ROSAMUND PIKE IN GONE GIRLTidy chaos: David Fincher's skillful blend of murder, deception, living in public, and hiding everythingDavid Fincher's fascination with America's criminal underbelly and domestic deception makes for a richly detailed and constantly entertaining mystery thriller in his adaptation of Gillian Flynn's 2012 bestseller. What an elaborate, precision twittering machine this movie is! And it blends the director's fascination with police investigation explored in
Se7en, Zodiac, and
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, with more about the media circus' invasion of US bedrooms. This is rich, juicy schlock that, as Eric Kohn said on Twitter, in other hands might be "super campy or super trashy," but in Fincher's becomes classic Hollywood cinema. Underpinning it all is a complicated but tightly constructed screenplay by Flynn herself with a back-and-forth timeline and an overlapping narrative full of jaw-dropping revelations. This is a big movie with an original and well-chosen cast headlined by Ben Affleck (stepping back from his directorial role again after his Oscar for
Argo last year) as NIck Dunne, gem-like Brit Rosamund Pike as his ice-queen wife Amy who disappears, Carrie Coon as Nick's comradely twin sister Margo, Kim Dickens as Detective Rhonda Boney, Tyler Perry as ace criminal lawyer Tanner Bolt, and Neil Patrick Harris as Amy’s creepy and rich one-time beau Desi Collins.
The plot is a borderline indigestible mix of material from horror, noir, mystery story trickery, and Fox News scandal-mongering that is both preposterous and absolutely true to life. Fincher, Flynn, and the well-managed cast conspire to make it all clear and fun. We can't tell too much: like the post-Fourth of July wedding anniversary puzzle treasure hunt Amy constructs for Nick (and for the police and the public) to hide-reveal her plotting, this movie's a game of hide-and-seek and gradual pop-up revelations. But we begin with the day of Nick and Amy's fifth wedding anniversary. Nick returns to the couple's rented McMansion from a walk to find a living room coffee table smashed and Amy missing. He calls the police. And the story, in its various versions, begins getting told, first from Nick's and the public's point of view, and later on in the film from Amy's. When we get to Amy's, the dateline chronology starts back all over again. Flynn just uses a grab bag of old familiar thriller tricks, but they work. This becomes an inventive variation on the mystery story's final revelations of what
really happened that instead of being poured out at the end, is, for maximum pleasure, spread all through. When Fincher, in discussing the film, mentions that he thought of Desi as sort of like Claire Quilty in
Lolita, you realize Nabokov might have indeed liked the ironic complexity of
Gone Girl.
Amy, however, isn't Nabokov's kind of girl. We don't know who or what she is; she doesn't either. Her life has been warped by growing up with a mother who used her girlish experiences as fodder for "Amazing Amy," a highly successful and lucrative children's and young adult's book series, cannibalizing and improving upon the things she did, so her "reality" (a word Nabokov scorned) was a flimsy simulacrum of her mother's profitable fantasies. When Nick and Amy meet (in flashbacks) it's all romantic playacting and pledges always to be honest. Their married life is nothing but lies, a neurotic nightmare. Both are writers in New York when they meet, but soon after they marry they lose their jobs; and when Nick's mom gets fatally ill, they move back to Missouri and use her trust fund. But money runs low because Amy's mother's book sales dwindle, her parents are strapped, and teaching and running a bar aren't bringing in a lot of dough for the now increasingly unfun couple.
As the police investigation proceeds, suspicion falls more and more on Nick; the disappearance seems faked. There is a public "find Amy" initiative that feels a little like a political campaign, with Nick a very iffy candidate. Tidbits from a diary kept by Amy are constantly flashed at the audience, contrasting with Nick's completely different versions of the marriage. And then we finally get to what was actually going on with Amy when she disappeared, and after.
Gone Girl is destined to be popular and critically acclaimed movie, and by no means undeservedly: I've hardly begun to describe its many pleasures. It's sure to emerge as one of the best American films of the year. But in general I am an occasional David Fincher admirer rather than a bigl fan and that remains true here. His
Zodiac is a remarkable piece of precise cinematic obsessiveness. But only when he united with Aaron Sorkin for the much more brightly lit and smarter
The Social Network did he provide me with unmitigated and total pleasure. Though
Gone Girl, despite its indulgent two-and-a-half-hour length, is very enjoyable to watch, I'd have preferred something more pared down and film noir-ish. This is too much of a muchness. In particular it works the media circus theme too hard. The way Fincher juggles everything is impressive. But then juggling is just an act. What you'll most remember is the dark heart of this warped, strange woman, which Pike chillingly evokes, and her husband's appealing but cheesy good-old-boy machismo, which Affleck comfortably embodies -- and the frightening prospect of the two of them together in that house.
Gone Girl, 150 mins., had its world premiere 26 September 2014 as the opening night film of the New York Film Festival, where it was screened for this review. A glowing review appeared 11 days earlier by Justin Chang in
Variety. Worldwide release by Fox is set for 2 October, 3 October in the US, days later in some countries (8 October in France).
Walter Chaw nails certain aspects of Fincher in the lead sentence of his
review.
GONE GIRL: ROSAMUND PIKE, BEN AFFLECK__________________
(For my full coverage of the 2014 NYFF see also
FILMLEAF.)