Gone
Girl is an unusually wrenching film, even for David Fincher, and a hard
specimen to classify. What starts out as a psychological thriller (did an
unhappy husband kill his wife and then report her missing to throw the police
off track?) turns into a mind game, shifting gears about half-way through. Had
this been simply a case study of a doomed marriage spiraling into darkness the
game change would have been a weakness and a stronger case could be made for
the big revelation to be interpreted as a vilification of women. However, when
it turns the table, Gone Girl creates
a new villain; the media. Both the media and the public that feeds it take over
the role of monsters so thoroughly in the movie that the direction of the
tragedy between Nick and Amy Dunne (Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike), if there
even was one, is beside the point.
This, it should be said, it truer
of the film than the book. In the book, Gillian Flynn devotes at least as much
time to the mechanisms of Nick and Amy’s relationship and to what extent love
existed between them. In their dynamics, love, at least in the common sense, is
not only unnecessary but may also be misguided. It’s a marriage built on
conditions between two people who have reason to fear each other and, as Amy
argues in the novel, it works all the more secure for it. When she wrote the
screenplay, Flynn pushed Amy’s relationship ideology to the peripheral side and
centered the script to the ills of the media. For the purposes of the film this
was a smart choice, making for a concise, focused, and terse adaptation.
In the movie, almost every move the
Dunnes make is motivated by a foreknowledge of the media and concern for public
perception. That leads to the ultimate horror of the story. What they actually
do to each other is, to use one of Amy’s choice terms, background noise. They
act first and foremost as fodder for TV.
“In today’s media landscape every
human emotion is packaged for someone else to consume, whether it’s social
media or a true-crime TV show,” Flynn said. “People in the public eye are all
taking turns packaging themselves for consumption by others or being packaged
by others. We can’t control how we’re being viewed or how people perceive
us.Fact is, in this era of the 24-hour news cycle, we’re consuming other
people’s tragedies as entertainment.”
At first there is nothing
inherently strange about Nick and Amy. They meet like a lot of couples, among
hip circles at a New York bar, marry, and then move to a small Missouri town to
care for Nick’s mother in her final years. This is when and where the tension
seems to begin. There were earlier signs of disaccord, but the nearby presence
of Nick’s family seems to distance Amy. Things get worse when Nick’s habit of
spending continues after his lay-off and Amy allows her parents to take from
her trust fund. These quarrels are common to many married couples but Nick’s
image seems to get uglier fast upon their move to the suburbs and he shuts his
wife off emotionally, even turning violent when she pleads to have a baby.
But Fincher is pulling the carpet
out beneath us and in time will incriminate us with the same locals who bought
Amy’s story uncritically. Everything we know of their marriage comes from Amy’s
diary, told in flashback. We accept what she tells us without ever questioning
her reliability as a narrator. There is, Fincher says, no excuse for us buying
Amy’s story as easily as the locals who assume Nick murdered his wife. If the
media and the movies themselves haven’t given us enough precedent as to the
dangers of fast assumptions, Gone Girl
gives us plenty.
The first thing to strike us about
the flashbacks is the dreamy quality; the heightened music, dark tones, and
fake sounding dialogue. Amy (in both voice-over and in person) sounds especially
phony, meaning her words have been rehearsed and faked. It is, after all, based
on how she recorded her own words in her journal, where she polished her image
into the character she wanted the public to see.
Both in and out of the flashbacks
those around her speak more naturally, but the scenes set in the present, when
Amy is “gone”, seem far closer to the real world. Of course, flashbacks often
have dreamy feels as memory is, indeed, a foggy thing but, in Gone Girl, they are deliberately staged
that way by their narrator and so the haziness of recollection has little to do
with the matter.
Only in the intervals between the
flashbacks does a different picture of Nick and Amy begin to form. Amy had at
least two previous turbulent relationships with men and one ended in a near
suicide for her lover. Suggesting there are at least other sides to her story.
Nick, likewise, doesn’t seem to be quite the monster Amy paints
him as. He acts genuinely concerned about his wife and, if anything, he seems a
bit of a sap. Still, we follow what Amy’s diary tells us until the movie
reveals the truth about both Amy and her diary, when we tend to feel more
relieved than unsurprised.
Fincher and Flynn thrust it on us
as “see, don’t jump to conclusion” twist. Had Nick been executed for Amy’s
murder (unlikely, anyhow, as the officer investigating the case reminds us how
difficult it is to get a conviction without a body) we are just as guilty as
the locals suckered in by Amy and her use of the media.
Of course, David Fincher is not one
to offer easy answers. If movies and the media itself are reason to take Amy’s
account with a grain of salt, Fincher also points to a number of reason in
favor of her credibility. The strongest case for Amy’s story is that her
account of her relationship with Desi, the suicidal millionaire played by Neil
Patrick Harris, is proven at least partially true when she reconnects with him
after her plan is thwarted. Everything we learn about Desi is consistent with
Amy’s description; mostly
his emotional imbalance and need to control. But this disturbing vibe comes not from
Harris’s performance in the movie itself but, of all places, evocations of his
performance in A Very Harold & Kumar
3D Christmas, where he spoofed his own public image while also using
women’s vulnerability, feigning empathy with them, to gain control of their
actions. If Harold & Kumar
presented the darkest depths of his persona, Gone Girl uses it as a very bleak glimpse into Amy’s past and a
possible motive for his distrust of men.
A lot of
what Amy says about Nick could also well be true. He is bound to fits of rage
(he smashes a glass when a police interrogation cuts too deep) and has not been
entirely honest with his own family about his infidelity. The truth, finally,
is somewhere in the middle. That is Fincher’s ultimate stance. We shouldn’t
dismiss Amy’s story entirely. Even after the half-way point when its climax is
revealed to have been staged.
If we ever
lost sympathy for Nick, after the big reveal we want Amy to fail. She almost
does when she underestimates a couple she takes into her confidence, but
whenever her plan begins to crumble she is always one step ahead because she
knows the media so well. When her original plan fails, she moves to plan B
which, because the viewing public likes happy endings, succeeds (is there a
suggestion that television audiences dictate news story outcomes?) Amy’s
triumph, however, is not just a result of her own savviness but also of Nick’s
and that is the final sad irony. Through the whole ordeal, Nick has learned
enough about the media and what its audience wants to know his options are
predetermined. He knows who his wife is, what she’s doing, and how the public
will react, and so he knows his chance for getting out is becoming smaller,
given the influence of the media in making or breaking a person, especially
when a baby is involved. Gone Girl is
a tragedy about a man who gets to know the media so well only to get trapped by
it into a life of misery. He is, finally, as much a sell-out to it as the
people who condemned him.
Stylistically
and emotively, Gone Girl is another triumph for David Fincher who can’t seem to
make a wrong turn. Yes, the film runs a bit too long but it knows how to sprawl
itself. The flashbacks, which start coming before we even know what kind of
film this is ultimately going to be, offer him the greatest canvas for what he
does best; creating suspense within ordinary settings and drab infrastructure.
He likely saw a great opportunity in Flynn’s third novel and joined the wagon after
20th-Century-Fox purchased the rights to the novel in the summer of
2012 for $1.5 million, with $500,00 going to Flynn for writing the screenplay.
Fincher has still not signed on, however, by the time Fincher submitted the
first draft in December. The hard part for Flynn was largely done, though she
thought it a positive experience.
“It was
thrilling to see it all come together,” she said. “As someone who has covered
movies for many years, I know that most of the time it doesn’t turn out so well
for the original author. What was different this time around was that I had a
great director who really liked the book and didn’t want to turn it into
something other than what it already was.”
From the
start, Fincher and Flynn worked well together and the finished product has the
polished feel of a great minds working in perfect harmony.
“David
Fincher liked the same things in the book that I liked. He wanted a faithful
screen adaptation, not a whole new thing,” Flynn added.
When the
book started making waves in Hollywood (before even hitting shelves), Fincher
was thought of as the best, if only, director capable of bringing the
psychological depths of the work to the surface. Even Flynn came to realize
that her novel would not easily lend itself to film.
“Of course
once I got into it I realized I was dealing with some complicated ideas,” she
said. “It’s an internal story, centering on the characters’ thoughts. There’s
lots of jumping back and forth in time. The diary stuff. And the plotting is
very dense. So I knew from the beginning it wasn’t going to be easy. I knew I
would have to concentrate on pacing and rearranging the order of some scenes.
And with this story, tone is hugely important. It’s a thriller but with some
dark humor — deep and dark.”
As well as
Flynn and Fincher worked together, it is unlikely that either one imagined how
much the cast would bring to understanding of the book, even from critically
shunned names like Tyler Perry as an attorney with an ability to play the media
at its own game and come out ahead.
“I’ve said
all along that Amy is the showy role, but that the actor playing Nick has to be
simply great,” Flynn said. “If he doesn’t work, the movie doesn’t work. And the
great thing about Ben’s performance is that he makes you care even when you’re
thinking he might be a murderer. You want to hang out with him and tell him
it’s going to be OK … but you also want to punch him in the mouth. And Rosamund
really blooms in her role. She gets to show so many emotions and sides to a
human being. She was constantly asking me about Amy’s background, her friends,
what kind of party she would enjoy. She had a copy of the book filled with
notes.”
Appropriately
so for such a unique film, Gone Girl
is one of the very few times in Hollywood (especially when the author of the
original work was directly involved) that many cooks from many different
circles created something wonderful, in this case the most atmospheric and
provocative film of 2014. The media is a frequent and easy target for its own
spawn, the film industry, but few movies have had the nerve to make their
audience complicit in its corruption. Gone
Girl’s makes its most powerful statement by making us gawkers into a
personal tragedy before we even understand it, much like the locals in the film
we think we are above.
