Gone Girl (3/5 Stars)

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 5^th 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 2^nd 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.