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VENICE, Italy—In 1988, Nicholson Baker’s novel The Mezzanine caused a stir with its ironic, witty rendering of the everyday thoughts of a young office worker, in all their mundanity: Over the course of the book, Howie disserts on paper straws, escalators, and popcorn. Over the course of the ’90s, Seinfeld would take that idea and run with it, digging deep down into the quotidian lives of its characters and their menial preoccupations.
David Fincher’s new film, The Killer, premiered Sunday at the Venice Film Festival. It focuses on a contract killer taking revenge on his employer and colleagues, and is not cut entirely from the same cloth as these works, but there is an oddly hilarious preoccupation with objects, their meaning and their uses. In a fully globalized world, the main character jets around the place, sharing Zen musings about success and how to get ahead, while killing people and eating only the protein from a Big Mac.
As the film begins, the killer (played by an impeccable Michael Fassbender, giving nothing away but proving a perversely engaging anti-hero in his weird, ironic detachment and loopy thought processes) is readying himself to kill a mark, stationed across the way from him in an empty apartment in Paris. The killer—who is nameless throughout the film, except when taking a number of different aliases—is clearly a man of experience, a detached, clean, businesslike killer who takes a certain pride in his work and in his methods.