Director Report Card: David Fincher (2014)

11. Gone Girl

You know a work has achieved a major level of fame when it contributes to our larger cultural lexicon. Upon release in 2012, Gillian Flynn's novel “Gone Girl” immediately became a bestseller. It generated a countless number of thinkpieces and essays about what it said about gender, marriage, and the media. Moreover, it added the phrase “cool girl” to our pop culture vocabulary. The film rights to the book were scooped up before it was even published, with Reese Witherspoon's production company developing it as a project for her. Flynn herself wrote the first draft, which attracted David Fincher's attention. Fincher would ensure that the feature adaptation of “Gone Girl” would generate as much debate and interest as its literary predecessor.

Nick and Amy once had a great marriage, full of passion and spontaneous sex. That was a few years ago now, before they moved to Missouri, before Nick's mom died and before their careers dried up. On the day of their fifth anniversary, Nick returns home to see his wife has vanished. The police are immediately suspicious of him, with more incriminating evidence against Nick piling up. As Amy was a minor celebrity, the inspiration for a long-running series of children's books, her disappearance becomes a major news story. Despite all the clues pointing to it, Nick didn't kill his wife... And Amazing Amy is far from done with him.

It's easy to see why “Gone Girl” would appeal to David Fincher, as it's another story of a calculating psychopath with a convoluted master plan and the people caught up in the ensuing conspiracy. Yet even this is not what “Gone Girl” is really about. First and foremost, this is another entry in the proud American tradition of melodramas about decomposing marriages. We see Nick and Amy's first date, how they had immediate chemistry, how he quickly charmed her. How they used to have great sex all the time. How her games on their anniversaries used to charm and entrance Nick. Since then, resentment and complacency has sneaked into their home. She wants a baby, he's having an affair. Both quickly realize that neither person is who the thought they married. This is the discomforting place “Gone Girl” begins to tell its story.

Yet this is only where "Gone Girl" is beginning. The first half-hour of this movie gives you the impression that you are watching one kind of film. It appears to be a story about how a disappearing wife incriminates her husband, the question of whether he actually killed her, and the resulting media attention. This is before the reveal that Amy is alive. That she not only disappeared on her own but utilized an elaborate plan to frame Nick for her murder. It's the first of a series of brilliant twists, "Gone Girl" drawling you more and more into its story. Wherever you think the film is headed at the beginning, it ends in an entirely different place.

Gillian Flynn herself wrote the script, her debut screenplay, after Fincher insisted she continue to work on the film after the first draft. I've never read any of Flynn's novels but it's apparent that she has a very distinct voice. The dialogue in "Gone Girl" is often sharp, exaggerated, and hilarious. Amy's voiceover narration is so keenly observed. The back-and-forth Nick has with his twin sister, Margo, is immediately likable and funny. When a high-price, high-powered lawyer enters Nick's life to rehabilitate his image, more witty lines are fired at us. Flynn also knows when to drop profanity. Amy describing Nick's girlfriend as having "cum-on-me tits" is vividly descriptive. The use of the c-bomb in a later scene is also extremely effective. 

The most memorable of Flynn's words is the "Cool Girl" monologue that captured so much attention in 2014. In the span of about three minutes, Flynn vividly details the insane archetypal roles that men force women to conform to. That women sometimes conform to themselves, in order to please these men. You can't help but feel sorry for Amy, and so many women all over the world, for having to deal with such a ridiculous double-standard. She kills this "cool girl" version of herself when she pours a pint of blood on the kitchen floor. She scarfs snack food and drinks soda, finally free of the ludicrous standards of maintaining the cool girl's size 2 figure. As she details the ridiculous illusion she had to maintain to please Nick, you can't help but feel like maybe he deserves what she's doing to him. Maybe every dude deserves it. 

But "Gone Girl" is only beginning to pull rugs out from under you at this point. Because Amy isn't an avenging woman who strikes back at the sexist system that oppresses her. She's a stone-cold psychopath, who has engineered an elaborate scheme to ruin her husband's life. She hocks a loogie into a person's Mountain Dew after they indirectly insult her. She framed an ex-boyfriend for rape. When the wheels start to come off Amy's master plan, when it looks like Nick has won over the public that has condemn him, she devises another insane plan to frame another man, which plays out in the most brutal way possible. In "Gone Girl," we see a femme fatale's story from the inside out. Flynn uses this to attack another troubling role society forces women into. If "Gone Girl" decimates the "cool girl" archetype, it also burns down the idea of women being feminist avengers by extending the idea to its most terrifying extreme. Amy is neither cool girl nor an "empowered" woman, suggesting both roles are equally damaging. 

"Gone Girl" is also a brutal condemnation of the media, playing like an absurd and pitch-black satire of the tabloid news cycle we are constantly embroiled in. Why Amy Dunne's disappearance attracts so much attention, when people disappear every day, is obvious. She's white, blonde, attractive, rich and famous. The media attention is largely driven by Ellen Abbott, a barely exaggerated version of Nancy Grace. They attack Nick for not being sad enough, even though everyone reacts to stress differently. Abbott makes salacious implications on her talk show, saying that Nick's not just a murderer but in an incestuous relationship with his sister. Of course, the minute the narrative changes, and Nick's innocence is assured, the media leaps on that too. The tabloid journalists are only interested in the scandal and the happy endings. They have no desire to dig into the inconsistencies just below the surface in Amy's story. Few people are interested in the truth and more interested in the "story" being presented.

"Gone Girl" operates like a beautifully executed mystery, always pulling you deeper as more information is revealed or more clues are uncovered. Every big pay-off – from a shed full of expensive gifts to the detailed explanations of how Amy pulled off her scheme – is deployed perfectly, hitting the audience in the face in the best way. As we see Amy start to set-up her next evil scheme, “Gone Girl” spirals towards a shocking and disturbing climax. It's a sudden act of gruesome violence, catching the audience off-guard no matter how much it's foreshadowed. And then, interestingly, the movie continues further past this point then you'd expect. “Gone Girl's” ambiguous ending, Amy getting her revenge on Nick in a round-about way, re-enforces its central idea: Of people forced to pretend to be someone else while trapped in a bitter marriage, leaving the audience with a unsettled feeling.

Ben Affleck stars as Nick. Affleck brings a certain meta context to the role that is unavoidable. The star has certainly had his own run-ins with the tabloid media. Around the time he was filming “Gone Girl,” he got cast as Batman. A sharp-eyed viewer can spot his physique growing more muscular throughout the film. Not too long after that, Affleck's personal life was rocked by divorce, rumors of affairs, a stint in rehab for alcoholism, and a horrible back tattoo. In other words: Ben Affleck has big Mid-Life Crisis Energy and the film makes ideal use of it. In the beginning, we can never be too sure if we trust Nick. If what Amy says about him is true or if he's been framed. Affleck certainly can capture the image of a big dopey guy, who doesn't know not to smile when talking about his missing wife on TV. Yet you can see some of the charm that made Ben a movie star in the first place, during the interview when Nick takes control of the narrative. In other words, Ben Affleck is used perfectly in the film, the baggage around him as a performer actually enhancing the movie.

Considering her producer's credit on the film, one assumes Reese Witherspoon originally had eyes on playing Amy. It's pretty easy to imagine what the Reese version of Amy would look like. (Like an older, more fucked-up Tracy Flick probably.) Instead, Rosamund Pike would slot into the role after Reese disagreed with Fincher's ideas for the character. Unlike Affleck – or Witherspoon, for that matter – Pike brings no preconceived notions to her character. Pike disappears totally into Amy, a character whose alliances are hard to guess. Pike certainly brings the right venom and anger to Amy's monologues, slowly revealing the character's sociopathic tendencies with a terrifying deliberateness. 

“Gone Girl” also features a cast full of surprising faces. None more than Tyler Perry as Tanner Bolt, the lawyer Nick hires to turn the public opinion around on him. Perry is actually pretty good in the role, fittingly charismatic as a man very used to smoozing in the right way and playing to the right crowds. Neil Patrick Harris is also cast very against type as Desi, Amy's obsessive ex-boyfriend that she weaves back into her scheme. Harris brings the same slightly haughty quality, that we've seen in roles like Doogie Howser or Dr. Horrible, to a ridiculously overconfident and utterly clueless rich dork. Missi Pyle is hilarious as Ellen Abbott, simply by playing the Nancy Grace schtikc more-or-less straight, the ridiculousness of the inspiration becoming all the more obvious. I also really liked Carrie Coon as Margo, who is funny and sure-headed as Nick's more grounded sibling.

With typically sharp direction from Fincher, making use of washed-up lightning and shadowy angles, and a low-key but effectively spooky score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, “Gone Girl” stands as one of the best films of the director's career. It generated rave reviews and controversary in 2014, some even accusing the film of being sexist. Despite being one of the best movies of the year, it only scored a single Oscar nomination, a Best Actress nod for Pike. But, then again, the Academy has always been slow to acknowledge Fincher's thrillers, no matter how brilliantly executed they may be. An Oscar is no guarantee a movie will endure, while the type of brilliance on display in “Gone Girl” almost certainly is. [Grade: A]