This week’s case in point of a movie where the not-knowing is the core enjoyment factor is a murder/disappearance mystery in which, like Psycho, the biggest bombshell drops quite early on – though other gradual reveals of backstory, motive and method continue to unspool pleasurably thereafter: David Fincher’s Gone Girl. And it’s a real poser how to say anything about it at all beyond this long-winded intro.
I walked into the cinema with the distinct advantage of being among the minority of literate Americans who had not read Gillian Flynn’s mega-best-selling 2012 potboiler novel. And I had successfully dodged any subsequent discussions that divulged whether or not protagonist Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) had in fact murdered his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike), who has disappeared from the childless couple’s rented McMansion in Missouri, leaving behind some smashed furniture and the hastily swabbed-up remnants of a pool of blood on the kitchen floor. I didn’t want to know.
But I did read a few other reviews beforehand; and despite their authors’ strenuous efforts not to make them spoilerific, I accurately guessed where the story was going, based on hints as slim as other movie titles in whose genre they placed Gone Girl (Psycho was not among the tipoffs). Maybe the problem is that I’ve been spoiled, perhaps irrevocably, by today’s crop of literature, film and TV in which one must, in order to avoid future emotional trauma, presume that every narrator is unreliable, every character capable of both heroic and villainous behavior (not to mention expendable at the author or director’s whim), all motives ulterior and all ethics situational.
The novel on which Gone Girl is based alternates point-of-view between the two principals, with Nick’s chapters commencing with the morning of the day of Amy’s disappearance and Amy’s with an entry dated some seven years earlier chronicling the couple’s first meeting, in a diary that Nick – significantly – doesn’t know that she keeps (or so he claims). By showing early courtship scenes as backstory from an apparently omniscient cinema viewpoint, the movie is able to save the existence of the diary for a later complication. But the camera’s eye in this movie is not necessarily always as objective as moviegoers have come to expect; it too may be an unreliable narrator at times. In cinema, as in a marriage or in life, everything is subjective, Fincher suggests.
That diary is only one of many things that Nick doesn’t know about his once-idealized wife, and he harbors quite a few secrets of his own, some of them significant. Without getting too much into specifics, there is certainly violent crime in the story of Gone Girl, and some of its best moments are the police-procedural passages rendered by Patrick Fugit and especially Kim Dickens as the primary investigators assigned to Amy’s case. But it’s really less of a whodunit than a study of how relationships can deteriorate over time as a couple’s illusions about one another unravel – especially under the stresses of financial reversals and infidelity. On the personal level, it’s about lying, from the merely self-serving to the pathological, and on the cultural level, about how truth is warped, perceptions manipulated and privacy compromised in our times by reality TV, cable network news and social media. Who or what, it asks, can we ever trust?
For a tangly thriller, Gone Girl sometimes seems to be moving forward at too glacial a pace to sustain the tension that it’s after. The fact that Flynn’s screenplay affords the audience ample time to ponder plot holes – or wonder idly why an actress as young and beautiful as Pike needs to be so heavily Botoxed that she seems devoid of any expression above the eyes – suggests that some of its two-and-a-half-hour running time might profitably have been cut.
But Affleck does fine work sustaining ambiguity as the husband whose muted affect and tendency to respond inappropriately in social situations are seen as insensitivity and lack of appreciation by his wife, and as glaring proof of murderous duplicity by TV-watchers across America. The rest of the cast does excellent work as well, notably Carrie Coon as Margo, Nick’s twin sister and sounding board; Tyler Perry as Tanner Bolt, the celebrity attorney who takes on Nick’s defense with juicy relish for the seemingly hopeless fray; and Neil Patrick Harris, Amy’s wealthy ex-boyfriend Desi Collings, against whom she obtained an Order of Protection years earlier (or so she claims).
There: I may be no Andrew Sarris, but I’ve managed to natter on without being a “congenital spoilsport” or divulging more than the most basic premise of Gone Girl, which you probably already knew anyway. Rest assured that the film is slickly assembled and engaging enough, even if, like me, you’re not as surprised by the main twist, and it still has a lot to say even once you more or less know who done what to whom. The most unexpected – and disappointing because it seems so implausible – denouement actually comes at the very end, when a major character makes a decision that will strike most people as inexplicably dumb. But maybe that’s just Gone Girl’s ironic message about what can happen when we let the mass media dumb us down beyond redemption. Or perhaps the secret sign over the gateway to matrimony is being revealed: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
To read Frances Marion Platt’s previous movie reviews & other film-related pieces, visit our Almanac Weekly website at HudsonValleyAlmanacWeekly.com and click on the “film” tab.
