A Ballad for Modern Apathy

Rating: 10/10 (7 September 2011)

A bleak, gruesome, horrific and clever thriller, and filmmaking of a distinguished kind, it tells the tale of two detectives, one all set to retire, the other at the outset of his career, and their efforts to catch a jaundiced but cunning serial killer using the Seven Deadly Sins as his narrative. As the film begins, we meet Somerset, a painstaking veteran cop who lives a lonesome bachelor's life in what seems like a furnished room. Then he meets Mills, an impetuous young cop who indeed requested to be transferred to Somerset's district. The two men probe an exceptionally grisly murder, an obese man having been hog-tied and force-fed to death.
His sin was gluttony. Shortly Somerset and Mills are examining similarly creative murders concerning greed, sloth, lust and the like. In each circumstance, the murderous means is fitting, and revolting. Somerset deduces that the murderer, John Doe, is using his crimes to sermonize. The look of this pulp meditation is vital to its achievement. This is a very sinister film, the murk regularly diffused only by police flashlights. Even when all the lights are on in the victims' apartments, they shed merely ashen, despondent puddles of illumination.
While the story is present-tense, the set design evokes the 1940s. Gary Wissner, the art director, uses dark blacks and browns, cavernous shadows, lights of sickly yellow, and a lot of dark wood furnishings. And it virtually always rains. In this cutthroat world of darkness, Somerset and Mills move with increasing fear. Somerset perceives that the killer is using ancient literature as a muse, and researches Dante, Milton and Chaucer for clues. Mills opts for Cliff Notes. A leg up comes with Somerset's feeling that John Doe must have a library card. But the stiffs amass, in bitter thickset detail, as terrifyingly vivid as one sees in commercial films. The few twinkles of soul and hopefulness come from Mills' wife One of the most skillfully and innovatively edited contemporary American films, perhaps its most beautiful montage features Somerset in the library researching the Seven Deadly Sins while his friends, the library custodians and guards, share their boys'-night-out loft ritual, with an unexpected blackly comic punch line: When the sequence ends, Fincher hard-cuts to Mills losing his temper at these confounding research materials. The contrast between Somerset's reservedness and erudition and Mills' man-this-sucks horse sense and youthful dopeyness starts to make pretty broad strokes, but there is some charming buddy-cop undercurrent that works without a glitch into the glass sheen of the film's atmospheric tone. It's because Andrew Kevin Walker's script and Freeman and Pitt's chemistry that the film is so moving. For instance, the chasing of John Doe through the streets gives Mills the till-now belated chance to show his bones as an impressive, dedicated cop.
The material independently could've been managed through numerous approach, but David Fincher pinpoints suggestive atmosphere, and Walker writes dialogue that especially for Morgan Freeman is judicious, learned and lyrical. Ultimately, it sinks in that the killer's sermon is being urged directly to the two investigators, and that to appreciate it, they may have to imperil their hearts and their psyches. Fincher's fatalistic noir ballad is distinctive in bringing the killer on screen with half an hour left, and gives him a speaking role. Rather than just being the game of a hunt, he's exposed as a warped yet eloquent enemy, having contrived a hideous plan for finishing his sermon.