Gone Girl
(2014)
(SPOILERS) A David Fincher film is always a seductive treat,
even when the greater whole proves something of a misfire (The Game, The Girl With the
Dragon Tattoo). Gone Girl finds
the director’s technique ever more refined, seamless and subtle, yet as with
his previous picture he has chosen to unleash his virtuosity and microscopic
attention to detail on subject matter that is overtly lurid and provocative. In
contrast to Tattoo, Gillian Flynn’s
adaptation of her novel is at least imbued with multiple layers themes, adding
substance – but let’s not overstate this – to what is at first sight just your
a standard mystery yarn. This is a twisted take on marriage, media and our
capacity for suggestibility. It’s also easy to hear Fincher’s mischievous chuckle
over successive scenes, pleased with the way he has so calculatedly pushed the
buttons of debate; is it misogynist, feminist, or is this just a director
taking delight in causing those discussions? There have been comparisons to Stanley
Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut but the
better yardstick, in terms of flagrantly manipulating the audience, is probably
Alfred Hitchcock.
For all that Gone Girl
has caused a lot of people to say a lot of about it, sometimes at odds with
each other, its mechanics are essentially those of airport fiction. Fincher
presents his fiction in an a luxuriant manner, suggesting it is expansively
about something beyond it’s titillating plot devices. And it is, but whether it
can actually fill the spaces it creates, thereby surmounting its genre, is
questionable. I’m dubious the film has sufficiently deliberate content to carry
the resonance of a Vertigo, or
Fincher’s own Fight Club (with which
it bears comparison in respect of eminent scope for interpretation and
misinterpretation).
Which is worth considering because this is a rivetingly put
together, resplendently executed piece of work. Fincher setting his sights on
pulp elicits a not dissimilar response to those questioning why Kubrick would
choose to adapt something clearly beneath him like The Shining. For a thriller with barely a standard cheap thrill in
it, Gone Girl remains taut and
compelling; Fincher has such confidence he doesn’t need to consciously put any
pedal to any metal. Yet he also rides a succession of audacious twists and
reveals, some of which threaten to implode the careful precision and exactness
over which he presides. The daring, unusual narrative structure nurses many of
the perils of the unreliable narrator device and serves to unbalance the
dynamic of an ill-suited couple that proves to be all too suited to each other.
We’re introduced to Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) on the morning
of his fifth wedding anniversary; discovering his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) is
missing, with signs of violence in the house, he calls the police and a manhunt
duly begins. Inevitably the media spotlight shifts to focus on him and his potential
transgressiveness, a perspective underlined by relationship flashbacks narrated
from Amy’s diary. Here the slow descent of their marriage is revealed in
consort with a threatening side to an apparently ideal husband. And then,
without warning, the rug is pulled as we cut to Amy alive-and-well, having
plotted this morass of intrigue to frame Nick for his infidelities. What
follows finds Amy’s plans not quite going according to plan, but as a
consequence revealing a scrupulously inventive ability to turn almost any
scenario to her advantage. Ultimately and most humorously and perversely, this
leads to a gambit to win back Nick.
It’s actually the leftfield conclusion of Gone Girl that most sets it apart from
being a standard glossy thriller along the lines of Jagged Edge or Basic Instinct.
No one gets his or her comeuppance, perhaps because no one is an especially
nice persona anyway and Fincher and Flynn are disinterested in token gestures.
In that respect it forms a neat companion piece to another paean to the
corrupted, disintegrating marriage, Danny De Vito’s The War of the Roses. That Nick should choose to remain with Amy,
after the outlandish frame-up she has connived, is the blackest joke in a film
of acrid mischief. It’s just a pity that Fincher and Flynn need to emphasise it
with dialogue as one the nose as Amy’s response to Nick’s “Yes, I loved you and
then all we did was resent each other, try to control each other. We cause each
other pain”; “That’s marriage”. We’ve got the jaundiced message. Even given the
war she has waged, he succumbs to her manipulation; his eyes are open (unlike
his somnambulant stumble into her first set up) but he can’t help himself this
time. Weak as he is, he is carried along by her powers of persuasion and the
fortune and fame their arrangement offers (her pregnancy is his voiced reason,
but we see his subtle responses to her – amid his protestations – as she casts
an irresistible spell on him).
In his heavy-on-plot-summary essay, Richard Kelly compares Gone Girl with Eyes Wide Shut. Fincher, with his cool formality and painstaking
process, is no stranger to comparisons the late great, but I don’t really think
this is much like Eyes, other than in
the most obvious – rather than integral – terms. Both feature a male haplessly
immersed in a world beyond his control, not nearly as bright as his partner, and
out of his depth when challenged by the guiles of the woman in his life. He
becomes the nominal sympathetic character, while through obliqueness and lack
of texture Amy is merely the arch-siren who pulls his strings. It should be
pointed out that I don’t think it’s the makers’ intent to draw such lines
between the characters, certainly not in this manner (although Gone Girl is certainly clear in
establishing the extremes of Amy’s cold-hearted intent); rather, it’s a
function of a structure that has no choice but to unbalance the presentation of
the female character.
Nick’s a cheat who has dragged his wife to the back of
beyond and drained her resources, an impassive ungiving boor who has fallen
into self-indulgence after losing his job (they are, or were, both writers).
Fincher uses the slightly smug, stolid inscrutability of Affleck to good effect
during the first section of the film, creating enough of a “Maybe he did it” to
allow the accumulating forces to build a case against him. And there is most
definitely an intent here to mark Nick out as, in some ways, just as unnerving
as Amy. As noted, there is the choice he makes at to stay with her, which no
person of sound mind would make, but this also serves to bookend our opening
insight into his thought processes (as I recall this is the only voice over we
hear from Nick in the film) where he talks about fantasising stoving Amy’s head
in. The obvious purpose is to sow the seeds of doubt that grow over the next
hour, but there’s a dual mechanism; if he didn’t murder his wife, maybe he
could, maybe he has it in him. Roused to anger after their repatriation, he
pins her by the throat; suddenly the Nick Amy has imagined in her diary entries
is crystallised (although the real Amy is fiercely unafraid of him). After the
dust has settled and they have reconciled we can only conclude they fit like peas
in a pod, all-too deserving of each other.
Before Nick goes on TV for a talk show interview he announces, “I can do this”, and he unveils the same master-manipulation at
which Amy excels. Appropriately, she tells him the reason she came back was
seeing him on TV; his engagement in his performance is the quality that
attracted her to him in the first place. While this is clearly a ploy, we can
also believe it happens to be true. The irony is, he is only her equal when she
has provoked and cornered him; his choice to stay with her is a submissive,
passive one.
Nick ends up coming across as weak and morally degenerate.
At least Amy is relentless in her psychopathy. If Nick has such leanings they
are less evident and less honed; for all his ability to lie and put on a show,
he still has tells and failings (getting caught smiling in photos, trying to
please others; suggestive of genuine feelings, but they aren’t “normal”
feelings, such as those his sister expresses). As shocking and instructive as
Nick’s about face is, the extremes of Amy’s behaviour nevertheless serve to
overwhelm his distinct brand of malfeasance.
It’s been said that Amy in the film isn’t nearly as
developed a character as in the novel, and this wouldn’t surprise me (I haven’t
read it, I hasten to add). The first half of the picture unspools her deceit. So
after we’ve been presented with a fake Amy we are introduced to cool-as-a-cucumber
revenger Amy, complete with perfidious schemes and unconvincing plans to top
herself. The trailer trash girl who ultimately robs her hits the nail on the
head when she calls Amy a spoilt rich girl (the TV Amy, that is). So it is
that, when robbed, she opts for the easy life. If easy is murdering your obsessive
ex-boyfriend (Desi, Neil Patrick Harris) with a box cutter, rather than
toughing things out. It might be argued
the lack of insight into Amy is an intentional deceit; Nick doesn’t know real
Amy, but real Amy knows real Nick. That doesn’t really fly, however; the trick
with Amy would have been to make us identify – or at least understand – with her
in spite of her actions. Fincher is unable to do this.
When we meet “real” Amy (so too with Desi) she arrives as a
movie world character (or villain) than one with any semblance of
verisimilitude. This contrasts with the environment of the first half of the
picture, and the relationship between Nick and his sister Margo (Carrie Coon).
Amy’s is a plane of heightened deceit, impenetrable because there is nothing
within which to relate. When she delivers a discourse on how the “Guys want cool girls”, it’s an
over-written and studied pieces of dialogues, maybe because this is a
sociopath’s rehearsed justification but maybe because Amy is really just another
two-dimensional Hollywood dastard. This doesn’t need to be so; the less nuanced
Jagged Edge managed to create a
relatable character from its bad guy. So the blame for Gone Girl’s girl leads to the door of the seductive structure and
Fincher and Flynn’s resultant choices.
After all, during the course of the picture we learn of far
worse sins (as in hot button topics) that Amy has committed beyond merely
framing her husband for murder; she faked a rape charge against a former
classmate (a blink and you’ll miss him Scoot McNairy) and she subsequently gets
pregnant just to keep her man. There can be little doubt Fincher and Flynn are
consciously drawing on deep male fears of the culpability and capability of
women, but to what end? Well, it must surely be that this capacity is an end in
itself; Nick gets the women he deserves, the marriage he deserves. They aren’t
together for the sake of the baby alone, they’re together because they’re bad
seeds, and a marriage where they hate each other is at least a form of
simpatico.
Which might lead to the more general reading that one gets
the marriage one deserves. I wouldn’t go this far; Fincher’s overriding intent is
to create a reaction even, if it’s at the expense of rounded storytelling. He
might want the viewer to mull the point, but he’s too slippery to let it stick.
He and Flynn are shining a light on fears within marriage, disembowelling its
core, discarding the innards, and suggesting, with a half-cocked smirk, that
all that remains after the first bloom has abated is discontent, escalating loathing
and contempt. This is not a thesis, a diatribe or a polemic. Fincher and Flynn
aim to raise such doubts and expose such fears in similar fashion to a horror
movie engineering effective scares; in its way Gone Girl is as calculated and callous as Amy herself.
This goes to some of the charges being thrown the way of
Fincher and Flynn (in particular the latter). There’s a great deal of difference
between titillation or provocation and endorsement. If artists are to be held responsible
for those who embrace the views of their characters, there will never be
anything but anaemic art. Similarly, there are commentators who wish to throw dispositions
at artists because they’re too lazy to differentiate between a character and
its creator. Of course, there are
objectionable sorts who espouse objectionable views in the field of culture, but the media
never tires of taking a continuingly broke-backed approach in which the blame is
placed on those who comment on society rather the ones who perpetuate its ills.
The debate about the possible misogyny of Gone
Girl is inevitable (and as suggested, quite probably intentional on
Fincher’s part) but spurious; so too, the concern that it might further justify
those holding such views is about as deserving of an audience as arguing any
movie or TV show that someone, somewhere, could latch onto unhealthily should
be banned (let’s say Taxi Driver, or Dexter; whatever the latest example may
be where someone sees themselves in a fictional character). It remains a perennial headline maker,
however, and so the need to present the counter-view – that exploring
objectionable or undesirable values or views doesn’t represent an endorsement
of those values or views – also remains ever necessary.
One area the picture doesn’t put a foot wrong is in the
astute, caustic and very funny presentation of the media circus that swarms
across the case like locusts. At one point Kim Dickens’ Detective Boney refers
to Nick’s bar being called The Bar as very meta, and the self-awareness of Gone Girl is nothing if not that.
The media want to believe the script they want to believe at
the time they want to believe it, and everyone involved is informed either by established
case book lore (it’s usually someone the missing person knows) or television
shows (Nick notably invokes this when interviewed by the police). The fiction
of the film is aware of the fiction that permeates its reality. Amy knows how
to plant evidence of wrongdoing from the numerous cop shows and CSIs she has
seen; the plot itself reeks of the sort of thing Columbo would investigate.
Except of course there’s no murder and the chief suspect didn’t do it. Yet the meticulous
construction with significant holes in it has that kind of vibe; it’s just waiting
for a guy in a crumpled mac to tear Amy’s story apart.
In the world of Gone
Girl, and the media generally, suspicion falls on the husband and so the
trial by opinion begins (it might be argued this is a fallacy; all it takes is
for an Amanda Knox case and the fascination and assumptions are equally as
coordinated and relentless). Everyone involved wants a piece of Nick’s pie, and
most prove to be inveterate manipulators. There’s the girl who takes a selfie
with Nick. There’s cable TV host Ellen Abbott (Missi Pyle), shamelessly
vilifying Nick only to do a 180° turn when it’s the “happy” couple agree
to appear on her show. Tyler Perry’s suitably implausibly named Tanner Bolt is
not only a lawyer specialising in Nick’s brand of predicament, but one who is
highly media savvy. And, like everyone apart from Margo, Nick catches on quick.
And everyone’s at it, almost. Amy’s parents Marybeth (Lisa
Banes) and Rand (David Clennon) are past masters; their daughter’s vanishing
act becomes not a heartfelt plea for her safe recovery but the latest publicity
tour for Amazing Amy (the series of
books about her younger self that have blighted Amy’s subsequent development; I’m
sure if Psycho’s shrink was on hand
he could point to exactly where it was she went wrong).
As presented by Fincher and Flynn, the veneer of
make-believe and opinion is more real and desirable than flimsy truth. No one’s
immune. Certainly not the police and FBI, who swallow Amy’s tall tale hook,
line and box cutter. As Patrick Fugit’s Officer Gilpin – who had it in for Nick
as the perpetrator – comments to him, “Can't
you just be happy your wife’s home?” She has manufactured a happy ending
that everyone else would much rather believe, and so pervasive is it that Nick
also succumbs.
The sway of media, and the innate need for self-promotion go
hand-in-hand with the pursuit of money. Filthy lucre and its lack is a recurrent
underlying theme of the film, It’s somewhere lurking in every corner, from the
homeless hidden away from upstanding folk in a derelict mall (the former symbol
of every town’s success and boom) to Marybeth and Rand, the starkly
manipulative parents (they even broke into her trust fund). The backdrop of
recession has affected everyone except maybe Tanner.
Anyone attempting to say the green stuff is not important is
rudely awakened. Nick and Amy (in her filtered flashbacks admittedly) claim it
cannot buy happiness, and that they will survive with just each other. But when
Nick loses his job and becomes a slob camping out in the living room playing
computer games, and Amy is forced into moving to Carthage, Missouri to be with
Nick’s dying mother, it becomes clear that theirs is but a cheap veneer.
Without it, they the edifice crumbles. Very tellingly, their relationship only
recovers when they have money again at the end; they may not be happy, but at
least their existence was founded on a lack of hardship.
Elsewhere its money that leads Amy back to worrisome arms of
Desi when she is robbed by trailer trash Jeff (Boyd Holbrook) and Greta (Lola
Kirke). The super rich and very alone Desi hasn’t been hit by the recession,
but he has been corrupted by his
luxurious surroundings, seeing people as mere possessions. It’s only the
picture’s rock Margo who is unpersuaded by the press and unimpressed by wealth.
True, her livelihood is propped up by a loan from her sister-in-law, but she
offers her brother her savings without hesitation when it comes to trial. It
isn’t that Margo is holier than thou or some kind of philanthropic saint. It’s
that she’s the only normal person in a catalogue of grotesques.
Part of Gone Girl’s
appeal, even if it cannot finally transcend its genre trappings to become something
more profound, is the manner in which it successfully confounds expectation as
to the type of story it is telling. That it does so several times is even more
impressive and unusual. Even with of Amy’s body in absentia, the are-they-aren’t
they prime suspect plot is one to which we’re well used (although the last
really quality one I can recall might be as far back as Presumed Innocent). So when Flynn pulls a switcheroo and the
focus transfers to the believed victim, it’s an audacious and risky moment. As
I’ve said, I don’t think the picture entirely succeeds in its portrait of Amy
but it’s nevertheless amusing to hear her detail her scheme, suddenly appearing
midway through the yarn as if to steal Hercule Poirot’s thunder.
That’s one of the wittier aspects of the telling, that the
act itself is consciously built upon a lifetime’s consumption of detective
fiction. Flynn seems to be almost daring the audience to call her out on Amy’s
embrace of the artifice of overblown and unlikely plans, the sort that always
come undone within moments of (yes) Columbo clapping eyes on the perpetrator.
So the clues she leaves, both literal (the envelopes) and implicating (the
diary, the shed full of man-goodies), are fanciful and reliant on predicting a
certain sequence of events, which have multiple possible alternatives. Later,
this slight incredulity seems to be at least part of the point. We’re surely supposed
to wonder at the waving away of holes in Amy’s story because at least three of
the characters do too; the overall impact of her reappearance is so
overpowering.
So it is that viewers have taken issue, in particular with
Desi’s 24/7 surveillance pad not spilling its secrets, why no one did a search
of his/her phone records, or why the police are so utterly incompetent when it
comes to the important stuff (aside from Boney, who was formerly all-but
convinced of Nick’s guilt). But the point is, facts are an encumbrance once
opinion is on your side. We are as floored as anyone by the sudden appearance
of a blood-soaked Amy in Nick’s driveway, even given that she just opened up
Doogie Howser’s throat mid-coitus. Because these are the kind of gaudy
developments that seemed to have stepped in from a much more innately trashy
spectacle like Basic Instinct (one similarly
resistant to logic and good policing). Yet Fincher makes these transitions with
underplayed flourish, and deceptive ease.
The areas Fincher is playing with, Hitchcock has been to
before him. Then, there’s little in this genre that Hitch hasn’t explored in
some shape or form. He came particularly unstuck when he pushed the unreliable
narrator too far in Stage Fright (not
one of his finest, although it features Alistair Sim, which should be
recommendation enough). Fincher gets away with it, just about, because there’s
a “real” story playing out concurrently and there’s a lot more real story to be
told after the flashbacks have concluded. The other aspect that likely appealed
to Fincher from a basic structural perspective – and he likes his curveballs
and tricksy narratives as evidenced by Seven
and Fight Club, even if they
sometimes hoist him by his own petard (The
Game) – was the opportunity to turn the story on its head, not with some
final reel twist but barely halfway through. This is a director who dared
audiences to watch a serial killer procedural where the murderer is never
determined (Zodiac), so one should
never doubt his affinity for some bright dangling jewel of plotting that could
potentially overpower his better instincts; can he get away with it? Will the
audience be turned off? All the more reason to try it.
Gone Girl’s twist
can’t compare with Psycho’s but it
has a similar shredding effect on what we have seen before. In both films there
is a seismic shift after the murder/not murder has taken place. The Nick and
Margo world of naturalistic interactions, and the suspicion, interrogation and
growing media spotlight has a particular relative realism, all the stronger due
to the over-emphasis of the skewed flashbacks (all chocolate box romance or
lurid threats). So to, Marion Crane’s petty theft and flight from perceived
justice represent a very different movie than the gothic fizz and raining knife
blows that follow. This opening section is – relatively, as it’s heightened as
only Hitch can make things – is a realistic small-time crime movie, but morphs
into Grand Guignol horror once Norman Bates makes his presence felt. The rest
of the picture is a much more cartoonish affair, with the most indelible of big
screen serial killers and a couple of Scooby
Doo investigators. Gone Girl’s
Amy is a much broader characterisation than Nick also; difficult perhaps to
write a sociopath without a tendency to bold strokes, but the incidents that
stack up only serve to complement this take. The picture becomes more of a
caricature, and would become giddy or delirious if it weren’t for Fincher’s
firm, steely grip.
Amy’s sojourn at a cheap motel (just like Psycho, and just like Psycho she has a bag full of money and
threatening neighbours) is frequently very funny, from her superiority complex
to her indecisiveness about killing herself today everyday. And her creeping
addiction to the TV coverage of her disappearance makes for some of the few moments
in her storyline that reveal a glimpse of her true self; here at least, there’s
a sense of the deflation and mundanity that follow the success of her
implausible stunt. The ever after isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be,
particularly when the exit plan of suicide was never going to happen. So I
wasn’t all that impressed by the decision for her to rock up at Desi’s. It felt
that, whatever the choices being made by Flynn, they had become
self-limiting. Even more so when Desi – a near-parody of a repressed nutter of
the first order, who only serves to underline that we are now firmly in the
world of full-on sordid pulp – make his obsessive feelings felt.
Fortunately, the box cutter incident sucked me back in and kept my attention
until the denouement. But much like Psycho,
while the fireworks and over-enunciated commentary seize the attention in the
second half the picture, and get the instant responses, the less forward, more
considered, first section is probably the better judged and more immersive.
Fincher tends to cast his pictures well. There’s the odd
exception. Jake Gyllenhaal in Zodiac
never wholly sold me, and Justin Timberlake’s turn in The Social Network is off because Timberlake as an actor is off.
Here, I groaned when I heard he’d cast Affleck. Ben may be enjoying a career
renaissance, but I don’t find him per se an appealing or persuasive performer
(the only exception is his early career bluster in Shakespeare in Love; perhaps he should work more at being fun,
rather than existing in monotone). That works to his favour here, his aging
jock looks and ambiguous, indifferent, presence serving the character.
Despite the failings in the depiction of Amy, Pike probably
hasn’t had a character this juicy in her career to date. She embraces the
opportunity with gusto, whether she’s discarding all make-up to hide out or adjusting
her performance and tone in a heartbeat. Yet in spite of the showiness of the
character, this isn’t one to marvel at. Amy’s on the Lector scale of screen
psychos, simply because we see her predominately as a faker; she’s a perpetrator
of monstrous deeds and unflinching deceptions. In fact, for all the attention-seeking
of Fincher’s last two major female protagonists, they are both really rather
short-changed where it counts; Lisbeth is a look and attitude in search of any
real substance (not that anyone in the Dragon
really has any) while Amy is murky in a different way to Nick. We may not
be able to see their inner lives, but Amy is quick, sharp and precise while
Nick is slovenly and slow. There’s no complexity to her, just a string of
colourful charades (Fincher’s most successful female protagonist might be Jodie
Foster in Panic Room, even though
that picture tends to get dismissed as a rudimentary exercise in box-ticking
thriller tropes).
As for the rest of the cast, Perry is a rambunctious delight
as the unscrupulous Bolt. I haven’t seen any of his Madea-fuelled one-man franchise house and I avoided Alex Cross expressly, but on this
evidence he has a rich potential outside of his self-created movie universe. It
takes Fincher’s distorted lens to see that, like Affleck, he has a role beyond
established limitations. Missi Pyle provides the alter-glitz, and you can tell
she’s loving every moment of her horrifically plausible cable show host. Harris
is always strong, he just isn’t very well catered for here. Dickens is solid in
a role that demands solid, while Fugit ekes dry laughs as not the most
discerning of law enforcement types. This summer’s big small screen discovery,
Carrie Coon, yet again delivers an outstanding performance as the sober,
considered voice of reason while all are losing their heads. Hers is the
barometer of the madness of the movie, but reactive as Margo is Coon makes her
memorable.
Fincher brings his regular collaborators to the party; Jeff
Cronenwerth is cinematographer again, while Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
provide the soundtrack. Theirs is a disenchanted yet upbeat aural hue, the
tinkly sound of marital bliss stretched to the point of nightmares. The imagery
of Gone Girl doesn’t leap up and
shout “Look at me!” compared to some of
Fincher’s work; he appears to be consciously adopting a more measured less ostentatious
style. There are no zooms through kettle handles here or browsing of Ikea
catalogues. But then shots percolate in the mind afterwards. The romantic kiss
amid powdered sugar made me think only of that lousy CGI breath in The Social Network, to be honest, but
other images are most arresting; Nick’s cat in almost any shot, but especially
sitting at the door as reporters frenzy outside; the torch light search party
at dusk, with cyclists, all but hearkens to E.T.;
Amy’s performance for the closed-circuit cameras, struggling bloodied
(wine-ied) at the glass doors of Dezi’s abode; and her exit from her car,
breaking onto Nick’s drive as the media are rouse from their slumber, suddenly
aware of the scoop that has deposited itself in their laps.
One can imagine Brian De Palma or Paul Verhoeven attacking Gone Girl with gleeful abandon and
enthusiasm for its sensationalist excesses. It’s that kind of picture. If
there’s some commentary (Verhoeven would have gone to town wth the media show)
or depth too, so much the better. But, perhaps in response to Tattoo, Fincher needs the respectability
of theme to induce him, even if it’s something of a bauble itself. There’s a reticence
to truly soak himself in the bloody remains; for all Tattoo’s censor-bating, it was never less than rigidly controlled and
schematic (which ultimately worked against it; old wine in new skins) In some
ways this recent streak for Fincher hearkens to De Palma’s intricate psychosexual
thrillers of the ‘80s, and one recalls that director boasting of how he would
push the envelope as far as he could with Body
Double. Fincher, more clinically perhaps, seems to be experimenting with
something of the same. De Palma was frequently lambasted for his visual
indiscretions (and labelled a misogynist) so Fincher, something of a coolly
respected darling, has the ground on him there. But this lustre sometimes seems
like emperor’s new clothes, breathing an intellectual sheen on material to
disguise the fact it only has a couple of good ideas.
Verhoeven and De Palma might not have inflamed the same
talking points if they’d made the film (although certainly others would have
arisen), but their results might have been more honest in a curious way
(conversely, give it to a director with just the right lack of flair and you
get the next Double Jeopardy). There’s
a strange feeling of prudery here and in Tattoo
whereby Fincher focuses on sexual congress, often in an unsettling or violent
context, but remains wholly impassive.
This creates a sense that he has no interest in such sordid material
other than as a challenge of depiction he has set himself. Verhoeven would
revel in such scenes while Kubrick, for all his reputation as a clinician, was clearly
fascinated by and ready to explore matters sexual and erotic.
In interviews Fincher has expressed his wish to provoke, and
he’s certainly succeeded here. That at least means he’s made a zeitgeist movie
for the first time in fifteen years. Gone
Girl isn’t as densely packed and intricately formed as Fight Club, and it may be that Fincher’s restraint here allows the
film’s shortcomings too much time to percolate. Like Fight Club, it looks as if this will be the subject of ready
misinterpretation as commonly as it will be a popular conversation piece. Gone Girl is a superior mishmash of genre
tropes and seditious treatise on the broken back of marriage, while taking in
the monstrous twin manipulators of media and money. Yet this is really just glossy
popular fiction along the lines of Fatal
Attraction. Fincher and Flynn embrace fears regarding the marital unit and
shower them with narrative hyperbole, albeit delivered with considerably more
class than Adrian Lynne’s movie. Yet you only have to look at the way the trailers finish with Amy's fantasy of her corpse plunging into the depths; it's an overtly calculated misdirection that tells you this picture is really all about sleight of hand. Which means this is the wrong place to
look if you want a genuinely insightful interrogation or meaningful discourse on the subject.
