Gone Girl is a
sick dispatch from the dark center of a poisoned culture. It’s a missing person
thriller imbued with the tick-tock urgency of a well-wrought procedural. But
for all his precise surface sheen, David Fincher is a director interested in
implications far more troubling and upsetting than any given episode of any
given crime drama. Just look at how he turned the true crime Zodiac into a masterful investigation of
obsession and unknowablity. With Gone
Girl, the screenplay by Gillian Flynn, from her novel, obliges his impulses,
creating a world that snaps into revealing action when a woman in a small
Missouri town vanishes from the home she shares with her husband of five years.
In doing so, it exposes a culture that’s selfish, prejudiced, misogynistic,
easily misled, and eagerly superficial. And in the middle are characters who
exploit these flaws.
At first, we know the drill. And because Fincher is a
director who loves process and information, we appear to be on solid genre
ground. The front door is open. The glass coffee table is smashed. There’s a
bit of blood on the kitchen cabinet. And Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike) is nowhere
to be found. Her husband Nick (Ben Affleck) calls the cops. Officers (Kim
Dickens and Patrick Fugit) show up to collect samples and rope off the
suspected crime scene. He’s interviewed, then released to stay with his twin
sister (Carrie Coon) while his wife’s parents (Lisa Banes and David Clennon)
race to town. Search parties are gathered. A tip line is established. The media
flocks, from local station vans getting all Ace
in the Hole on lawns and sidewalks, to the tabloid media sharks (Missi Pyle
and Sela Ward) ripping their teeth into the story’s details from the desks of
their cable news channels.
This is how these things always go, whether in Law & Order or in real life. The
husband is a source of suspicion. The wife is valorized. Fear and excitement creep through the community, media whips the nation into a frenzy of judgment, and
the police chase down clues with professionalism. It's dryly funny, a mixture of unease, bewilderment and practicality. This is the least showily
directed of Fincher's work, but he still ably deploys Jeff Cronenweth’s
cinematography – clean, simple images, clear shadows and soft colors – to keep
the vice grip of tension screwing tighter. Sinister steady shots glide together
with propulsive, clever editing – like a cute, creepy cut from a flashback to
the couple’s first kiss to his mouth being swabbed by forensics – to bring
considerable menace and dread to the procedural beats as the story grows more
complex.
As the investigation moves forward, Amy narrates past scenes
from their marriage, happy days and growing ominous inklings alike. In the
present, clues begin to add up to an unpleasant picture for Nick. The police
grow more skeptical of his story. They and we see uglier sides of his
personality. What begins as a wrong-man thriller starts to gather a nauseous
nagging weight. But that’s not the end of the story, and it doesn’t end up
where you’d think from that set up. The film takes loop-de-loops with audience
identification, recontextualizing characters, shifting sympathies
with each new piece of information.
The cast expands. We meet a high-powered defense attorney (Tyler
Perry), a mistress (Emily Ratajkowski), a chatty neighbor (Casey Wilson), a
wronged ex (Scoot McNairy), a stalker (Neil Patrick Harris). But, with
confident and nuanced performances across the board, none are as they seem.
Dangerous people end up victims. The sleazy end up noble. The helpful are
dupes. The clueless are shrewd. It’s important to consider not only what we
know, but from what perspective we learned it, what we’ve seen and what we’ve
only heard. Fincher deftly navigates the script’s developing mysteries and
twists with a dread as steady as his eye for accumulating detail, even if some
of the plot devices come across as only that.
In the center remain the couple, the husband left behind and
the wife who is missing. They’re each playing a role in this case, exposing
their lives to the world and leaving it up to the media’s interpretation. They
weren’t perfect. They weren’t happy. They left New York crushed by the
recession to take root in the Midwest, and found their seemingly perfect lives
crack under the pressure. Selfish motives filled the cracks and pulled them
apart. And now this. Now what?
Affleck and Pike play complicated roles that develop from
stock types into richly complicated contradictions. They are both convincing as
normal people trapped in a marriage that’s nearing a turning point, and
heightened genre constructs heading towards a startling conclusion. Fincher
gets them playing the easily digestible surfaces and the roiling ugliness
underneath, hanging everything out for us to see them fully. The better to
twist the plot in directions that are as surprising as they are sickening. The
resulting gender politics are queasy, either sloppy or too clever and more than
a little troubling in the ways it plays into a sexist’s worst nightmare
assumptions. But the performances carry the film over anyway. It’s worth
puzzling over because of how ice cold complicated the actors manage to be, by
steering into the ugliest aspects of their characters.
Our culture values easy surface details and convenient
narratives. They let us avoid the need to look further, think more deeply. In Gone Girl, there are those exploiting
this for their own benefit. And I’m not just talking about the villain(s). (I’m
being purposely vague there.) The cops make assumptions. The media finds easy
targets. It’s easy to frame people, mislead the public, and obscure the
obvious. Public relations becomes a way to win a case, or at least wriggle out
of suspicion. Even Amy’s parents turned her childhood into a series of
idealized kids’ books, then enjoyed conflating the character and their daughter
for financial gain.
So it’s not merely a story of lurid violence and voyeuristic
chills with fear mongering, although that’s certainly exploited here. (The
film’s closer to De Palma than Hitchcock, if you catch my drift.) It’s also a
movie about psychological damage of many kinds, drawing upsetting conclusions
about the lengths people will go to appear good, to appear innocent, to get
what they want and look right in others’ eyes. Why else would a do-gooder snap
a selfie at a vigil, then get offended when asked to delete? She wants proof of
appearances for her own use, no matter how unsettled or difficult it leaves
those in her wake. It’s a film full of such troubling details.
Being so detail-oriented, Fincher makes films with
impeccable craftsmanship of the highest order. Handsomely photographed and
hermetically sealed, Gone Girl looks
and moves like hard-edged blockbuster pulp, confident, prurient, and expensive.
And yet it’s a wholly pessimistic and scathingly misanthropic Hollywood
thriller, an eerily beautiful and darkly funny poison pill swallowed straight
into the heart of our chaotic frivolousness. It resolves thematically with a
chilling snap, leaving its implications dangling, lingering, and staining. What’s
going on inside the minds of others? You can think you know someone, but once
you learn the truth, there’s no unknowing.
