Let’s suppose that the NFL, Steubenville, and sexual assault statistics hadn’t been in the news, as indeed they weren’t when Gillian Flynn was writing Gone Girl. Her 2012 novel about a child of privilege who marries a schlub, regrets it, and stages her own disappearance had, like Sharp Objects, its kinky kicks. In the hands of David Fincher, however, Gone Girl is humorless, elephantine pulp. Film’s tendency to literalize texts and Rosamund Pike’s performance as master schemer Amy turn this thing into a epic slog. The surface pleasures in Gone Girl — Fincher’s deft editing, appraiser’s eye for decor, and an insider’s allure for the chic — remain surface. Worse, I don’t need an adaptation of a novel about a rich bitch who dupes her husband into fame and is abetted by talk shows and the tabloid press. I don’t find it entertaining or edifying in 2014.
The film opens on July 5, 2012 with Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) staggering into a watering hole called, appropriately, The Bar and ordering straight bourbon. The bartender is his twin sister Margo. It’s Nick and Amy’s fifth wedding anniversary. When he returns home, he finds a smashed coffee table and Amy missing. The North Carthage, Missouri cops are sympathetic enough not to raise suspicions, despite finding blood traces on a cabinet. Nick doesn’t act especially worried and has to be persuaded to call his in-laws, who upon arrival within twenty-four hours set up a headquarters, toll free hotline, and website. Passages from Amy’s journal signal flashbacks, painting a picture of whirlwind romance atrophying into boredom, resentment, rage, and, finally, fear. The audience learns that Nick was a writer who lost his job during the recession while Amy coasts on her status as the daughter of the author of “The Amazing Amy” series of adolescent fiction (in the book her idleness and restlessness get a fair airing). They moved to Missouri to care for Nick’s dying mother and have remained since.
As the evidence mounts against Nick, Detective Boney (Kim Dickens)’s sympathy dissolves (Patrick Fugit has the film’s second best turn as her wire-thin assistant, a guy so sure of Nick’s guilt that he’s buoyed by the knowledge). Playing a dumbfounded ox of a bro whose reaction time is a beat behind everyone else’s, Affleck is almost too well cast. I can imagine Fincher congratulating himself on exploiting Affleck’s stolid un-charm. But Affleck inhabits a dull man dully. The perfect sap, of course, but he didn’t invoke my sympathy.
Part of Gone Girl‘s tension stems from accepting the stilted dialogue and caffeinated TV sitcom reaction time of the happier times recorded by Amy; even when it’s clear they’re as fictional as her novels the device of the unreliable narrator can mask a lot of narrative shortcomings. “He thinks Lolita is a cheese,” she writes; on another occasion she records Nick praising her wonderful vagina at a table full of Manhattan literati. Once it becomes clear that Amy has faked her murder — from planting the journal to befriending, in Amy’s words, a moron neighbor with triplets to whom she can share the horrors of her marriage — Gone Girl has nowhere else to go except follow Amy as she dyes her hair, adapts a New Orleans accent, and hits the road, and nudging Nick into calling defense attorney Tanner Bolt. Tyler Perry, who reminds Nick that he commands a $100,000 retainer, grounds the film in an acceptable reality. He’s so professional and logical as he coaches Nick that finding Amy and persuading the police to believe Nick becomes a question of time.
Fincher’s aforementioned fetish for the chic reaches a climax at the home of Desi Collings, an ex into whose arms Amy falls after Nick’s successful TV appearance on one of the tabloid entertainment shows that had condemned him turns public perceptions of him; now he’s a flawed, philandering husband who loves his wife (the book and movie’s idea that rapt Americans stop and watch the Nick Dunne case on TV in airports or bars doesn’t square with my experiences of celebrity trials; it’s white noise at best). Desi is Nick’s dark twin: born to wealth and privilege, with a lake house, fluent in eighteenth century symphonies, nineteenth century Impressionism (is there any other kind?), and “Proust in French” (think of Sam Waterston in Woody Allen’s September reminding his wife that they didn’t want to be late for the Kurosawa film festival). Heated floors! Cameras in every room! As played by Neil Patrick Harris, he’s a silken creep who gets off on Amy’s abuse and might get dangerous if he didn’t get it — quite unlike Nick, the book and film underline with pink highlighter. This interlude sets up Gone Girl‘s least plausible and grisliest twist, and when the violence is over Fincher reverts to the guy who shot MTV videos in another life and lingering on Amy’s perfectly smeared nude body.
With the exception of Margo (sister) and Boney (cop), the women in Gone Girl are shrews, moneyed into irrelevance, and imbeciles. They drink too much wine and smoke cigarettes. If they’re professionals on TV they telegraph their cynicism with eyebrows going up and down like the curtain at the Metropolitan Opera. Once revealing herself as a manipulator of men, Pike has nowhere to go as an actress. She clenches her jaw tight and says things from the we’re-both-terrible-and-we-deserve-each-other school of film malice (think George Sanders and Anne Baxter’s key moment in All About Eve). She has one spontaneous moment: realizing while on the lam that she may have gotten away with the crime she does a triumphant jump while putting things in her car. The film has nowhere to go either except reveal again and again how bad this woman can be — how bad Woman can be — and flaunt Fincher’s delight in bright colors against greys, whites, and browns.
Please understand: I don’t blame Fincher or Flynn for the timing. I blame Fincher for choosing this material and Flynn for thinking red state rot needed a Lana Turner re-boot. The femme fatales of forties film depended on a social context in which the war forced them to work or left them home alone if they had enough money; the scripts for those films relied on audiences recognizing, in their minds, the villainy to which women could succumb without the right man. From the movie version it’s not clear why Amy is so bad. Sixty million dollars in art direction, straight angles, and salaries for a movie about nitwits that will coax nitwits in the audiences into questioning rape and murder allegations made by women. If Paul Verhoeven had directed, Gone Girl would have played like a delicious caricature of male fantasies about predatory women and had delirious tonal clashes. What I got with Flynn’s material is a Joe Eszterhas script directed by a Sidney Pollack with visual sense: pedantry, down to the last comma.
Humanizing The Vacuum 