Word: parallaxes
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Fincher's style is so handsomely oppressive, and Douglas' befuddlement is so cagey, that for a while the film recalls smarter excursions into heroic paranoia (The Parallax View, Total Recall). But, Fincher would say, it's your choice whether to be tantalized or exasperated. If the movie works, it's because you believe, for a couple of hours, that you are Nick. You are not playing the game; The Game is playing...
...book is also the kind of material Alan J. Pakula was put on earth to direct. Klute, The Parallax View and All the President's Men are all marvelously intricate visions in which otherwise quite knowing individuals are slowly forced to the awareness that they are being victimized -- no, terrorized -- by other people's unscrupulous rage to maintain respectable order at any cost. Yet conscientiously as this movie has been made, it does not work as well as the novel did or as some of Pakula's other films have...
Alan Pakula is a discreet stylist whose best movies (Klute, The Parallax View) find silky danger in the most commonplace phrases and gestures. But there were problems in adapting Styron's tale, to which Pakula deferred in his dogged fidelity to the book. For one thing, the choice Sophie must make takes place years before the main story begins; so the film must switch tracks halfway through for a half-hour flashback to a Nazi death camp. Though the sequence is as strong and beautifully detailed as the rest of Pakula's work, the events it depicts could...
...killer, involves us so totally that the girl-in-the-abandoned-warehouse routine at the end doesn't even appear schematic (well, it does, but we're still scared to death). You gotta credit Alan J. Pakula though, who here, as in All the President's Men and the Parallax View, conveys the someone-is-always-watching-you motif with incomparable creepiness. Donald Sutherland is an intelligent, if pallid detective, but the protagonist is Jane all the way, the frustrated hooker trapped by the emotional and physical perils of her profession. Her best performance to date...
...movie is not without curiosity value, however, for some of Hollywood's brightest figures have tried to whip it int shape The stars are Jane Fonda, James Caan and Jason Robards. The director is Alan J. Pakula (Klute, The Parallax View, All the President's Men), a major cinematic stylist who works equally well with actors and ideas. Cinematographer Gordon Willis (The Godfather, Interiors), though overly enraptured with the poetic uses of shadows, is one of the top craftsmen in American movies. There's only one wild card in this impressive pack: first-time Screenwriter Dennis Lynton...