Word: ruffalo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...movies, Reservation Road and Things We Lost in the Fire, take up this theme. In the former, a lawyer named Dwight Arno (Mark Ruffalo) is rushing to return his son to his estranged wife, when his car hits and kills a small boy. Panicked, he flees the scene, becoming a guilt-ridden hit-and-run driver. In the latter, a father goes out to buy ice cream for his family, intervenes in a street corner act of domestic violence and is murdered for his trouble. Both movies concern themselves primarily with the aftermath of these shocking crimes, Reservation Road...
...wannabe, with the young Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) as Woodward and Bernstein, and his senior colleague Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) as a crusty Ben Bradlee type with a lot more showmanship and a mile-wide self-destructive streak. Their sleuthing sometimes helps, mostly annoys detectives Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards). When Toschi is asked, "Have you considered that the killer might be Paul Avery?", he deadpans, "Frequently...
Fincher, whose work on Fight Club and Panic Room displayed his expertise in melding the suspenseful and the lurid, plays it cool here. He lets his stars do their thing: Ruffalo emitting just a whisper of rage under his just-the-facts-ma'am demeanor; Downey playing the chatty, suicidal genius (the actor's line readings always have a jazzman's musical ingenuity); and Gyllenhaal in his winsome mode, looking like a puppy who just got swatted with a newspaper by the master he somehow still adores. The star quality has to carry the movie, all 2 1/2 hours...
...strategy is to calm viewers with humor and the character’s own confusion, before shocking them with a gruesome death. Gyllenhaal has wonderful on-screen chemistry with co-stars Robert Downey Jr., who plays a crime reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, and Mark Ruffalo, who plays a detective. Their repartee creates a deceptively funny film. The comedy lulls the audience into a false sense of security, one Fincher seems set on destroying. The shock of seeing a stabbing is heightened with the knowledge that you were chuckling at witty dialogue up until the moment it happened...
...Documentaries get starry: Some of the hottest documentaries at the film festival employed actors to tell their tales: the opening-night movie, Chicago 10, relies on a voice cast including Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo and Liev Schreiber in animated scenes of the trial of anti-war demonstrators from the 1968 Democratic National Convention; Woody Harrelson and Mariel Hemingway read letters and journals in Nanking, about the Japanese occupation of the Chinese city in 1937; Strange Culture features Tilda Swinton and other actors dramatizing events that lead to the arrest of a University of Buffalo professor on suspicion of bioterrorism...