GONE GIRL: Gone in 149 Minutes

In which Neil Patrick Harris and Tyler Perry are both cast in a thriller for the first and last time ever.

Director: David Fincher
Writer: Gillian Flynn
Cast: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry
Runtime: 149 mins.
2014

David Fincher feeds on twisty structures and mind games. It's his lifeforce. His body of work is one sinister game after another: Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network, House of Cards, and the most cheekily named The Game. He thrives on these house-of-mirror thriller structures, generally at the expense of real, convincing, or meaningful characters. Go ahead and try to name one truly memorable character from Fincher's filmography--and before you say Tyler Durden, Frank Underwood, or Mark Zuckerberg, let me add one more caveat: a memorable character who isn't a sociopath. The list runs thin, doesn't it?

Fincher has made a career of taking trashy source materials/ideas and elevating them to the level of Serious Cinema. To be clear, I love trashy stories. They don't have to be mere entertainment, although they can be. They can also be fodder for all sorts of interesting intellectual interpretations. Fincher clearly believes this, and he has always walked the fine line between giving genre fiction the attention of craft that he feels it deserves, and taking it all rather too seriously to the point of losing perspective. His best work tends to be the former, and if it can be said that any of his films have "failed," they belong to the latter category.

Lucky for us, Gone Girl features both a twisty-turny thriller structure, and characters who are designed more to be avatars than believable people--a Fincher special! Double lucky for us, Gone Girl may be a serious affair, but it never mistakes itself for what it's not. This movie is a thriller all the way down.

Don't expect me to produce anything close to a proper plot summary. That would be irresponsible, as the plot of Gone Girl is functionally a stand-in for the entire experience of Gone Girl. I'm not saying the plot is the only important element, or the only notable element. I am saying that unlike many movies--Her, Die Hard, 2001: A Space Odyssey, whatever--Gone Girl follows the thriller model of placing the plot front and center, and crafting all other elements of the movie as beholden to the plot.

Let it just be said, then, that Gone Girl is apparently about a man named Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) whose wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) disappears on the morning of their fifth anniversary, leaving a shattered glass table and a series of cheeky anniversary-scavenger-hunt-clues in her wake. As the evidence piles up, Nick is... perturbed, shall we say, to see that everything points to him as the guilty party. Meanwhile, incessant and skewed news coverage has painted Nick as the most loathsome person in the United States, and he and his sister Margo (Carrie Coon) have to deal with the public and the law by hiring hotshot attorney Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry). The American public is such a force in this film that they may as well be credited as a supporting character. That's right, American readers, you were in this movie!

Surprises are obviously in store, but I don't want to imply that Gone Girl is some sort of Shyamafest of red herrings and twist endings. Script writer Gillian Flynn (author of the popular beach read that is this film's source material) does well to dump the main "twist" on the audience far before the end of the film, which allows the dramatic tension to amp up owing to our clear understanding of the stakes. That's how it's done. The murkiness of the top end of this film, in which we don't know the truth and are generally uncomfortable with our protagonist, plays well, but would have been unbearable for two and a half hours.

Yes, this is a long movie. Thankfully, whereas 149 minutes would be a death knell for most thrillers which require a quick pace and none too much reflective thinking, Gone Girl never becomes lugubrious due to the incredible precision of pacing and craft on display. Fincher handles the concurrent unfolding of three different timelines--the present, the near past, and the long past--almost as artfully as Nolan's similar hat trick in The Prestige. This is one of the more restrained films of Fincher's career, featuring only a few Big Moments during its lengthy but never-lagging runtime. This lets those Big Moments feel even Bigger in relief against the even-keel staging of the rest of the drama. The eerie soundtrack works with the same undercurrent/punctuation rhythm, its echoey strings and piano chords going all synthy and distorted (much like the poster above) in key moments.

That undercurrent/punctuation tone works thematically too. Much like the happy-on-the-surface version of marriage that it portrays, Gone Girl's tone is that of an artfully restrained personality that obscures worlds of rage and indignation underneath. When we get glimpses of this roiling underworld, primarily through Amy's character e.g. her "good wife" monologue, it's exhilarating, like standing on the edge of the abyss. Gone Girl is good about teasing and tasting that abyss for so long that it becomes unbearable without us even realizing the build-up is happening.

That's the weird thing about this movie. The first half is arguably the better half (the back end features a more cartoonish villainy than anything that came before it, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just less subtly disconcerting and more openly upsetting), and yet it's also kind of... dull? I don't want to say boring, because I was never bored, but the pace is so steady and the content so restrained that it can seem like nothing gripping is happening, yet feel gripping despite that. I have a hard time thinking of analogues. Maybe the patient horror of Session 9. Or The Turn of the Screw.

Maybe I should put it this way. I enjoyed this movie quite a bit without especially enjoying any single moment, save one or two. The cast mostly follows that rubric for better or for worse. Leads Affleck and Pike give strong performances, without being particularly notable in any way. Ben Affleck is an actor who has never given me any reason to say anything more complimentary than "He's doing his job." He's perhaps the A-lister whose performance appeal I understand the least (though I will give him directing props for Argo). That being said, it's almost as if Gone Girl understands that about him, and subverts his lazy movie star image accordingly. The confidence and smug self-assurance he exudes do not do his character any favors in front of the cameras. He seems smug when he should be broken up about his wife's disappearance. There's even a recurring idea that he has a villainous chin. This is especially amusing to me considering his role as Batman in the upcoming Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (hahahahaha), a hero for whom a strong jawline is required.



 

The supporting cast is more interesting, if not more impressive per se. Tyler Perry and Carrie Coon acquit themselves well, and Kim Dickens manages to be exciting in a detective role we've seen a million million times before, but my favorite is probably Neil Patrick Harris as a creepy and obscenely wealthy ex-boyfriend of Amy's. His character work is little more than solid, but it was my favorite to watch.

Like I said, Gone Girl is a thriller all the way down. There's a good bit of interesting subtext about gender roles and the deceptive nature of marriage as an institution (as well as a tremendous indictment of American news media), but the core of this movie is its gradient shading of the truth. As if marriage were some sort of game.

3.5 / 5  BLOBS