Kevin Spacey as the Machiavellian Frank Underwood
The director David Fincher is drawn to plots based on a simple premise—life is a game—combined with an equally straightforward Darwinian directive—kill or be killed. The heroes of his hugely popular films—most famously, Fight Club (1999), The Social Network (2010) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)—figure out fairly early on that they must outmanoeuvre their opponents if they hope to prevail.
Survival, Fincher reminds us, requires shedding our scruples and kicking aside the roadblocks conscience puts in our path. In his films upward mobility is a chess match with human pawns. The only way to avoid mediocrity and terminal boredom is to play a zero-sum game in which there is only one winner: the canniest, the strongest, the bravest. The one who will do anything—anything—to win.
Fincher’s latest work is the political thriller House of Cards, a series that marks a wholly new approach to film distribution. It cost $100m to make and is now available to watch online, and nowhere else. Since 1st February, Netflix subscribers have been able to view the entire first season—13 episodes—at once, rather than waiting for each week’s instalment. Fincher, the executive producer, also directed the first two episodes, establishing the show’s look and tone: sleek, glossy, expensive, as giddily fixated on power and money as the city in which it’s set.
House of Cards is based on a successful BBC series, aired in 1990, which was adapted from a novel by Michael Dobbs. Ian Richardson starred as the deliciously creepy, Machiavellian Francis Urquhart, the majority whip who schemes, blackmails, betrays, and murders his way to the top, becoming party leader and ultimately prime minister. According to the BBC show’s creators, its dark, suspenseful plot borrowed a few dirty tricks from the plays—Macbeth and Richard III—that feature Shakespeare’s most morally ambiguous and unambiguously ambitious heroes.
Fincher, known for orchestrating fierce on-screen battles for power, was the ideal director to translate this tale from the House of Commons to the House of Representatives. Beau Willimon, who wrote The Ides of March—a 2011 film about a US political campaign in which an idealist (played by Ryan Gosling) is rather harshly disabused of his ideals—was hired to make the original more American and more contemporary while preserving the ethical complications and plot twists that made the BBC version so much fun to watch. Among the inspired updates is the way in which House of Cards makes Twitter look like an essential tool for navigating the currents of modern life. The series is Fincher’s most sophisticated and most entertaining creation yet.
Fincher, who grew up in northern California, began directing commercials in the late 1980s for companies including Nike, Coca-Cola and Levis, as well as music videos for Madonna, The Rolling Stones and Aerosmith. By his own account, his first feature film, Alien 3, was a disaster, ruined by studio interference: “No one hated it more than me,” he told an interviewer in 2009.
Having learnt from this experience, Fincher fought to retain creative control of his follow-up, Seven (1995). The film starred Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman as two detectives tracking a serial killer who stages his crimes as grisly tableaux based on the seven deadly sins. Fincher successfully lobbied to keep the film’s brutal ending (about which the studio had understandable reservations) and his stubbornness paid off. This dark and unsettling film became a huge hit. Seven was a blueprint for the techniques and themes that have become Fincher’s trademarks: the murky, ominous lighting; the hyperventilating score; the adrenalised edits; the extreme close-ups that compel us to look hard at something that, we discover too late, we might not wish to see; the elaborate tracking shots that make us feel as if we’re running to keep up with a camera taking us somewhere unpleasant and dangerous; the fascination with male friendship, with loyalty, treachery, gamesmanship, and with the possibility that the mouse that the cat is toying with may turn out to have been toying with the cat. In Seven, the demonic quarry is played by Kevin Spacey, who also stars as the insidious Francis (Frank) Underwood in House of Cards. As always he shines in the role of a weirdly charming, charismatic villain who demands and keeps our attention.
Watch enough of Fincher’s work and you may feel that you are observing a director educating himself in the process of making each new film. In Panic Room (2002), in which Jodie Foster plays a woman trapped in a sealed chamber as three thieves rampage through her home, Fincher experiments with the momentum of escalating threat and violence. In The Game (1997), a sort of slick, expensive dress rehearsal for Fight Club, two brothers (Michael Douglas and Sean Penn) participate in an elaborate, potentially deadly charade. Like much of Fincher’s work, the film addresses questions of masculinity, of what it means to be in or out of control, and the ways in which perfectly ordinary activities can turn into acts of vicious aggression. By the movie’s end, its director appears to have realised that an audience engrossed by the spectacle of two guys messing with each other’s heads won’t bother much about plausibility—about whether what they are watching could possibly occur in reality.
Fight Club (1999) not only won Fincher new and devoted fans but persuaded them that he was far more than a director of genre thrillers. Adapted from a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, the film (as every male over the age of 12 can probably tell you) concerns a disaffected office drone (Edward Norton) with a world-class case of insomnia. After a chance meeting and a series of apparent misadventures cement his friendship with a soap salesman named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), our hero is admitted to a secret society of pop-up blood fests in which young men bash each other to a pulp for fun. The sheer preposterousness of the plot and its unlikely resolution did nothing to discourage viewers who felt that the film was speaking to them: alienated worker bees tricked by the culture into losing touch with their hormones and primal instincts.
If I found The Social Network (2010) less interesting than many people did, I assumed it was because I had only a tangential interest in Facebook’s origin myth. But it’s hard not to admire its creators for making typing on a keyboard look sexy (a skill that would serve Fincher well in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and for creating a fast-paced thriller about a nerdy Harvard kid who invents a computer program. With its portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg’s simultaneously cool headed and giddy climb to wealth and power (a goal achieved partly by screwing over his friends) The Social Network is a natural stepping stone—an autodidact’s preparation—on the way to House of Cards.
Unlike some of Fincher’s weaker work, House of Cards is aimed at a grown-up audience, viewers who would not be pleased to learn that what they’ve been watching was all a dream or an extended psychotic episode. Though there’s a great deal of money on the table in The Social Network, the stakes are much higher in House of Cards: nothing less than the American presidency, and the government’s policies on education, immigration, and international relations. In an early scene, Underwood, about to be disappointed in his hope of becoming secretary of state, describes his plans for the department with the absurd yet all too credible catchphrase, “trickle-down diplomacy.”
Fincher extracts a remarkable performance from Spacey, who combines reptilian cynicism with a reflexive vulnerability born (we feel) of blighted ambition—a response of which he is ashamed and instantly conceals. Exuding warm southern courtliness (Underwood is from South Carolina) while staying ice cold around the eyes, the House majority whip gives off a glacial chill that the people around him choose not to notice, to their eventual harm. Though Urquhart was never less than mezmerising to watch, Spacey gives us a more complex character: capable (as the more single-minded Urquhart was not) of flashes of sexual jealousy, regret, sympathy and even affection—emotions he struggles against in an effort not to appear weak. And yet the two men utter some of the same lines, the same catchphrases. Having just led a reporter to surmise—that is, having essentially leaked—a valuable tidbit of information, both Urquhart and Underwood say, with transparent glee and sly self-protectiveness, “You might very well think that, but I couldn’t possibly comment.”
Whether or not Spacey is having a good time, he certainly gives that impression. After eating a plate of ribs prepared for him by the elderly African-American owner of an inner-city ribs joint, Underwood delivers a speech about picturing his Washington colleagues, “their lightly salted faces frying in a skillet.” Not since The Silence of the Lambs has an actor lent such glee to a cannibalistic fantasy, and the way in which the mere thought lights up Underwood’s face may make you think: Hannibal Lector Goes to Washington.
Many of the supporting characters are familiar types, closely based on their BBC counterparts, but the actors bring authenticity and complexity to their parts. As Francis’s scheming wife, Claire Underwood, Robin Wright plays a social climbing Snow Queen who makes Lady Macbeth look like an exemplar of conscience. “My husband doesn’t apologise,” she says. “Not even to me.” And as the young reporter who enters into a Faustian bargain with Underwood, selling her soul for the promise of inside information, Kate Mara nearly shimmers with energised desperation as she exchanges her jeans, hooded sweatshirt and fatigue jacket for the low-cut T-shirt and push-up bra that, she hopes, will snag Underwood’s interest.
Fincher has taken the political intrigue out of the cramped corridors and meeting rooms of the Houses of Parliament. Much of House of Cards transpires in the glare we associate with a city in which a reporter’s flash is always going off somewhere. Rarely has Washington appeared so beautiful on screen; reflected in the Potomac, its lighted monuments glitter with a stately glory we more often associate with Paris.
Underwood’s ascent to power has the bravado of Philippe Petit tightrope walking between the World Trade Centre towers. Even during those intervals when the plot isn’t moving quickly, you can’t take your eyes off the screen. I can easily imagine people who have worked hard all week, allowing themselves the pleasure of zoning out with a private, 13-episode House of Cards marathon.
It’s not all fun, all the way through. There are long passages of stiff, awkwardly expositional dialogue. And there are moments when the director could have done a better job reminding viewers who all the characters are and who knows which dirty secret about whom. Some things get on your nerves, among them the suspicion that you are watching a politically cynical film about political cynicism. One can’t help feeling that the film-makers are essentially in agreement with Francis Underwood: to be idealistic is to be naive, a turtle paddling without a shell in shark-infested waters.
Ultimately, though, I was willing to overlook all my doubts in return for the pleasure of watching Underwood plotting and conspiring. As an occasional TV-series binger—I consumed five series of Breaking Bad in just under two weeks—I couldn’t have been happier: watching 13 episodes in a row and telling myself I was working. I would have watched them anyway, though perhaps not in such quick succession. There is something inside all of us that enjoys the spectacle of a poisonous snake wriggling through the grass, or in this case a formal gala.
