Can any do-gooder documentary released this year claim to have done more good than The Social Network, David Fincher’s high-powered drama about the founding of Facebook? Its portrait of CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a conniving little shit who elbowed his best friend out of the business was so scathing that, shortly before the release date, Zuckerberg pledged $100 million to the school system of Newark, New Jersey. And now that the movie has won rave reviews, played for ten weeks, and emerged as a surefire Oscar contender, Zuckerberg has joined the Giving Pledge, the philanthropic campaign launched by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and promised to donate more than half his fortune to charity. Clearly, since we can’t raise taxes on the wealthy, what we need is a new genre of shame-inducing billionaire biopics: “Get Christy Walton,” say, or “The Brothers Koch.”
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The default for big Hollywood releases—your Adam Sandler comedies, your Angelina Jolie thrillers—is an upper-middle-class world of nice houses with two SUVs in every driveway. But even the art-house crowd likes to see a little money onscreen. One of the year’s most warmly received foreign imports was I Am Love, Luca Guadignino’s elegant Italian drama about a poor Russian woman (Tilda Swinton) who’s married into a filthy-rich industrial clan in picturesque Milan. And indie films, though they may strike a proletarian pose, often trade in a well-upholstered bohemia. Tiny Furniture, now screening at Music Box, stars its 24-year-old filmmaker, Lena Dunham, as a young woman who returns home from a liberal-arts college in Ohio, film theory degree in hand, to live with her mother and sister (played by Dunham’s mother and sister) and feel sorry for herself in their swell apartment in Tribeca. Her romantic ideal is a fellow video maker who, she takes pains to inform her mother, is “kind of a big deal on YouTube.” Even more than Coppola, Dunham reminds you that filmmaking tends to be a class privilege.
Only one fictional movie this year really took on the juicy topic of income inequality in America, and then only indirectly: Nicole Holofcener’s masterful social satire Please Give. Catherine Keener stars as Kate, a middle-aged woman who lives in midtown Manhattan and, with her husband, owns and operates a midcentury furniture store. Compassionate to a fault, she’s constantly pressing money into the hands of street people, to the angry dismay of her spoiled teenage daughter. Kate is seldom rewarded for this generosity: she offers her restaurant leftovers to a homeless man on the street, for instance, then discovers to her mortification that he’s a patron waiting for a table at another restaurant. Holofcener believes in sharing the wealth, and she notes with care the many ways we have of quashing our own generous impulses. “Your guilt is warping me!” Kate’s husband complains at one point. Whether guilt is warping her, or Mark Zuckerberg for that matter, probably isn’t important to someone who needs their help.
Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno Clouzot, director of such French suspense classics as Diabolique and The Wages of Fear, was felled by a heart attack while shooting his lavish experimental thriller “L’Enfer.” The movie was never completed, but Clouzot managed to shoot about 13 hours of footage for the 1964 production, including a series of stunning camera experiments that were heavily influenced by the kinetic art of the time. Sifting through this salvaged material, documentary makers Serge Bromberg and Ruzandra Medrea manage to reconstruct the movie’s story, while interviews with surviving crew members tell a dramatic tale of a great film artist out of control.
