GONE GIRL - david fincher 9.5 / 10

I enjoyed Gone Girl on every level on which it’s possible to enjoy a movie: as entertainment, as comedy, as art, as a masterful display of filmmaking technique.  It's a thriller that’s thrilling simply in the bare fact of its existence.  That a film like this-- with this budget, this level of talent, produced and promoted at this scale about this subject matter portrayed in this way-- exists at all is thrilling in and of itself.  That it also succeeds on every level makes the whole thing one of the most enjoyable experiences I've had at the movies in years and recalibrated my conception of what's possible artistically and thematically in a big budget thriller.  I'm pretty sure I was grinning like an idiot for fifteen minutes after the credits rolled.

Why, then, are so many people having such a visceral negative reaction to Gone Girl?  I have a few ideas.  I could be way off, of course, but I think it's because the film cuts too close to the bone about topics (marriage, feminism) that people are not particularly comfortable being forced to reexamine, especially not by a movie that seemed from the marketing and trailers to be just a run-of-the-mill 'adult thriller'.

Gone Girl begins in a place we've seen over and over in countless films, television shows, novels, etc.  In the marriage of Nick and Amy Dunne, Nick (Ben Affleck, putting his bland smugness to good use) is the central figure, in control of where and what kind of life the couple lives.  This is the normal order of things as far as mainstream entertainment is concerned and it has a lulling effect on the audience.  They settle in, comfortable in the notion that they've seen this before, that there's nothing new or challenging here.

Then the story kicks in.  Amy (Rosamund Pike) disappears under suspicious circumstances.  Everyone starts to think Nick might be involved and he tries desperately to prove his innocence.  Again, this is a thriller set-up that's not so very different from countless entertainments we've all seen / read many times before.  Sure, it's an incredibly well-shot, edited and scored version of that set-up, but it's not fundamentally new, different or challenging. 

But just as the audience is settling into the familiar rhythms of an 'adult thriller', Fincher pulls the rug out from under them by revealing that not only is Amy alive, she's actively framing her husband for her 'murder'.  In other words, she's the villain.  And whatever lip service people pay to the idea that women and men are equal, the reality of what that means in practice (i.e. that women get to be screwed-up, evil monsters, just like men) isn't an idea they're all that comfortable with.  And so, a film that had seemed pretty generic (in both senses of the word), suddenly and without warning, gets a lot more challenging and begins asking its audience some fairly prickly questions.

In revealing Amy's role as the mastermind behind it all (cleverly skewering Nick's idea of himself (conveyed in an early scene where he carries around a game of Mastermind)), Fincher and writer Gillian Flynn also reveal that everything we've seen thus far of Amy and Nick's life together is at best an exaggeration and at worst an outright lie.  And so, what had for its first hour looked like a straightforward mystery potboiler with the main female character in the comfortable role of deified corpse has suddenly become a film in which nothing we've seen can be trusted with a main female character who's a devious, lying con artist.  This is deeply unsettling.

And Gone Girl only gets more challenging and more uncomfortable in its second half.  Amy, after being robbed at the mountain motel where she was hiding out, is forced to call upon Desi (Neil Patrick Harris), an old boyfriend still creepily obsessed with her, for aid.  It becomes clear fairly quickly that Desi's been waiting years for just such a call.  And before long, Amy has effectively been imprisoned in his sterile, high-tech lake house.  As the reality of her situation becomes clear, Gone Girl starts asking the audience root for Amy.  Despite her role as the villain up until this point, she becomes sympathetic, suffering a fate worse than what she deserves.

We're now confronted with a situation in which not only is the main female character a deceitful, duplicitous manipulator, we're also feeling some sympathy for her.  And then, just when that sympathy is at its height and the audience is hoping she'll escape Desi's clutches, Amy murders him in gruesome fashion, paying back our empathy with horrifying brutality.  This is such a startling moment that the film itself breaks down.  The soundtrack goes haywire; the image goes black intermittently; the film itself reels.  It's an audacious moment in an audacious film and Fincher pulls it off gloriously.

Now, having had their sympathies betrayed twice, the audience wants Amy to be punished, to be found out and put in prison or for Nick to murder her for real.  And what happens?  Not only does she get away with it all, she gets everything she always wanted: the great house, the perfect nuclear family and a financial windfall in the form of book and movie deals.  And that's just too much, one step too far.  People cannot forgive Gone Girl that.  This lying, manipulating, murdering psycho bitch cannot get away with it and end up happier than ever.  No.  That is unacceptable.  And they reject the movie outright.

Of course, if you’re on Gone Girl's wavelength (as I clearly am), that ending is just awesome.  In fact, I have a hard time thinking of a better ending to a movie in the last few years.  It ends exactly as it should.  It's perfect.

So, okay, I just outlined a lot of reasons for disliking Gone Girl.  Why do I like it so much (aside from that it so cleverly manipulates its audience in a way I find incredibly bold and amusing)? 

Well, for one thing, the level of filmmaking craft on display here by David Fincher puts just about every other director working today to shame.  The way he composes shots, moves the camera and edits everything together is masterful.  He's operating with a precision that is almost unheard of in a world where shaky handheld camerawork is used as shorthand for emotional intensity and most directors' shot selection consists of little more than a wide master shot and a couple close-ups.  He's putting on a clinic in Gone Girl, and that's damn fun to watch. 

For the record, Fincher uses one handheld shot in the entire film: when Nick runs from the crowd of reporters at Amy's vigil after it's revealed she was pregnant.  Fincher clearly intends that shot as punctuation, to call attention to itself, to mark it as the moment when Nick's glib, self-satisfied façade finally cracks.  It's no coincidence the moment is staged to make Nick look like a buffoon as he jogs awkwardly across a wide lawn toward a waiting police car.  He's finally been knocked out of his comfortable, steadfast belief in his own superiority and Fincher sells that with every choice he makes in that scene.

But that's barely scratching the surface of the depth of directorial craft evident here.  Gone Girl is split roughly in half, with Nick being in control of the first half of the film and Amy in control of the second.  Fincher emphasizes this in a lot of clever ways, for instance, the careful way in which he positions Nick in the frame.  At the start of the film, he's positioned in the very center of the screen.  But as the situation gets further and further out of his control, he's pushed farther and farther from the center, moving almost totally out of it in the second half, when Amy is in control.  And he only gets back to the center again at the very end, when Amy has so totally taken control of his life that she can afford him a little autonomy.

There's also a marked difference in the way the first half of the film sexualizes and objectifies its female characters and the way in which it refuses to do so, even going so far as to objectify the men, in the second half.  In the first half of the film, Margo, Nick's twin sister, is introduced telling a particularly sexual and not particularly funny joke.  And Nick's girlfriend Andie is introduced as a sex-obsessed bimbo who can't wait to take her shirt off.  But then, in the second half of the film, this is flipped on its head.  There's no female nudity.  Even when Amy manipulates Desi into having sex with her, she never removes her underwear.  And then, upon returning home, she and Nick have a scene in the shower in which Nick is shown full frontal (if only momentarily) while Amy keeps her back steadfastly turned to the camera.

I could go on and on about Fincher's directorial skill and the many brilliant ways it's employed here, but that's not enough by itself to make Gone Girl a terrific film.  What really elevates it is the way everything and everyone in the movie revolves around and plays off the same theme: narrative, specifically the stories we tell about ourselves and each other.

When you get right down to it, any individual's life is just a collection of stories, stories they tell themselves and stories others tell about them.  Our lives are narratives.  So too is a marriage.  Gone Girl investigates this idea on a deep level, with every character and storyline pinging off of it.

Amy's character reflects this theme most directly.  Amy has never been in control of the narrative of her own life.  She’s always been defined by other people.  Growing up, Amy was the inspiration for a series of books by her psychologist / author parents.  Dubbed the 'Amazing Amy' series, these books didn't simply chronicle Amy's life, they constantly improved upon Amy's real-life failures.  When real Amy stopped playing the cello, Amazing Amy became a prodigy.  When real Amy got cut from her school's volleyball team, Amazing Amy made varsity, etc. etc.  And thus, for her entire childhood and much of her early adulthood, Amy existed primarily in dialogue with her fictional doppelganger, the narrative of her life controlled by her parents and their fictional creation.

Then Amy meets Nick, falls in love and gets married.  Only it turns out Amy was playing at being a person whom Nick would love.  And when she revealed her true self, he rejected her in favor of a younger mistress.  She was accepted as long as she fit the narrative that Nick had in mind.  As soon as she didn't, as soon as she tried to stop defining herself by what he wanted, he rejected her. 

The events of Gone Girl are, then, Amy attempting to take back control.  By faking her own murder and turning herself into a national martyr / hero, Amy is finally able to take charge of her own narrative.  But even then, after she's worked so long on this plan and gone to such extremes, one mistake and she's at the mercy of Desi, yet another person who wants to control her story (in this case to turn her back into the person he loved in high school). 

As Amy says in a monologue about the ways in which women perform roles for the men they're with (the novel's famous 'Cool Girl' speech), this lack of control of your own story is far too common.  And something needs to be done about it-- probably not what Amy actually did, but that she goes to such extremes and is only really successful after committing a horrific murder says a lot about how difficult it is for women to achieve that control.

Fincher advances this idea in other subtle ways as well.  In the first half of the film, every word Pike says as Amy is dubbed, as if the film itself won't let Amy speak for herself and has to constantly tweak and correct everything she says, in other words, to control her entirely.

All of the other characters are impacted by this theme as well.  Margo tells Nick, almost from the moment Amy goes missing, that he has to be careful how he comes across, how other people are going to see and define him.  She does this in almost every scene, whether she's telling him what to wear or what to say or just worrying what people are going to think of him.  Tanner Bolt, Nick's lawyer, attempts to control the media and the stories they tell about Nick and Amy.  The media, in turns, creates versions of Nick and Amy that neither one recognizes.

This theme even plays a role in the police investigation of Amy's disappearance and reappearance.  That the police appeared to have so badly botched the initial investigation (eventually arresting Nick for a murder that never took place) makes it impossible for them to fully investigate Amy's reappearance because the story everyone is telling about them is that they're incompetent.  And if the story is told often enough, it becomes, for all intents and purposes, the truth.

On top of all that thematic richness, Gone Girl is also very very funny.  Fincher and Flynn are very aware of how absurd some of these situations are and they're not above getting a laugh out of it.  Whether it's Tanner lightly joking with Nick not to piss Amy off after she returns or using 'Don’t Fear the Reaper' on the soundtrack, Gone Girl has a wicked sense of humor.  But like any good satire, it's best jokes also cut the deepest, making the laughter more than a little uncomfortable.

This is all fascinating, but Fincher is playing an even deeper game here.  Film itself is, of course, a form of narrative storytelling.  So this theme of controlling narrative applies just as much to the film itself as it does to the characters.  One of the jobs of a filmmaker is to manipulate the story to elicit specific reactions in an audience.  All the ways in which Fincher and Flynn manipulate their audience, as outlined above, show how effectively this can be achieved by people in command of their craft.  They use the first half of the film to lull the audience into thinking they're seeing a certain kind of film only to upend everything halfway through.  They continue that manipulation by first getting the audience to sympathize with Amy despite her role as the film's villain only to then completely betray that sympathy, which in turn causes the audience to actively root against her.  And then, of course, they betray the audience one final time and let Amy get away with everything.  They get the audience to trust them only to continually defy and betray that trust.

This, Gone Girl is saying to its audience, is what it's like to be Amy.  She wants things to be a certain way, does everything she can to make that happen, only to have her trust repeatedly betrayed.  That’s what the film itself does to its audience.  The first half of Gone Girl gets them to think it's a certain kind of movie, to trust that it's going to follow a certain path and resolve a certain way.  And then that trust is betrayed over and over again.  It's so deviously brilliant that I'm still in awe of it days later. 

Gone Girl is as good a film as could possibly be made about this theme and subject matter.  It puts just about every other movie of its kind to shame.  This is some next level shit.  Gone Girl reminds me of just what the medium of film is capable.  It's a remarkable achievement.  And that it's entered into the national conversation currently underway about feminism thrills me to no end.