TWISTED THRILLER
Gone Girl will keep audiences in a constant state of suspense.
Without David Fincher behind the camera, it could have been complete nonsense punctuated by Ben Affleck’s screen swagger: A cheap thriller with too much ego and a desperate shortage of intellect.
And in many ways, this adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestseller is all that — a frothy little mug of machinated suspense designed to keep the viewer guessing, and just a little aghast, as one man comes under scrutiny after his wife’s disappearance.
It’s the stuff of mass-produced pulp novels and National Enquirer covers. But in Fincher’s surgical grip, Gone Girl becomes more than a simple screen trip through Flynn’s prose. He takes all the inherent fluff, the formula and the towering shadow of ego and leverages it for his own artistic purpose as he takes us into the eye of the media storm. Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) seems like a regular guy when we first meet him. A magazine writer with a trenchant wit and a cheesy wink, Nick seems pretty mellow and even-tempered, making him accessible to the audience in the initial scenes.
Yet, for all the folksy warmth and guy’s guy energy, Nick is drinking early in the morning. And when he eventually gets home, the glass coffee table is smashed, there’s blood over the stove and his wife is missing.
Like any other law-abiding citizen, Nick calls the police, a move that pushes the narrative into the glare of media attention and through a tangle of flashbacks.
Lead detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) wants to call a news conference to get the word out about the disappearance of Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), but Nick isn’t acting like the heartbroken husband.
Something is off. And it’s in this tilted, eerily distorted landscape that Fincher typically scores thematic points.
With Nick as the focus, Fincher explores their marriage breakdown in a rapid succession of flashbacks triggered by entries in Amy’s wellattended diary. It’s Amy’s voice that introduces us to the early strains of their love affair, and then Nick’s gradual neglect.
Amy’s voice frames our perception of their relationship, but it’s Nick who bears the burden of narrative events, creating a conflict that keeps Gone Girl in a state of constant suspense. In Fincher’s hands, that makes for a surprisingly fun ride.
Tapping the same dark social satire he used so fluently in Fight Club, Fincher takes full advantage of Affleck’s charm, as well as his inherent smarm, to explore and expose the modern media circus.
Affleck is one of those actors whose eyes are just a little too narrow, his teeth just a tad too small, to read as the flawless knight in shining armour. There’s something about him we do not trust. And because this is a story about the power of perception being much stronger than truth, Affleck’s unreliability plays to the larger purpose.
Populated by broadcast bimbos looking to score big ratings with scandalous revelations, moralizing mommies pushing prams and a husband and wife who’ve been living a shared lie for years, Gone Girl shows us how we all leap to immediate judgment before knowing all the facts.
Designed to show us how shallow we all are, and how stupid we can be, Gone Girl suggests we prefer living in a shared state of denial instead of looking truth square in the face.
Filmmaker David Fincher’s work doesn’t just stay with you. It clings.
In Seven, two detectives wander a nameless, rain-lashed city while a serial killer slips through the shadows, 15 steps ahead. In The Social Network, a brilliant young misanthrope builds walls around himself, first emotional, then digital, and finally legal, until he finds himself trapped in a gated community of one. Zodiac, Fincher’s masterpiece, features another serial killer, although the film is not about the sudden, violent snuffing-out of life so much as the slow, creeping loss of it to nightmares and obsessions.
Perhaps Fincher’s defining skill is the deftness with which he balances the competing interests of the corrosive and the commercial. He makes big, Friday-night movies, but each one is laced with Mondaymorning dread.
As a child, two experiences were responsible for placing a camera in his hands, though neither explains the source of the winter chill that runs through his work. At age seven, he watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and realized making movies could be fun. At 12, he was aware that the man who lived down the road from his family in Marin County, Calif., was George Lucas, the director of American Graffiti, and realized making movies was within reach.
At 18, he took a job at the Lucas special effects company, Industrial Light & Magic, and worked as an effects technician on Return of the Jedi. Perhaps inevitably, the Imperial Walker that shoots an Ewok dead is his.
From Lucasfilm, Fincher joined the 1980s music-video gold rush, and has made 55 to date, most of them between 1984 and 1990. His two most famous, both made with Madonna, were drenched in vintage cinema. Express Yourself (1989) peoples Fritz Lang’s Metropolis with homoerotic beefcakes, while Vogue (1990) re-creates classic publicity portraits of such Golden Age goddesses as Katharine Hepburn, Veronica Lake and Greta Garbo.
The director’s first feature, Alien 3, made money, but was mostly unloved and put him at odds with studio interference.
Then the script for a biblically themed serial-killer movie called Seven arrived in the mail. It was an old draft — one with an unwatchably bleak and longsince rewritten finale, in which a mysterious box is delivered to its young detective hero in the middle of the desert — but Fincher liked what he read, and New Line gave him $33 million to make the film. He only had one proviso: He was going to make it with the old ending.
Almost 20 years after opening the box, Fincher is thriving. His
They don’t want to be charmed by someone who might have hacked his wife up and put her in the crawl space. DAVID FINCHER DIRECTOR
10th film, an adaptation of the bestselling thriller novel Gone Girl, had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival and now arrives in movie theatres.
Gone Girl has allowed this great technician of darkness a chance to lighten up, within acceptable parameters, which means it’s a film that wants to show you the best bad time it can whip up.
Gillian Flynn adapted it from her original novel, and it stars Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck as Amy and Nick Dunne, two married writers whose relationship, which began in a blaze of romance, is now hopelessly bogged down in bitterness. When Amy goes missing, the police start eyeing Nick with suspicion, and we, along with the TV news crews that descend on the town, soon realize he has something to hide.
“This is the kind of stuff it’s very hard to make a cinema audience engage with,” says Fincher, sadly shaking his head, “because we’ve got this whole f---ing ‘likability’ thing that people are so concerned with.
“They reserve their empathy because they don’t want to fall in love with someone whose body is going to end up in a 50-gallon oil drum. They don’t want to be charmed by someone who might have hacked his wife up and put her in the crawl space.”
In a Fincher film, both outcomes are highly possible. Asked who the hero of Gone Girl is, he looks momentarily confused, as if it’s a trick question. “No one,” he says.
There was no pressing need for Fincher to make another film in which police scrub blood from kitchen floors, but the appeal of Gone Girl ran deeper than that.
“The thing in this story that I had never seen articulated before,” he says, “was this idea that we create these narcissistic projections of ourselves in order to get people to like us, and in some cases to seduce them. And yet we remain completely oblivious that other people are doing the same thing to us.”
Image projection is the essence of Fight Club, a film narrated by a chronic insomniac who can barely tell the difference between what’s inside his head and out of it.
After Fight Club came something simpler: Panic Room, a claustrophobic thriller in which a mother and daughter (Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart) take refuge from three burglars in a reinforced security chamber. He found the experience underwhelming, and five years passed before he released another film.
Then he made four on the hoof, at a rate of one per year, as well as producing and directing episodes of the TV drama House of Cards. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo showed off his range But it was Zodiac, his 2007 comeback film, that proved his mastery.
The film is a scrupulous recounting of the real-life, unsolved, manhunt for the Zodiac serial killer in San Francisco in the 1960s and ’70s.
The deliberate denial of satisfaction — a technique Fincher also uses to delicious, albeit less profound, effect in Gone Girl — is precisely what keeps his films rolling around your head long after they end.