***SPOILER ALERT!***
This is what marriage is supposed to look like. A man and a woman in
their late 20s/early 30s – whiteness and physical compatibility optional but
definitely preferred – meet, fall in love, date for a couple of years and get
hitched in an elegant, classy ceremony. They move into a nice, big house with a
manicured, grassy lawn and quiet, pleasant neighbors and eventually a cute kid
or two comes along to complete the picture. Aside from the children, this is
what Nick and Amy Dunne have. Sure, they’ve run into some money problems, and a
cancerous parent forced them out of their chic New York City life and into
Middle-of-Nowhere, Missouri, but they’ve still got her trust fund and, more
importantly, each other. Isn’t that all anyone needs, after all? They have what
everyone wants, and it’s just about perfect – until it isn’t. With a script
adapted by Gillian Flynn from her own gleefully twisted, blisteringly caustic
novel, David Fincher’s Gone Girl methodically
chips away at manufactured ideals of justice, happiness and love to reveal the
toxic, inconvenient reality underneath all the everything’s great! smiles. This, the movie says, is what marriage
really is.
Though it tones down a lot of
the more explicit and scathing gender politics of its source material,
Fincher’s film nonetheless feeds off of the same desire to critique both the
institution of heterosexual marriage and the ease with which the media shapes
(and can be used to shape) the truth. In fact, here, there is no truth, at
least not a singular one and certainly not one that really matters; as another
recent movie that explored the materiality of fiction said, people believe what
they want to believe. So, Nick continues to believe that he’s a decent person
at heart, despite all evidence to the contrary, and Amy believes she’s
justified in framing him for the wrongs he’s done to her and for all he
represents – for his laziness, apathy, entitlement and overt and repressed
misogyny. The police, media and public believe, first, in the infuriating but
predictable story of a frustrated, temperamental, cheating man who killed his
wife and, later, in the comforting but equally cliché story of a traumatized,
victimized woman who just wants to live in peace and to repair her strained
relationship with her husband.
In a nice example of form fitting content, Flynn’s book drew attention to the unreliability of her characters and the invented nature of the stories they were telling by alternating between Nick’s and Amy’s points of view. Given that a too-heavy reliance on voiceover could have doomed the entire production, Fincher limits his use of the technique to a few carefully selected moments, mostly in the film’s first half, and instead builds an atmosphere of uncertainty and suspicion through a combination of shrewdly staged cinematography by Jeff Cronenweth, nifty editing courtesy of Kirk Baxter, and a mesmerizing, spine-tingling, show-stealing soundscape of a score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. All four men have frequently teamed up with the director in the past and it shows, not just in how well each technical element is executed, but in the way they work together, melding to create a seamless, fully-realized whole; one can’t be praised without acknowledging the others. There’s no better example of this than the movie’s climax, when Amy seduces and kills Neil Patrick Harris’ Desi Collings. The slick camerawork and muted gold lighting that has become a signature of Fincher’s projects turn the scene into a display of visceral horror and aesthetic beauty without catering to the male gaze or fetishizing the violence. At the same time, by matching the rhythm of the music to the pacing of the choppy, flashing visual edits, the film enhances an already-present sense of escalating tension and urgency. Capped off by Rosamund Pike’s perfectly composed face as Amy admires her handiwork, a look that cuts through the screen like a dagger, this awe-inspiring sequence is the culmination of an entire movie dedicated to instilling the audience with the sensation of being trapped, of a noose being slowly tightened around our necks.
Casting is key to Fincher and
Flynn achieving the tonal balance between intelligent satire and pulpy
potboiler they’re aiming for. Though I came into the movie seriously skeptical,
especially of some of the more out-of-left-field choices like Neil Patrick
Harris and Tyler Perry, it turns out that they nailed it. While the actors largely
play things straight, they also prove adept at delivering some of the film’s
cheekier or more sardonic lines, with Carrie Coon (so good on TV in The Leftovers) as Nick’s twin sister Margo
and Kim Dickens as the professional but sympathetic Officer Rhoda Boney
emerging as standouts of the supporting cast. As Nick, Ben Affleck is
especially game, smoothly inhabiting a role that exploits his
cool/bumbling/smarmy jock image and his past as a contentious tabloid magnet. His
hulking, muscular frame makes him seem appropriately threatening and volatile,
yet he’s surprisingly good at teasing out Nick’s more vulnerable, conflicted
side, his eyes frequently darting back and forth as if looking for a hidden
threat and his body visibly tensing up during interrogation and confrontation
scenes.
However, the star of the show is, as it should be, Rosamund Pike. Gifted
with one of the juiciest roles for a female lead in a while, Pike revels in
Amy’s mysteriousness, her face effortlessly morphing from the serene but
enigmatic stillness of a porcelain doll to teary hysteria to cold, calculating
menace, sometimes all within the same moment. Her Amy is a ruthless
perfectionist, frightening and compelling not so much because she’s
unpredictable or violent, but because she does everything with such exacting
efficiency that it’s easy to believe she’s capable of doing – and willing to do
–anything. She’s a female psychopath who is as complicated and fascinating as
male characters like Patrick Bateman and Hannibal Lecter, an unspeakably rare
creation in a culture that endlessly attempts to tame, simplify and erase bad
women.
By leaning into cinema’s
strengths as a collaborative and primarily visual medium, Fincher manages to sufficiently
differentiate his adaptation from its source so that it can stand on its own,
while Flynn’s screenplay ensures that it still retains the essence of her
original. To be sure, some nuances were lost in the adaptation process: the
almost total absence of Nick’s father detracts from some of the emotional
complexity of his character, and the film’s abbreviated version of the
now-iconic Cool Girl monologue lacks the eye-opening, blunt power of the full
thing. Still, for the most part, both the novel, which I loved, and the movie,
which I really liked, succeed in their own way and on their own merits, showing
that multiple versions of the same story can indeed coexist peacefully.
Gone Girl ends with a marriage both perverted and perfected.
According to Amy Dunne, a couple should be expected to be at its best at all
times, and naturally, she gets exactly what she wants, essentially intimidating
Nick into staying with her and ensuring that he will never again let his guard
down or underestimate her. Fincher’s conclusion misses the sinister punch of
the book, partly because Nick and Amy never really get their emotional, mano a
mano confrontation (the book’s climactic argument scene has been significantly
shortened and altered here, with the two characters not even alone in the house
when it occurs). Yet, the film’s ending was unsatisfying in a way that I can’t
quite pinpoint, one that goes beyond deviating from the source material; it
felt simultaneously too abrupt and too stretched out, as if unsure of what note
it wanted to hit. Perhaps this is giving the filmmakers too much credit, but
the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether this sense of anticlimax,
this hollowness was not only deliberate, but fitting. After two and a half
hours spent revealing the nightmare beneath the fairy tale that is marriage, Gone Girl engineers an ending so neat
and storybook-like that it can only feel like a lie. You almost have to admire
it.
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