This is a problem film for movie critics. I could dance around all the
plot twists that I am not supposed to give away and focus on the skillful
directing of David Fincher, the good performances by Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike,
or the beautiful cinematography, seamless editing, and brooding score, etc. But
that would give the reader a false sense of confidence in my opinion of the
movie. The one thing I can’t talk about is the thing I’m not supposed to talk
about. I have a problem with the plot itself and in the end I felt that
overwhelmed the otherwise technical merits of this movie. A student of film
would be satisfied to watch ‘Gone Girl’ merely for its technical education but
I’m not about to recommend it to anyone.
The stoy opens with two
concurrent storylines. One is in the present and follows Nick Dunne (Ben
Afflek) on the day of his 5th Anniversary. He comes home to discover
that his house has been broken into and his wife is gone. He calls the police
and an investigation starts. The second storyline concerns journal entries
written by his wife Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike). It starts the day they meet and
portrays a good marriage until the Great Recession hit, he lost his job, she
lost her trust fund, and they moved from New York City to his hometown in
Missouri. She does not like it there and he knows it. In fact, he was about to
ask for a divorce the day of his anniversary. Or was he? Because she says he
had different plans in her journal. It is a bit of a he said she said and after
she cannot be found and other things develop a media circus descends on the
small town. The question from the press is thus: Did Nick Dunne kill his wife?
There is a certain guilt that goes along with seeing Ben Affleck hounded
by television cameras and unscrupulous reporters that don’t seem to
particularly care whether he is guilty or innocent. For those with memories
that go back a decade, this sort of thing really did happen to Ben Affleck or
‘Benniffer’ to be exact, the moniker given to the celebrity pair of Ben Affleck
and Jennifer Lopez. There was an unmistakably meanspirtedness to the whole
proceeding. The general public had something against Ben Affleck and the press
hounded him until his marriage fell apart and his career floundered. Did he deserve
it? Well, he did win Oscar gold at the age of 27 that many people thought (and
I include myself here) belonged almost entirely to Matt Damon (who had not paid
any dues either) and then followed that up with a lot of big paychecks in bad
movies and then he married arguably the hottest woman on the planet. That sort
of unfairness earned him plenty of envy.
Why am I bringing this up? I bring it up because Ben Affleck in this
movie is a perfect example of the power of good casting. (In fact, I have spoken
about this exact topic with Ben Affleck before in my ‘Argo’ review.) It is
impossible for the audience to completely block out what they know about a
well-known actor when they see a movie so even though the character they are
playing may be somebody completely different from whom they played before or
who they are in real life, the audience will at least subconsciously project
upon the character all that they know about the actor. Now there are three ways
to deal with this fact when making a movie. One, you could do what Milos Forman
did when he made ‘Amadeus’ and just side step the whole issue. He did not want
any well-known actor to overshadow the character of Mozart or Salieri so he
went and cast unknown actors. Two, you could use the audience’s preconceptions
to save time. As I once heard in a director’s commentary, using a film star
saves about fifteen minutes of exposition. You want a tough leader guy: cast
Bruce Willis. All he has to do is show up and you know what the character is
about. Thirdly, and my favorite, you can use the audience’s preconceptions not
to simplify but to distract. You deliberately set up a kind of character played
by a particular actor to set up an expectation of behavior. You deviate from
that expectation in a believable way and boom you got a good story twist going
on. Think Cameron Diaz in Vanilla Sky
or Neil Patrick Harris in Harold and
Kumar Go to White Castle. There are plenty of others as well.
Ben Affleck is the perfect casting choice for this movie. Unfortunately the
plot of the story takes the 2nd way down the casting choice road. I
do not believe it is really a spoiler to tell you something that happens in the
middle of the movie but here is the warning anyway: Nothing but spoilers from
here on out. Nick Dunne did not kill his wife. Seriously, did any of us really
think Ben Affleck was a wife killer. No, we expect him to be the hapless victim
of disgraceful media frenzy. But what if he did. Now that would be a plot
twist.
Okay I’m sorry. I can’t actually argue that everything past the midpoint
of the movie should be changed. Let me just explain how it was not particularly
good. The whole thing, and boy is it elaborate, was planned out by the wife to
frame her philandering husband. It is so intricate in fact that the perpetrator
needs to be a psychopath. Let’s put aside the whole feminist argument that a
woman would never be capable of this sort of thing (even though to my knowledge
no living woman ever has been capable of this sort of thing.) And we also can’t
say that this movie is another woman-hating exercise perpetrated by the male
establishment of Hollywood after all the screenplay was written by a woman
(Gillian Flynn) and adapted by a best-selling book written by the same woman.
Let us just ask this, does the Rosamund Pike character make sense as a
psychopath? I would argue she does not. She makes a big decision about 3/4ths
of the way through the movie on the basis of pure emotion. Perhaps I need to
brush up on my psychopathic profiling but I don’t think that these people kill out
of love all that often. The movie does not work for the same reason that other
David Fincher movies sometimes don’t work. It was certainly the difference in
his inferior version of The Girl with the
Dragon Tattoo. The women characters in his movies tend to lack humanity.
That’s a rather rough thing to level at a master director (and David Fincher
certainly is that) but I think it is true. There is a void where something else
should be and taking up that space is a paranoia that takes what should be a
complex portrait of a woman and makes it into something that is simply
heartless. Not helping is his tendency to cast supermodels in supporting roles
that do not call for it. Do you have Netflix? Watch a few episodes of David
Fincher’s House of Cards and compare
it to how the women look in Orange is the
New Black. The difference could contain a multitude of worlds.
You know who also had this trademark? Alfred Hitchcock. The gorgeous
chilly blonde of Hitchcock is definitely comparable to Fincher’s dangerous and
calculating beauties. To an extent this is not good casting. Why? Because if it
is noticeable to the extent of cliché than the director distacts the audience
from the story. That is unless the story is not all that good, then I suppose
the more distractions the better. And there are plenty in this movie.
