — Requiem for a Dream (2000), The Fountain (2006), The Wrestler (2008), Black Swan (2010), Noah (2014), and mother! (2017). Many have been polarizing, and I was probably in the minority when I declared the frantic fable mother! the great American film of its year. Aronofsky’s art does not always work for me — I found Requiem and Black Swan pompous and conceived in bad faith — but he consistently takes such chances, swings so hard for the fence, that I can absorb and even respect the two out of seven films that didn’t land for me. π is a workout, no question, and not for everyone, but it has intellectual and spiritual fervor, and even when it stops dead for some mystical exposition, at least it assumes our intelligence (though also our patience).

The movie follows Max Cohen (Sean Gullette), a mathematical savant who thinks numbers are everything — are in everything, explain everything. He lives in a crappy, ant-infested apartment with a rickety computer he calls Euclid, which he uses to try to game the stock market. Instead, it spits out a 216-digit number, which Max disregards; then various folks ranging from Hasidic Jews to Wall Street agents descend on him. They all want what he knows; he doesn’t even know what he knows. This aspect of π is sort of a wry indie rewrite of the standard detective story, where the scruffy gumshoe is menaced by people wanting the MacGuffin or the dingus or whatever. Max is a gumshoe of number theory, and the MacGuffin is in his head. Then again, so are paranoia and migraines and, in the notorious but abbreviated climax, a drill bit.

The soul of π, though, isn’t in its thriller tropes (there’s a hectically-staged chase scene that’s as boring as any other chase scene) but in the scenes with Max and his old friend Sol (Mark Margolis), a math warhorse who got a little too close to the flame of numerical truth and had a debilitating stroke. Margolis is 78 now and has always looked 78, even 20 years ago in this film, and we believe him as an exhausted old man who has forsaken math obsession; we also appreciate seeing him as something other than a cold-blooded mobster. The two men sit and talk quietly in Sol’s equally rumpled apartment while they play Go or Sol feeds his fish. It’s top-drawer stuff, and proved that Aronofsky wasn’t just some hip hotshot but an artist engaged with his characters’ emotional readings. (Margolis has gone on to appear in almost every Aronofsky film since, like a lucky charm, except for mother!)

Max is surrounded by people, benevolent or very much otherwise, who want something from him; aside from Sol, the only person he has time for is a little Chinese girl who loves to throw calculations at him. She reminds him, I guess, of a time when his particular strange acumen might have been fun. Enjoyment, relaxation, a rare computer chip — people keep offering Max things to pull him away from his own obsessions, his own head. But he can’t, and won’t, be distracted. He is the damaged loner as outlaw artist, a theme Aronofsky has returned to again and again, or has at any rate lived in his own life. Coming back to π after his subsequent pieces puts them all into perspective — even the hornéd beast mother!, which I would gladly recommend on a double bill with π if it wouldn’t make you come after me with a drill.

The Maltese Falcon

Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade is a likable bastard, someone you might come to with your troubles but not with your power of attorney. Sam is a private detective in San Francisco on the cusp of wartime (the movie was released about two months before Pearl Harbor), dealing with shady characters of vague and various nationalities. The Maltese Falcon is less about Dashiell Hammett’s plot than about the interplay of cynical villains and anti-heroes, and first-time director John Huston (who also wrote the script) was savvy enough to know that. The Maltese Falcon itself is, as Sam might say, hooey; it’s what Hitchcock liked to call the MacGuffin, the thing nobody has that everyone wants.

This is a great and unmistakably American entertainment, and might lay claim to being the best directorial debut of 1941 if not for a modest little film called Citizen Kane. As it is, The Maltese Falcon more or less inaugurated film noir as it came to be known in Hollywood, even though Huston doesn’t do all that much show-offy with the lighting or compositions — his effects are subtle, a sturdy cage enclosing a menagerie of creatures. Aside from a couple of scenes dealing with the murder of Sam’s partner Archer, the movie stays confined to offices and hotel rooms — it’s claustrophobic, with the boxy Academy format hemming everyone in further. At times we seem to be viewing the world through a keyhole — the movie turns us into detectives.

A woman calling herself Ruth Wonderly (Mary Astor) drifts into Sam’s office, speaking of a dangerous man threatening her sister; there is no sister, and no Ruth Wonderly either — her real name, or at least the one she settles on, is Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Sam pegs Brigid as trouble from the start, yet still develops feelings for her, and is self-aware enough to be bitterly amused by them. There’s a reason Sam didn’t quite turn into a running character for Hammett (he appeared in three other short stories) — he’s less a serial hero than a flawed portrait of wised-up urban manhood, complete with the prejudices of the day. He enjoys slapping around Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre in his iconic American role), whose homosexuality was more explicit in the 1930 book, and he enjoys needling the touchy thug Wilmer (Elisha Cook Jr.) by referring to him as a “gunsel,” which pointedly did not mean what the squares of 1930 or 1941 (or 2016, possibly) thought it meant.

Cairo and Wilmer work for “fat man” Kaspar Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet), who yearns to possess the titular bird statue, or “the dingus” as Sam dismissively calls it. By this point in the narrative it hardly matters what the Falcon is or what it’s worth. All these vipers want it, and Sam says he can get it, but he’s just weaving his own web of deceit. The Maltese Falcon is a comedy-tragedy about liars (the only straight shooter in the movie is Sam’s secretary Effie, played as a wry sunbeam of morality by Lee Patrick); the comedy derives from the sharp back-and-forth in the dialogue, as the liars assess each other and figure out who knows what and what can be gained, and the tragedy is bundled in at the end, when, as Danny Peary pointed out in the first book of his Cult Movies trilogy, one character goes quickly to Hell, while Sam proceeds more slowly but will get there sooner or later.

Seventy-five years old on October 3 (when it comes to the Brattle in Cambridge for a four-day 35mm screening), The Maltese Falcon feels evergreen, not so much in style or attitude but in mood. It was the first of five films Huston made with Bogart, though I’m not prepared to say it’s the best — The African Queen and especially Treasure of the Sierra Madre pose hefty competition. It is, though, the movie from which a lot of blessings flow; its influence may feel fainter in this era of romcoms and caped crusaders, but look for it and it’s there. Its calloused urbanity comes from Hammett, its cheerful cynicism from Huston, its peculiar human gravity from Bogart, that odd, tooth-baring presence who excelled at men with dark corners, who was seldom less than compelling. Huston sets about surrounding this man of gravitas with a circle of moral gremlins, all of whom try their best to steal the picture (Lorre comes closest) while Bogart heavily stands his ground and fends them off not with a gat but with a gibe and a sneer.

Li’l Quinquin

“Open that cow’s ass,” commands a detective, “and show me what’s inside.” Before long, the growl of a chainsaw disrupts the lapping quietude of the oceanside crime scene. Welcome to the phlegmatic but askew reality of Li’l Quinquin, a four-part saga written and directed by Bruno Dumont for French TV and just now opening in America in limited release. Lengthy but never boring, the story comes divvied up into fifty-minute segments; the three hours and seventeen minutes march by like a Netflix binge-watch of your choice of quirky TV mysteries. Li’l Quinquin has drawn comparisons to Twin Peaks and True Detective, but it also shares DNA with such creepy-cool freak-of-the-week programs as The X-Files and Fringe, what with all these cow carcasses turning up with human body parts inside them.

Genetic experiments? Alien shenanigans? If you seek resolution, you’re barking up the wrong mystery. Dumont, best known for a variety of bleak, severe dramas, would rather establish the community affected by, and possibly giving rise to, these weird events. Two cops — Captain Van der Weyden (Bernard Pruvost) and his right-hand man Carpentier (Philippe Jore) — move from suspect to suspect, confronting their own irrelevance when each suspect ends up in a cow. (Sample absurdist dialogue, in case my lede didn’t sell you: “I was sorry to hear about his body in a cow on the beach.”) Followers of Dumont’s earlier work have expressed surprise at the tone of Li’l Quinquin, which hews closer to the tongue-in-cheek, or at least to cosmic bemusement.

The eponymous character (Alane Delhaye) is a complex and prickly pear, a ten-year-old boy who likes to toss firecrackers into his own house. Quinquin is civilized enough to have a tender relationship with a local girl, but is nonetheless well on his way to a life of racist violence. We aren’t told how to feel about Quinquin or about anyone else; nobody in the narrative seems quite whole. The only person around who looks remotely Hollywood is a teenage girl who wants to sing on TV; her rather tone-deaf rendition of a song called “Cause I Knew” goes on interminably at least twice, once at the funeral of the first victim, where a gigglingly inept pastor almost derails the service and the organist plays bombastically and self-indulgently. Nobody seems to care about the dead woman except her widower, and he becomes cow stuffing before long. There’s even what might be a backhanded salute to superheroes when a kid dressed as “Speedy-Man” enters the picture, climbs a wall, and exits, leaving behind a chill of incongruous weirdness that outdoes the whole of Birdman (to say nothing of Guardians of the Galaxy).

I confess this is my first exposure to Bruno Dumont (but not my last). I make this confession to assure you that, though a background in Dumont’s prior work might help Li’l Quinquin work on a deeper level, it’s not mandatory. Feel free to jump right into this epic; it’s immersive, like a good thick novel, and the widescreen compositions, by cinematographer Guillaume Deffontaines, showcase the enticing French countryside. It’s overall a soothing experience. The narrative isn’t heightened, and until the last half hour or so there isn’t even any non-diegetic music (why the movie finally allows some classical needle-drop is a question for more hard-nosed interpreters than I). The story stretches but is expertly paced — pacing is why a two-hour film can seem as though it’s crawling while a three-hour-plus work like this breezes by, and it’s a mystery of editing and the intuition of great moviemaking. Dumont uses the extra sprawl of his canvas and the luridness of his premise to indulge himself in the best, most playful sense. We don’t feel left out of the fun; we feel drawn in by the elliptical character-building and by the society on view, which we might say was splintered by the murders if we didn’t suspect it was pretty thoroughly splintered before.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

In The Grand Budapest Hotel, director Wes Anderson makes no pretense whatsoever to reality. Anderson’s films, of course, have all been fanciful and fantastic, but this one ensconces itself in a fictional European country whose characters all speak in different accents, the natural accents of the actors playing them. When Edward Norton turns up as a fascist military inspector named Henckels, he doesn’t bother sounding like a fascist military inspector named Henckels; he just sounds American, and Ralph Fiennes, as a hotel concierge known as M. Gustave H., uses his native English tones. This prepares us to view The Grand Budapest Hotel as a fable told via actors playing dress-up. It’s consciously artificial in a way that Anderson’s films haven’t been before, and that’s really saying something.

The key to the movie, for me, is its elaborate matryoshka structure. The story is told to us by The Author (Tom Wilkinson as an older man, Jude Law as his younger self), who talks about the time he was told a story by the elderly Zero Mustafa (F. Murray Abraham) about the time he, as a young man (Tony Revolori), worked as a lobby boy in the Grand Budapest Hotel for Gustave. The Author tells this story in a book called The Grand Budapest Hotel, read in the present day by a girl standing before a monument of The Author. We are seeing all this in a movie called The Grand Budapest Hotel, making us the audience to a reader to an author listening to a storyteller. What’s more, Anderson evokes each era by using a different aspect ratio — in 1968 the frame is enormously wide, in 1932 it’s a demure square.

The events surrounding the story — Nazism encroaching like a bloodstain on a map — suggest that Anderson is boxing off the historical nightmare the way his compartmentalized, symmetrical compositions box off everything else. Just outside the colorful wackiness in the frame, shadows lie. The plot itself, sectioned off by all the narrative scaffolding, is almost inconsequential: a rich matron of the hotel (Tilda Swinton) has been murdered, leaving a priceless painting to Gustave in her will, and the police nab Gustave for the crime. To paraphrase Roger Ebert, the movie isn’t about this plot; it’s about how we use stories to keep thorny emotions in manageable spaces. People die, and the deaths aren’t felt, at least not in the story as it is told. A major character’s great love dies offscreen, her fate covered by a couple of lines of narration. The Grand Budapest Hotel is not a callous work, but it’s about packing painful experience in storage.

On the most basic level, the movie is visually sumptuous, with Anderson’s fizzy deadpan comedy ladled over the immaculate design. The elegance of the look and sound is broken every so often by salty language, glimpses of surreptitious sex, even some bloodshed, all of which are relatively scarce in Andersonworld. When the jailed Gustave takes a sip of water and sets the glass down, we see a little cloud of red swirling in it. That’s about all the reality of prison brutality that Anderson wants to, or needs to, show us. Yet severed body parts and a breathless chase between a skier and a sled are also on the menu. There may be several floors of story here, but the overstory is a movie — the movie is the hotel itself, a story for each room. So Anderson gives us movie-ish thrills and a mystery of the sort we’ve seen umpteen times.

Of all the divertissements, I think what I enjoyed most was the implication that every great hotel back in the glory days of hotels was distinct only in design. A passage titled “The Society of the Crossed Keys” gives us a montage of concierges responding identically to a crisis, saying “Take over” to their right-hand men no matter what they’re doing. For all the moneyed prestige and pride of their architecture, functionally they might as well all be in the same motel franchise. This, of course, is never true of Wes Anderson’s films, which always manage to be utterly unlike anything else surrounding them in adjoining theaters. As for this one, it’s almost as if Anderson is addressing the detractors of his hermetic-dollhouse style and saying that wildness and weirdness are possible inside the dollhouse, and darkness outside.

The Girl Who Played with Fire

In their first cinematic go-round, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, intrepid journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and goth computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) didn’t actually meet until about halfway through the film. In The Girl Who Played with Fire, they don’t come face-to-face until the movie’s almost over. They “see” each other twice before then: Lisbeth watches Mikael enter her home via remote camera, and Mikael watches an incriminating disc of Lisbeth being raped by her “guardian” in the previous film. Both show Lisbeth being violated — her privacy, her body.

Grim as a funeral on a rainy Monday, The Girl Who Played with Fire finds Lisbeth wanted for three murders she didn’t commit. Mikael believes she’s innocent, and spends the movie tracking down suspects. The system, of course, is ready to throw away the key on Lisbeth — she has a checkered psychiatric history, and her bed partners include women as well as men. The late Stieg Larsson, who wrote the bestsellers these movies are drawn from, wanted to indict Swedish society’s misogyny and homophobia. In Lisbeth he found the perfect afflicted heroine, too fierce to be a mere victim but too damaged to stay out of trouble.

Lisbeth passes much of the movie in hiding, staying at an unregistered apartment and tapping away on her laptop. Mikael makes a lot of phone calls. Despite that — and its stately pace — the movie is not boring. There’s a nicely erotic encounter between Lisbeth and an old flame (Yasmine Garbi), and a crisply staged fight between a boxer and a big white-haired bruiser that packs more excitement and tension than most of the summer blockbusters have to offer. At their heart, though — and this feels more pronounced here than in Dragon Tattoo — these movies are high-flown pulp; this one comes complete with revelations about Lisbeth’s family that feel imported from soap opera, where everyone seems connected not entirely plausibly. Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but shouldn’t being shocked with a Taser disable someone even if they can’t feel pain?

Ah, well. Dragon Tattoo was so good (and the next one, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, is said to return to those heights) that disappointment in its sequel is probably inevitable. Partly, as noted above, it’s because the movie is missing the first film’s chief source of charm — the uneasy rapport between the decent Mikael and the spiky Lisbeth. Both actors keep their halves of the film afloat — Noomi Rapace scores again with her tough-vulnerable portrait of Lisbeth — but the movie works less as a cracking mystery than as a screed against scummy men, and an excuse to rub Lisbeth’s face in more dirt. If you share my fondness for the characters, that affection may pull you through this glumly compelling but unpleasant film. You may wish for more scenes like the tender meeting between Lisbeth and her ailing old former legal protector; the snarly young woman gently feeds the old man and even smiles at him. You may want a movie that gives this heroine — and this actress — more reasons to smile and fewer reasons not to.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Lisbeth Salander, the 24-year-old heroine of Stieg Larsson’s bestseller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and now the film version, is a great, prickly creation. On paper she may seem a collection of quirks: a goth, bisexual, chain-smoking, brilliant computer hacker with a history of violent behavior. But Noomi Rapace, the actress who breathes life into Lizbeth, gives a full-scale star-making performance with reserves of complexity and pain. Rapace carries this two-and-a-half-hour murder-mystery solidly, and seemingly effortlessly, on her slim sharp shoulders. Whoever takes the role in the upcoming American remake has gigantic shoes to fill.

Lisbeth isn’t the only lead, though. The other is Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a journalist facing three months in prison after his exposé of a corrupt industrialist got him tagged for libel. Mikael is hired by another industrialist, this one retired and far more benevolent, to help solve a 40-year-old mystery. The businessman’s niece went missing in the ‘60s, and he believes she was murdered. He also has little trust or love for his family, some of whom were or still are Nazi sympathizers. It’s a large family with many red herrings. Mikael takes the job — he has nothing better to do, and the case revs up his muckraker’s blood.

The mystery isn’t the best reason to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; for one thing, it leads to the sort of revelatory moment we’ve all seen a million times, in which the killer explains himself and seems to lack only a pointer and chalkboard. (The recent Shutter Island included that, with some parodic wit, I think.) No, the reason to watch is the relationship between the fortyish journalist and the severe young hacker, who eventually helps him with the case. The original Swedish title of the book and movie is Men Who Hate Women, and Lisbeth has met more than her share of such men. But Mikael is different; he doesn’t seem to have a corrupt or even sexual bone in his body — he cares only about compiling evidence. His monomania appeals to Lisbeth, who has her own one-track mind.

The movie really is their story, though it’s over an hour into the film before they even meet. Before that, we watch them separately, each having a difficult time of it. Lisbeth is assaulted twice by a sleazeball who’s been appointed her new “guardian,” but she avenges herself so swiftly and decisively that we spend the rest of the film not worrying about her. She can take care of herself. It’s Mikael, surrounded by a clan of suspects monitoring how close he’s getting to the truth, that we worry about. Director Niels Arden Oplev spreads gravely ominous music over the proceedings, pointing up how isolated Mikael is in his shack on the family’s compound. The suspense, I think, would be easier to sustain if we didn’t know there are two other books — and movies, though they have yet to open here — in this series.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo compels us in the good old ways — the piling up of clues, the decoding of hints, the use of old photos to recreate a micro-movie of a subtle but key event. What sets it apart thematically is the late Stieg Larsson’s preoccupations with racism, misogyny, and financial scandal as corrosive elements in the Swedish character. What sets it apart emotionally is the moving and sometimes funny rapport between the rumpled reporter (Michael Nykvist’s warm, steady performance will probably be overlooked but shouldn’t be) and the pierced angel/demon who can do anything with a MacBook. I’ll happily sit for two more movies featuring this pair; I only wish there could be more.

Spider

David Cronenberg’s Spider is some sort of master class in rigorous filmmaking; this director cuts to the bone now, with absolutely no flab and no ingratiation to the mainstream. Cronenberg tells bizarre and psychologically gnarled stories, but he tells them with a calm and measured sense of purpose, as if he had all the time in the world, and he assumes a high level of patience on our parts. Spider is slow but deadly, fixating on minute details as if weaving a world around us, and the world becomes a web smothering reason.

Working from Patrick McGrath’s screenplay (based on his novel), Cronenberg gives us an unreliable narrator — Dennis “Spider” Cleg (Ralph Fiennes), a schizophrenic who takes up residence in a dingy halfway house. Spider is haunted by his past, which we see in fragments, with Spider standing off to the side and observing. We see Spider’s working-class parents, a plumber (Gabriel Byrne) and his wife (Miranda Richardson), who seem to be more or less existing together. The joy seems to have gone out of the marriage; the father frequents a local pub, where he begins an affair with a local “tart” (also played by Richardson). One night, the mother catches the father in flagrante delicto with the tart; what follows convinces the young Spider that a murder has been committed.

We’re not convinced, though. For one thing, the movie often shows us events at which Spider was not present. Spider pursues the mystery anyway, though, a rumpled gumshoe unsure of his own perceptions. Playing this cracked inquisitor, Fiennes builds tension and heartbreak out of indecipherable mumbling and ritualistic, twitchy gestures. Cronenberg’s precise direction keeps us breathing the same stale air as Spider, and the lying, manipulative essence of cinema itself forces us to share Spider’s viewpoint even as we’re questioning it. Miranda Richardson also has a tough role — a triple role, actually, since she also takes on the part of the nurse running the halfway house (played at the beginning by Lynn Redgrave). Richardson is encouraged to play the mother sensibly, the tart and the nurse as threatening caricatures, which of course is how Spider would experience those two women. Gabriel Byrne, too, manages a difficult balancing act as the father, playing against decades of abusive, drunken working-class dads in movies. He drinks, and he fixes toilets, and he seems to be having sex with a local whore. But is he a murderer? And is she a whore?

Spider is bound to be misunderstood by literalists and Freudians, and those who persist in seeing misogyny in Cronenberg’s work. He presents, without comment, a programmatic view of women as either saints, whores or bullies that’s rooted in psychosis; all women become perversions of Spider’s beloved mum. Spider sifts with trembling fingers through the shards of his life, picking out pieces that may not reflect the truth. Cronenberg fixates on the possibly irrelevant and makes it relevant to the complete picture. Martin Scorsese used to be capable of films like this — small gems that root around in a damaged brain, persuading you that no subject could be larger or more important. Cronenberg, who came from visceral drive-in movies, is in his way as obsessive and as purely cinematic as Scorsese. His worlds are hermetically sealed; no outside perspectives are allowed to intrude, no glimmers of pop culture. Spider is Cronenberg’s most delicately poetic work yet, a shattered mirror whose reflection is false but finds its own truth.

The Pledge

In two out of his three directorial outings, Sean Penn has had the good fortune of having Jack Nicholson, unglamorous and hungry to act, as his star. Subtle work such as Nicholson does in The Crossing Guard and now The Pledge makes up for any ten crowd-pleasing, one-hand-tied-behind-his-back Nicholson performances (like, say, As Good As It Gets). Not content to be a brilliant actor himself, Penn is shaping up to be one of the great actor’s directors — a filmmaker who lets his performers live and breathe, giving them space to invent and to inspire each other.

Nicholson rules over The Pledge with a shaky hand, and that’s the source of his power here. He immerses himself in the role of Jerry Black, a Nevada detective about to retire from the force. Twice divorced, with no children that we hear about (we see a possible son in a photograph), Jerry plans rather half-heartedly to file himself away at a lake resort, fishing for marlins and waiting to die. When a little girl’s body is found in the snowbound woods, raped and murdered, Jerry can’t turn his back. He visits the girl’s parents (Patricia Clarkson and Michael O’Keefe), promising to find her killer. He knows he can’t fade into what he sees as the purgatory of retirement just yet. His brain can’t shut off the deductive process.

In structure, The Pledge is only tenuously a whodunit. We see Jerry uncovering clues, making connections that others scoff at (younger cop Aaron Eckhart and captain Sam Shepard are the main scoffers), refusing to believe that the case is closed even after a confession is manipulated out of a Native American drifter (Benicio Del Toro) who is barely even aware of his surroundings. We feel Jerry’s need to honor his promise and impose sense on a senseless crime. This movie, adapted by scripters Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski from the book The Promise by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, is similar to the overlooked 1982 drama The Border, featuring another fine, low-key performance by Nicholson as a lawman driven to do the right thing in the face of cynicism and indifference.

The Pledge also ranks among recent depressive, wintry dramas like The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction, in which the snow seems to rise to cover old wounds, old secrets, old violence. Chris Menges’ photography is immaculate yet naturalistic, never overselling the chilly climate or reducing the scenery to postcards. Sean Penn is never likely to direct a feel-good romantic comedy; his gods are Bergman and Cassavetes, with perhaps a side order of the French New Wave directors. Nicholson responds to Penn’s directorial muscle by allowing himself to appear weak; wrapping himself in this despairing role, he nevertheless exudes the intellectual glee of an actor who feels safe to explore, who knows he’s in good hands.

Continuing his lonely hunt for the killer, Jerry buys a gas station, the better to position himself by the road and see who rolls into town. (One wonderful touch: the former gas-station owner is Harry Dean Stanton, one of many cast members known for on-screen or off-screen hellraising; others include Mickey Rourke as the numb father of another missing girl, Vanessa Redgrave as the slain girl’s grandmother, and Helen Mirren as a shrink.) He also meets a waitress (Robin Wright Penn), a decent woman abused by her ex-husband, and her little daughter (Pauline Roberts). Feelings develop between the broken-down old cop and the wounded waitress, and Jerry has a kindly, grandfatherly touch with the little girl. What we begin to wonder is whether the resulting family unit is only a means to an end; we also begin to wonder about Jerry’s sanity.

Almost defiantly, The Pledge leaves us with no clear-cut resolution, yet this feels like the right — the only — way for such an emotionally messy film to finish. At the very beginning, we see a bloodied Jerry having what appears to be a nervous breakdown; this is reprised at the end, and we understand why. Penn catches us leaning the wrong way: conditioned by whodunits to expect a lurid revelation, we are instead confronted with an anticlimax that confounds our expectations and Jerry’s. Yet this question mark (closer to an ellipsis, actually) is more emphatic than the usual strained exclamation point that closes most formula Hollywood thrillers, and is more haunting than any manufactured shock ending. Sean Penn is batting three for three now; if he wants to forego acting to concentrate on directing, I wish he’d do the latter more often, but if movies like The Pledge are the result of five years of waiting for the right material, he has my blessing to wait.