GUILTY pleasure
David Fincher’s adaptation of Gone Girl is as gripping as the book.
Gone Girl
If you’re wondering whether it’s better to read Gillian Flynn’s popular novel Gone Girl before or after watching David Fincher’s take on the tale, the answer can only be: Yes. Both are thrilling experiences, the book a page-turner and the film — well, if I had to crank those 24 frames per second by hand, I would.
Both tell a he-said-she-said story with a missing she. Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) returns from an early morning trip to the bar he runs with his twin sister to find that his wife (Rosamund Pike) has vanished. There are signs of a struggle, but nothing to indicate who might have done this, where they took her or why.
Nick calls the police, who take on the case with a mixture of boredom and suspicion that soon suggests they half-believe Nick may have engineered this himself. So do a lot of other people, once the case is made public. Heck, so will a large percentage of moviegoers. And maybe he did.
Fincher’s prodigious output does not consist entirely of police procedurals, but he never lets more than a few films go by without revisiting and revising the form. (See Se7en in 1995, Zodiac in 2007 and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in 2010.) In the early scenes of Gone
Girl this is indeed the focus, but the film’s scope soon widens to include the ways in which we presume culpability based on circumstantial signs.
Is that a guilty smile on Nick’s face, or just an awkward one? In a flashback to the night they met, Amy tells him he has a “villainous chin,” and so he covers the cleft with a forefinger whenever he’s trying to be sincere. Later, he points out that even if he didn’t murder his wife, that alone doesn’t make him a good guy.
There’s a lot of backstory to tease out, and Fincher, working from Flynn’s own adaptation of the novel, doles it out perfectly, always leaving us hungry for more. Nick, we learn, used to be a writer until he lost his job and moved from New York back to his Missouri hometown. Amy, similarly unemployed, came with him, though the move from Upper West Side to Midwest proved problematic.
She also brought along some unusual baggage, having been the inspiration for a series of children’s books, written by her parents and featuring Amazing Amy, a fictional character who always seemed more successful than her flesh-and-blood counterpart. When informed of her disappearance, they set up a hotline, launch a website and compile a dossier of suspects in the time it takes Nick to figure out Amy’s first clue.
In another clever wrinkle, she disappears on the day of their fifth wedding anniversary, and leaves behind the latest annual treasure hunt for Nick to follow. The cops practically salivate when they find an envelope marked “Clue One.” It doesn’t get any easier than this! But lead detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) doesn’t assume the simplest answer is the right one; clearly, she doesn’t shave with Occam’s Razor.
Still, as Nick feels the weight of presumed guilt bearing down on him, he decides to hire celebrity lawyer Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry) to defend him. In a trial by media, one’s guilt can be more dependent on Neilsen figures than hard facts.
I haven’t even gotten around to Neil Patrick Harris’s role as a former friend of Amy’s who may still be carrying a torch for her. (He also gets the film’s best, weirdest line: “Octopus and Scrabble?”) But there’s little that can be said since his role only really takes shape in the film’s second half, when a spoiler-ific change in perspective reveals means and methods, if not motivations; those come out much more slowly, as though from a leaky balloon.
Fincher and Flynn have fun playing with both our expectations and our sympathies. Pages from Amy’s diary, for instance, reveal that her marital sacrifices included drinking canned beer while watching Adam Sandler movies with her husband. That would be a fair defence against almost any indiscretion, but who truly deserves our compassion in this sordid story? Keep turning the pages, and keep the frames flickering forward, and you’ll eventually find out. Just don’t be surprised if the person next to you comes away with a different opinion.
Gone Girl opens wide on Oct. 3.