The Killer and The Mission
In David Fincher's hands, a nondescript hitman can't help being distinctive. Plus, a documentary about the life-or-death stakes of missions work.
The Killer kicks off with Michael Fassbender’s titular character lost in a fugue state of routine work. Not the excitement of the chase, but the boredom of a days-long stakeout, patient as a spider. He’s parked himself in an unused WeWork, and if it weren’t for the gun in his bag and the rubber gloves he wears, he could be any office worker using the space, dreaming of more interesting things to do for money. When’s the last time I did a nice quiet drowning? he wonders to himself.
David Fincher’s latest is not a workplace drama, but it is interested in the buying and selling of work, specifically in the compromises necessary to be good at a specific job, and the amount to which one’s self can be defined wholly by one’s own career. The Killer has no name (though he gives many false ones, each lifted from sitcom characters). He’s defined, both in the script and on screen, by what he does, and even his thoughts, which Fassbender delivers in nearly flat voiceover, speak to the level to which the Killer has allowed himself to be subsumed by his work. “It’s not my place to form any opinion,” he repeats to himself. “Stick to the plan, don’t improvise, fight only the battle you are paid to fight.” The Killer operates on a level of anonymity so complete that he no longer exists as a person.
This is what sets him apart from other movie assassins. John Wick, James Bond, Jef Costello—all have traded away some fundamental piece of themselves, and by extension, a chance at a normal life, in favor of their ability to kill. But still, they’re all cool; they all have a sense of style and a level of personality beyond their respective vocations. Fassbender’s Killer purposefully cultivates a boring exterior. He dresses like a German tourist when in Paris so no one will talk to him. He eats McDonald’s repeatedly, on purpose; he drinks Starbucks and orders supplies from Amazon and buys name-brand painkillers. The man thinks in platitudes—“measure twice, cut once”—and draws comparisons of his own life to those that populate background-level reality TV shows from the A&E Network. Any hints at personality have been long gone before we meet him, drowned in the populist anonymity he armors himself with. He’s traded his soul for the generic, and he hasn’t even done it for the love of the game, nor for any pride in his work: he claims that he isn’t even the best at what he does. Like all hit men, he’s in it for the money, and he has nowhere else to go.
It’s a testament to Fassbender’s performance, and to the script, that the black-hole character of the Killer is still so compelling. Fassbender moves like a hungry panther: all austerity, none of the rolling laziness of the well-fed. He rarely speaks, except in the voiceover that constitutes his internal monologue. Even then his accent is somewhat anonymous, just American enough to sound Midwestern, but with a slightly too-hard “r” that betrays Fassbender’s native Irish accent. It works to Fassbender’s advantage: he could be anyone, and he is no one.
Under Fincher’s assured direction, all of that nothing still manages to constitute a story with the sleek efficiency of an airport thriller, chapter by swift chapter. The film moves, like its main character, at a respectable clip through its neo-noir paces, following Fassbender’s Killer after a botched job as he tries to find out where it all went wrong. It taps into a bleak sense of humor through shocking irony (something that the Killer himself would consider unnecessary), which makes the film’s funniest lines all the more potent thanks to their deadpan delivery. Cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt frames the action with clean efficiency, a neat fit for a cold movie. Most of the film’s flourishes are reserved for the sound design, which makes precise, maximalist use of diegetic music especially to reinforce the Killer’s own point of view.
All this personality makes the movie hum but also underlines its weakness: the Killer is anonymous by design, and so is his story. We’ve seen other assassins go through the same motions before: a failed hit, a loved one threatened, an attempt to find answers by going back to the start of their careers. The movie’s momentum is carried by Fincher’s sense of style and humor, but we can’t be invested in the Killer as a person. He doesn’t exist. He traded in his soul for his job. Despite the Killer’s best attempts to remain anonymous, though, we’re still interested in his story. If you find that paradox intriguing, there’s just enough friction to hang on and enjoy the ride. —Sarah Welch-Larson
★★★☆
The Killer is in limited theatrical release this weekend. It hits Netflix on November 10.
The Mission
A fanatic, as the adage has it, is a person who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. It’s an incisive bon mot, easily used to arraign and dismiss an imagined figure, but the derisive chuckle sticks in your throat when you try to apply the saying to someone like John Chau. In 2018, Chau was killed at the age of 26 by the uncontacted island people he was hoping to convert to Christianity, and his single-minded devotion to the foolhardy plan that brought him to that fate certainly fits some definitions of fanaticism. Then again, if you accept the axiom that sharing the Gospel with all people everywhere involves the highest possible stakes for their eternal souls, how harshly can Chau be judged?
The Mission is clear about how directors Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine would address that question. One of their interview subjects, a former missionary who ended up abandoning both the mission field and his faith, argues persuasively that mission work in certain undeveloped cultures does far more harm than good, and the film’s closing sequence offers a disquieting glimpse of the martyrdom narrative that has sprung up in the wake of Chau’s death. But Moss and McBaine are more interested in an exploration of Chau himself than they are in making a polemic. Chau emerges as a sincere lover of people whose zealousness is immediately relatable for anyone who was once a fresh college graduate with a lopsided ratio of idealism to real-world experience. Chau’s father, whose rueful letter to the filmmakers is poignantly read in voiceover by actor David Shih, minces no words about his mistrust of the evangelical subculture that encouraged his son’s missionary ambitions, but he is equally clear-eyed about the innocence of Chau’s personal motives. Plenty of screen time is allotted to Chau’s friends, all of them awed by his directness and lack of hesitation in taking up his cross to follow Jesus.
The film relies heavily on such testimonials to flesh out its portrait of Chau, so much so that he ends up feeling like a minor enigma. Unlike Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog’s examination of another quixotic idealist, The Mission does not have a gold mine of film footage and records to help it illuminate its central figure. This is not the filmmakers’ fault, but their choice to fill the gaps with interviews and speculative animated dramatizations of key moments doesn’t fully compensate. Rather than presenting a single portrait of their subject, Moss and McBaine offer only a series of portraits of Chau as others see him. If the film had exhibited more awareness of this subjectivity, it might have produced a remarkable rumination on how faith can be in the eye of the beholder, how an act can be an exemplar of courageous devotion for one person but a tragedy of blind fanaticism for another. As it is, The Mission provides an exploration of unanswerable questions and invites Christians to think carefully about how far we should push the idea that the wisdom of God is foolishness to men. —Kevin McLenithan
★★★☆
The Mission is currently in limited theatrical release.