In Review: 'The Killer,' 'The Holdovers'

Directors David Fincher and Alexander Payne return with new movies that are unmistakably in their wheelhouse.

The Killer
Dir. David Fincher
118 min.

One of the incidental details of David Fincher’s The Killer—and this film is nothing if not packed with incidental detail—is that the unnamed assassin of the title, played by Michael Fassbender, spends the first part of the film in an emptied-out top-floor WeWork office in Paris. It’s here that he waits (and waits and waits) for the right opportunity to hit a target in a hotel penthouse across the way. A little later, he comments on the ever-present voiceover track about the McDonald’s he frequents nearby and muses about the number of locations in Paris and around the world. Then, still later, he’s shown cradling a Starbucks coffee en route to a job that will require full use of his hands, which adds a little suspense as to when he might dispose of the cup. 

Fincher scholars may find themselves flashing back to Edward Norton’s apartment in Fight Club, and all of the furniture and bric-a-brac he imagines ordering from the IKEA catalog that will surely give his life some meaning. Getting stuff is the point of capitalism—or, at least, that’s what he believes until he ultimately opts to detonate bombs in the buildings of consumer credit companies. Though Fincher comes from advertising and music videos, the hollowness of material things is a theme he returns to in The Killer as a way to suggest the vacancy of a professional sociopath who has the resources to retire at any time, but doesn’t seem to know what he’d retire into. That empty WeWork office is like his soul externalized. 

Working from a French graphic novel by Alexis “Matz” Nolent, Fincher reunites with Seven screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker for an arch yet unmistakably personal film that feels a little like his Drive or The Counselor, an existential deconstruction of a straightforward genre film. The plot itself is a stock revenge thriller: The assassin misses his target, then works to take out everyone sent to “clean up” the job by killing him. A Big Boss waits for him at the end, but The Killer implies a troubling question mark over what happens after that, when he leaves his profession and enters retirement without a conscience, a soul or a purpose. At least killing people is something to set your mind around. 

The Killer’s opening minutes are audaciously, thrillingly mundane. The assassin stares intently out the window at the WeWork office, quiet save for the hum of the space heater in front of him, and nothing happens. He talks nonstop to us, though, in a stream of consciousness that seems intended partly to keep his mind active and partly to enlighten an invisible audience. When he finally does fire his rifle, at least a full day later, he hits the wrong person and immediately flees to his hideout in the Dominican Republic, where he discovers he hasn’t been given a pass for his first workplace accident. 

The road eventually leads, Michael Clayton-like, to a sinister mastermind played by Tilda Swinton, but The Killer makes a few violent pit stops along the way that show off Fincher’s dazzling technique. But these genre thrills wind up compounding the spiritual vacancy that underscores the film, sometimes leavened by a dark streak of comedy, but comprehensively bleak in a way hitman thrillers are not supposed to be. Fassbender doesn’t play the character as a cipher, exactly, but this one mistake rattles him enough to prompt a little soul-searching. For all his resourcefulness, for all the Plans A-Z he’s set up as contingencies, he’s not prepared for what he finds. — Scott Tobias

The Killer opens in limited release tomorrow before debuting on Netflix on November 10th. (You should see it projected if you can.)

The Holdovers
Dir. Alexander Payne
133 min.

Philistines. Visigoths. Cretins. These are the words that Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) uses to describe those he holds in contempt, a category that includes almost everyone. It probably helps that the rest of the world seemingly feels the same about Paul. A teacher of ancient history at Barton, an elite East Coast boarding school, Paul is unpopular with both students and faculty and knows it. He also seemingly doesn’t care. The long hair and liberal marijuana consumption of his students points to changes in the world outside of Barton’s confines, but Paul’s content to remain within them, just as he has since attending Barton as a student (a short, unhappy stint at Harvard aside). Paul has history to teach, detective novels to read, and Jim Beam to drink. It’s enough.

Or it’s almost enough. The latest from Alexander Payne (working from a script by David Hemmington), The Holdovers depicts lonely people making (sometimes fleeting) sparks of connection with others of their kind, a description that could be applied to several Payne films. But any similarity shouldn’t be mistaken for Payne repeating himself.  ’70s-style production logos for Focus Features and Miramax precede a leisurely credits sequence and the spirit of that era’s filmmaking is evident in everything from its zooms to the recurring use of a Labi Siffre song to, most importantly, its ​​purposeful shagginess. It’s a film about go-nowhere characters that mostly stays in one place but finds much to explore there.

That place is Barton, but more specifically Barton during Christmas break, when Paul is left in charge of a handful of boys who can’t, for one reason or another, spend the holidays with their parents. Before long, even their ranks thin, leaving Paul with only Angus (newcomer Dominic Sessa, a discovery) in his charge. Angus is gifted and prickly in ways that don’t make him popular with the other boys, but he also possesses reserves of confidence he can draw on when needed, including calling bullshit on Paul’s insistence they keep a schedule that includes ample study time during break. Joining them is Mary (Da'Vine Joy Randolph, also excellent), Barton’s long-serving cook, who’s still mourning the recent loss of her son, a gifted Barton grad who couldn’t pay for college then died serving in Vietnam.

The three get to know each other well over the break’s two-week stretch and, as Angus struggles to battle boredom and Mary introduces Paul to The Newlywed Game while both drink more than they probably should. In time, the order starts to slide away, but as they loosen up, each character’s particular ongoing crisis becomes harder to conceal.

Payne gives Mary and Angus plenty of time in the spotlight, but it’s Paul who emerges as the most unforgettable character. He’s an overeducated failure sometimes reminiscent of Ignatius J. Reilly, a man alienated from others by elements he can’t control. His misaligned eyes have earned the nickname “Walleye,” a condition that makes him begin the day smelling bad and end it smelling worse, and he has a reflexive condescension that he theoretically could keep in check. But Giamatti invests him with nobility and soulfulness, qualities waiting just beneath the surface for others to discover if they choose. Or, in this case, if they’re forced to by circumstance. It turns out even Visigoths might have something to offer.

The Holdovers begins a limited release tomorrow before expanding.