Gone Girl strains union of pulp, prestige

David Fincher is a director celebrated for approaching his subjects with a clinical curiosity usually reserved for back-alley surgeons and unscrupulous morticians. His films are clean, elegant surfaces whose austere contours mask the stench of madness and moral decay. So how did the dispassionate perfectionist behind Se7en, Fight Club and Zodiac become the industry’s go-to guy for adapting glorified airport novels?

Gone Girl, Fincher’s latest exercise in freeze-dried formalism, is based on former Entertainment Weekly television critic Gillian Flynn’s 2012 psychological thriller, which follows the cloud of suspicion that descends on Midwestern charmer Nick Dunne, played in the film by Ben Affleck, after the disappearance of his pregnant wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) on the day of their fifth wedding anniversary. It also marks the second time in four years that Fincher has attempted to bring a mainstream bestseller to the big screen, following his slick but financially disappointing remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Flynn’s novel, which takes partial inspiration from the real-life murders of Laci Peterson and her unborn child by her husband Scott back in 2002, is equal parts pulpy mystery –— Amy leaves behind a series of cryptic clues as part of an anniversary-themed scavenger hunt — and lurid character study, a story that aspires to double as a chilling vivisection of twenty-first century marriage. It also happens to be pretentious, preposterous and criminally over-plotted, hamstrung by a weak ending and populated by artificial characters spouting reams of self-consciously “witty” dialogue.

Do these flaws make Fincher’s version doomed by design? Absolutely not. Plenty of great movies have begun their lives as mediocre books, albeit ones with loyal followings.

Mario Puzo’s The Godfather was replete with extraneous subplots and gratuitous sex scenes before Francis Ford Coppola trimmed the fat and removed the constant references to Sonny Corleone’s comically large endowment. Steven Spielberg turned Peter Benchley’s slim paperback Jaws into the quintessential summer blockbuster by adding emotional complexity to its unlovable characters – the director himself admitted to rooting for the shark while reading the book — and changing the bleak, unsatisfying ending to the explosive finale we all know and love. Even Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men was considered a nonessential organ in the author’s body of work before the Coen Brothers elevated it to the level of sinister art.

In spite of its many issues, the core concept of Gone Girl is an inherently compelling one. Much of the story unfolds in flashback, revealing Nick and Amy’s life together and how their once-idyllic marriage has devolved into a poisonous viper’s nest of barely contained resentments and the specter of physical abuse.

It turns out the couple was forced to move back to Nick’s sleepy Missouri hometown after the big lug was downsized from his job as a New York journalist, compelling Amy, a lifelong trust fund baby whose psychologist parents used her as the inspiration for their “Amazing Amy” children’s book series, to forsake her socialite lifestyle and sink the last of her money into buying a local dive bar for Nick and his devoted twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon) to run together while they care for their cancer-stricken mother and Alzheimer’s-addled father. Nick and Amy’s rented McMansion, meanwhile, quickly becomes a beige-colored prison for Amy, who finds herself unable — or perhaps just unwilling — to give small-town living a chance.

Affleck, with his corn-fed good looks and plastered-on smirk, is definitely an inspired choice to play Nick, the gone-to-seed golden boy who reacts to the news of his wife’s vanishing with an eerie mixture of stoicism, evasiveness and the occasional look of genuine relief. The nervous energy that used to make him appear ill at ease in earlier roles is actually working in his favor here. In fact, the inscrutable expression on his face when the press takes his picture in front of Amy’s giant missing poster — a smile perched right on the edge between charming and creepy — might end up being the film’s most haunting image.

It’s also gratifying to see Pike, the 35-year-old British actress who’s spent the better part of the last fifteen years inhabiting small but memorable roles in movies such as Die Another Day, Jack Reacher and The World’s End, finally getting her time in the sun. She reportedly beat out the likes of Charlize Theron, Jessica Chastain, Olivia Wilde, Abbie Cornish, Natalie Portman, and Emily Blunt to win the part of “Amazing Amy,” and it’s not difficult to see why. The film’s final trailer does a commendable job of showing her character’s delicate yet spiteful nature without spoiling anything for the uninitiated. She even appears comfortable reciting the heavy-handed voiceover dialogue (yes, Flynn wrote the script, which means the rumors about the ending being changed are probably false).

So where will Fincher go from here? Aside from his commitment to direct the first season of HBO’s upcoming conspiracy thriller series Utopia (also written by Flynn), will the meticulous maestro continue blending pulp and prestige (rumors of him directing The Girl Who Played with Fire are also picking up steam), or will he return to his grimy shocker roots? Or will he try his hand at something completely different, perhaps his oft-delayed adaptation of Eric Powell’s supernatural gangster comic The Goon, or a big-screen version of Arthur C. Clarke’s seminal sci-fi tale Rendezvous with Rama? A new Fincher project always bears watching, especially when he decides to think beyond the airport bookstore.

 

Landon McDonald is a graduate student studying public relations. His column, “Screen Break,” runs Fridays.