Fail Safe

When we talk about the best directors of all time, everyone's quick to mention Lynch, Hitchcock, Coppola, Bergman, etc., but we need to start making the case for Sidney Lumet. I think much of the directorial discourse is framed around the style of an auteur—and maybe you could make the case that Lumet doesn't have anything nearly as distinct as someone like Lynch, for example. Still, I can't let a distinct lack of "style" cloud me from what I'm seeing, which is consistently elite-level filmmaking. I think this may be one of the greatest editing feats of all time, because the edit works in lockstep with every performance and shot. There is no cut wasted because there's no performance wasted, because there's absolutely no shot wasted. Each cut from the planes, to the warroom, to the Pentagon, to the bunker is timed so perfectly. Most of the cuts are to either close-ups of each character or wide shots of the various locations. And genuinely, every facial expression in this carries the weight of the world. I can only describe every cut to a close-up as another stroke, effectively painting modern masterpieces that deserve to be hung up and framed. I can't think of any bad performance in this because there's like a million shots of an eye-dart, or a lip quiver, or eyebrow raise, or bead of sweat that carry a million words. And the wide shots feel like nothing short of Renaissance paintings. All these men standing around tables, hunched over at control boards, huddling around telephones, peering at surveillance screens. And it allows for these really smart zooms and pans across the room. If I had to describe Lumet's cinematic "superpower," it'd be his ability to establish context and let the performances and framing speak for themselves. Harking back to stuff like Dog Day Afternoon or Network, I can vividly recall so many shots of a sweaty Al Pacino just bugging out or Peter Finch going crazy as we slowly move in to capture every detail on his face, and the same is true here. There's a real pathway for this to become some frenetic editing mess between a million different locations, but I love how this really gives you time to sit with things. Lumet understands that this is just a big game of telephone with the stakes raised to a million, and he does so by injecting ambiguity into everything by never giving us the Kremlin's reactions. We're stuck looking at a slowly spiraling Henry Fonda and his translator, who, for all his good work, is still wildly freaking out, thus adding on another layer of hazy narration and tension. Literally everything about this works so well, and every close-up or wide-angle shot could get put in the Louvre. Just great stuff man!