Old Yorker

  • Gone Girl

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Fincher (2014)

    Novels with first person narrators, when adapted for the screen, are often diminished by a loss of voice and the lack of an adequate replacement for it.   This is not a problem with making a film of Gone Girl in which the husband and wife protagonists, Nick and Amy Dunne, tell the story in alternating chapters:  you’re glad to be rid of their voices.  Both are dislikeable from the start of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 psychological thriller.  The competition between Nick and Amy, which has several aspects, is keenest in which of them will have proved the more tiresomely hateful once you’ve got through the 460 pages of Flynn’s novel.  They used to earn a living as writers of sorts and that suits Flynn very well:  it provides a kind of justification for the narrators’ often gratingly self-conscious use of language (even if this tendency is really Gillian Flynn’s) and a plausible pretext for trying out more than one narrative voice for Amy.   She disappears from the couple’s Missouri home on the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary.  The vanishing of this highly photogenic woman – who as a child was the inspiration for ‘Amazing Amy’, in a long-running series of books by her psychologist parents – sparks huge media interest and turns Nick Dunne into prime suspect and, in the words of a television talk show host who interviews him, ‘the most hated man in America right now’.

    In the first part of the book, Amy’s account of her decaying marriage to Nick takes the form of diary entries written over several years, starting with their first meeting in New York in 2005.  She’s a native New Yorker and he’s working there:  they move back to his home town of Carthage, Missouri after they’ve both lost their jobs in the wake of the 2008 recession.  Much of Amy’s ample trust fund has been clawed back by her parents, who’ve invested unwisely and whose books are no longer selling.  Nick’s mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer into the bargain.  Amy’s remaining funds are used to set up a bar in Carthage, which Nick runs with his twin sister, Margo (whose name is irritatingly – and, for this reader, confusingly, when it’s the first word in a sentence – abbreviated to ‘Go’).   Metropolitan-minded Amy is increasingly stultified in the small town; Nick’s secret affair with a nubile young student in the creative writing class he teaches there, when he’s not at the bar, is the last straw for their marriage as far as Amy’s concerned.  Halfway through Gone Girl, the diary entries stop and Amy takes over the narrative reins in the present:  it turns out that she hates Nick so much that she’s framing him for her murder.  She has faked her own abduction (and a pregnancy), making deliberate mistakes in her preparation of the ‘crime scene’ so as to raise suspicion that it’s her husband who’s faked the abduction.  The diary itself, left in order to be found, was a fraud – at least the later entries were:  in these, Amy describes a growing fear that Nick may kill her.

    Amy hides out in a motel – deglamorising herself as best she can, eating junk food to put on disguising weight, avidly watching television coverage of the investigation into her disappearance.  At first, she intends to drown herself and, in doing so, provide clinching evidence of her husband’s guilt so that he too pays with his life (Missouri still has the death penalty).  I’m not sure how convincing it is that Amy changes her mind about suicide – and decides, after seeing Nick’s apologetic TV interview, that she wants to resurrect their marriage, but Gillian Flynn needs this volte face in order for Amy eventually to return.  The journey home is a long one for the reader as well as for Amy.  Two other motel guests rob her of the large wad of cash she’s carrying.  In desperation, she contacts a rich, creepy ex-boyfriend called Desi Collings, who was crazy about Amy in high school and remains pathologically devoted to her.  After she’s told him how terrified she is of Nick, Desi sets Amy up – virtually imprisons her – in his luxury lake house and sees that she goes on a diet that will restore her former, floral slenderness.  Amy eventually murders Desi and drives back to Carthage.  Preparing to do so, she rehearses to herself the complicated lies she’s going to need to tell the police and this tall story, as you read it, sounds like Gillian Flynn checking that there are no holes in her elaborate plotting.  Amy’s narrative in Gone Girl includes a good deal of complaint about how she’s been treated by Nick – treatment which she generalises as typical male behaviour.  This gives the writing a ‘feminist’ sheen but Flynn is as slippery as her main characters:  Nick, unappealing as he is, can hardly not be preferred to the ‘psycho bitch’ (her husband’s phrase) that Amy turns out to be.  The longer it goes on, the more the novel seems to be less the story of Nick and Amy than a demonstration – almost a self-examination – by the author of her cold, shallow cleverness.

    The book is overlong; so too is David Fincher’s (149-minute) screen adaptation, for which Gillian Flynn wrote the screenplay.  You don’t get bored, though, and the film is a professional job – with insidiously oppressive murky photography by Jeff Cronenweth (even though, as Anthony Lane has noted in the New Yorker, the locale doesn’t develop the character you might expect from Fincher) and another effective score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross:  their music nods, in alternation, to the story’s themes of fake happiness and malicious reality.  There’s one bad lapse into trashy tastelessness:  Amy’s killing of Desi is garishly staged but, much worse, is the fact that, once she’s back in Carthage, she sits in hospital clothing, answering police questions, yet still covered in her victim’s blood – for no better reason than that she has to go home in that state for Fincher to get maximum impact from a scene in which Amy and Nick stand no-secrets naked in the shower together and the blood on her mingles with the water and swirls Psycho­-style down the plughole.  The film’s ending, more elaborate than the novel’s, is too protracted but the storytelling throughout is clear – Fincher’s handling of the broadcast media phenomenon that the Dunnes become, although it contains few surprises, is particularly accomplished.  The editing, by his usual cutter Kirk Baxter, is very crisp.

    David Fincher can’t, however, resolve what is fundamentally wrong with, or objectionable about, the source material.  Shorn of most of Amy’s the-evil-that-men-do invective, the film of Gone Girl comes across as more simply misogynist.  Fincher, reasonably enough, concentrates less on what Amy has to say than on what she is prepared to do to Nick and Desi – and to herself – in order to destroy them.  (Her blood-letting in her kitchen at home, designed to incriminate her husband, is only a warm-up for her masochistic self-harm in the lake house: in order to be able to claim that she was kept prisoner and repeatedly raped by abductor Desi, Amy binds her own wrists and ankles and penetrates herself with a wine bottle to simulate forced entry.)  As in the novel, once Amy is revealed to be still alive the big plot card has been played – with half the story still to go.  This inevitably switches the focus of attention from the mystery of what’s happened onto the characters of her and Nick – and they’re just not interesting.  The only satisfaction in the outcome to Gone Girl is that you feel they deserve each other – and to inflict themselves on each other, instead of on the audience.

    Rosamund Pike is good for as long as she’s playing the disappeared Amy – a tantalising, elusive figure.  Once the avenging Amy is fully on screen, Pike seems too lightweight for the role.  In the book, a little of Amy’s vindictive dynamism went a long way:  it may seem unfair therefore to complain that Pike is an image rather than a personality (especially since Gillian Flynn’s Amy is a fancy idea rather than a character to start with) but she lacks the charge that the role needs.   (In disguise, Pike’s Amy occasionally suggests photographs of Sylvia Plath, which puts an odd spin on the unhappy marriage being described in Gone Girl.)  Ben Affleck is an able actor but a dull presence; it’s a back-handed compliment to describe him as right for the part of Nick Dunne but he is.  Nick becomes a media hate figure largely because he doesn’t get emotional on camera the way that a husband in his situation is expected to do.  Affleck can’t make Nick’s inappropriate public manner, and its relationship with his private personality, as fascinating as this element was in A Cry in the Dark but you can hardly expect that:  Nick Dunne isn’t as complex a character as Lindy Chamberlain seems to have been (and Ben Affleck isn’t Meryl Streep).  Affleck’s acting is intelligent, though.  He convincingly becomes more animated whenever Nick has the opportunity for spontaneous expressions of selfishness; he’s particularly good when Nick gives his mea culpa television interview – insisting that he didn’t kill his wife but admitting he was a bad husband – which transforms his public image and (less credibly) causes Amy to think again.  You believe that Nick Dunne is shrewdly self-serving enough to learn how to perform effectively to camera.

    As Tanner Bolt, the flamboyant celebrity attorney who specialises in defending husbands accused of their wife’s murder, Tyler Perry adds a welcome zest and humour to proceedings. There are few characters in the novel with potential for comedy on screen so it’s a particular disappointment that Amy’s self-satisfied, touchy-feely parents are reduced to the drab pair that David Clennon and Lisa Banes bring to the screen.  As Go, Carrie Coon, although she shows some deadpan wit in the early stages, also veers towards the mournful.   Kim Dickens is good as the main detective, Rhonda Boney, persuasively blending human decency and professional discipline.  It’s a pity that Fincher rewards her efforts with a couple of small exchanges between Boney and her sidekick (Patrick Fugit) which, if anything, detract from Dickens’s strong characterisation.  Neil Patrick Harris does more than can be expected with the impossible role of Desi.  The cast also includes Emily Ratajowski as Nick’s mistress, and Missi Pyle and Sela Ward as cable television hosts.

    7 October 2014

  • The World of Apu

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Apur Sansar

    Satyajit Ray (1959)

    Plans to watch Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy this month in the proper sequence were thwarted – by a combination of my feebleness and a problem with the air conditioning in NFT1 on the evening I’d booked to see Pather Panchali and Aparajito back to back.  Although I felt guilty about it, I had to get out before the first film was over and didn’t return even after a breather.  I saw Pather Panchali on television, twenty years or so ago, but it’s frustrating that I’ve now seen The World of Apu, the last of the trilogy, but not the intervening Aparajito[1].  An additional frustration watching The World of Apu:  the whitish subtitles were often difficult to read – even if Ray’s actors are so expressive that you can usually get the gist of what they’re saying without the words.  (It’s interesting too – as it was in The Big City – that the characters choose to speak certain words and phrases in English rather than Bengali.)   The BFI’s programme notes for their Satyajit Ray season include a summary of the continuing work, sponsored by AMPAS, to preserve and restore Ray’s work.  On the evidence of this print, the project might usefully do some work on the subtitles too.   But The World of Apu is an emotionally supple and demanding film:  moaning about the subtitles makes me feel guilty all over again.

    In a brief prologue the camera shows a glowing reference which Apu’s college teacher has written for him.  Apu has completed his ‘intermediate certificate’.  The teacher wants him to continue with a full degree course but Apu hasn’t the money to pay for it.  He earns a little from private tutoring but not enough, as his landlord reminds Apu in an early scene, to pay the rent for a small room in a building next to a railway line.  Apu’s main interest is in working on a novel which, when he describes it to an old friend, Pulu, who looks him up, is strongly autobiographical.  The film’s many rich and remarkable sequences include the first one after the prologue.  Apu wakes to find that rainwater has dripped onto his bedclothes and the pages of his manuscript that he evidently went to sleep with.  He takes the bed sheets out onto a balcony to wash them in the rain and ends up almost dancing in the downpour, drenched and exultant.   Dressed and shaved, Apu goes out into Calcutta in search of employment but he doesn’t get far:  a teaching job he inquires about requires a graduate; he takes one look at workers in a pharmaceutical factory and returns home.  When he and Pulu go out that evening, the latter suggests office work but Apu rejects this too as soul-destroying.  ‘Life is for living’, he tells Pulu, and that opening rain dance expresses Apu’s sheer joy of being alive.

    The evening with Pulu, although it doesn’t occupy much screen time, moves through different stages – a meal, a walk over the railway bridge after dark (with clearly legible subtitles!) during which Apu recites poetry with feeling and too loudly.  There’s a continuing lively conversation between the two young men; this episode has an amplitude that makes you feel you’ve partaken of the whole experience.  Pulu invites Apu to come with him to his cousin’s wedding in a village called Khulna.  The passage that follows echoes the shifting quality of the evening with Pulu but in a more expansive way.  We watch the bride, Aparna, being got ready by her mother and other attendants and the arrival of the bridegroom’s retinue along the river bank, the groom borne in a litter, a band playing ‘For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow’.  Apu is seen lying asleep above the same river bank, a book of poetry on his chest.   As soon as the bridegroom appears it’s clear there’s something very wrong.   He’s evidently mentally ill and Aparna’s mother refuses to let the wedding go ahead.  If a marriage doesn’t take place at the appointed time, however, the bride is cursed – so a new bridegroom is required.   Pulu asks Apu if he’s willing.  Apu, unsurprisingly, refuses but, after mulling things over, changes his mind.   Satyajit Ray had the following to say about this part of the story:

    ‘A western viewer ignorant of orthodox Hindu customs must find the episode highly bizarre.  But since Apu himself finds it so, and since his action is prompted by compassion, the viewer accepts it on moral grounds, though given no opportunity to weigh the pros and cons of a seemingly irrational practice.’

    I think this is right – but also that a Western viewer is likely to find the idea of arranged marriage so odd anyway that what happens here can be accepted as an extension of a practice that already seems crazy.   And, as Ray suggests, Apu’s decision makes sense, both morally and because of his determination to experience life.

    Through his short-lived marriage to Aparna, Apu has intense experiences of life and death.  The sequences of their domestic life together are effortlessly intimate and eccentrically funny.  Aparna returns to Khulna, leaving Apu in Calcutta, in the boring office job he’s now taken to pay the rent.  The baby is premature and, although he survives, Aparna dies in childbirth. The lightness of the marital scenes makes the intervention of death all the more shocking and dislocating:  it brings the fluidity of The World of Apu to a halt – Apu seems nearly unable to move, and Ray’s camera slows down with him.  Soumitra Chatterjee, who plays Apu, looks to age decades.  An earlier volatility of feeling returns in the final part of the film – in terms of what happens in the relationship between Apu and his son Kajal – but the weight of bereavement never quite lifts, and this is right:  the brutal rupture of Aparna’s death can’t be erased.   While she is back in Khulna, she and Apu exchange letters and we hear Aparna’s voice reading one of hers, threatening playfully that if she doesn’t get the letter he owes her she’ll never love him again – ‘Never, never, never’:  the words are repeated, and their effect is soon very poignant.

    The widowed Apu abandons his novel – standing on a high hill, he lets the wind carry the pages of the manuscript away.  He leaves Calcutta and goes to work in a mine.  He occasionally sends money for his son to Aparna’s family in Khulna but cannot bring himself to see the child, whose life he blames for his wife’s death.  Kajal, who lives with his grandfather, is undisciplined (on his first appearance, we see his face only after he’s removed a disturbing beast-bird mask).  When Apu returns to Khulna – following a visit and pleading from the now professionally successful but still loyal Pulu – the child at first refuses to speak to him.   Apu, having left Kajal’s grandfather funds for the boy’s education, is leaving when he sees the small figure of his son watching him, following him.  The film ends with Apu marching triumphantly forward through the landscape, carrying Kajal on his shoulders.  Because this final part of The World of Apu is so emotionally tough, the happy ending feels hard won.  I felt that Satyajit Ray had earned it but didn’t fully believe it – because Ray has so convincingly and unsparingly realised Apu’s and Kajal’s feelings for each other.  The accusing eyes of the son who’s been rejected by his father also reflect the father’s resentment of the child.   Surely these feelings, and the scarred early years of Kajal’s childhood, can’t be fully overcome?

    I’m sorry that so much of the detail of The World of Apu was lost on me – through not having seen the first two parts of the trilogy beforehand and through my ignorance of Indian religious mythology and tradition.  When Aparna’s mother first sees Apu she compares him with the god Krishna:  I missed the fact that Krishna, like Apu, is a flute-player.   The absence of any reaction on the part of Aparna’s relatively wealthy family to the news that Apu is without means struck me as an omission but perhaps wouldn’t seem so to a better informed viewer.   Even so, the resonances within the film are clear:  for example, in an early scene Apu walks back home along the railway line and shouts at some pigs that are rooting around to get out of the way; the bereaved Apu stands by the same line contemplating suicide as a train approaches – when the train has passed it’s revealed that a pig has been hit by it.   The hoots of the trains and the notes of Apu’s flute mingle expressively, and the score by Ravi Shankar heightens the emotions of the story without overpowering it.   Images like the men labelling vials in the pharmaceutical factory, one of them meeting Apu’s eyes as he watches in dismay, are extraordinarily succinct and powerful.   Soumitra Chatterjee, who featured in many later Ray films and remains a leading figure in Indian film culture, has a wonderfully animated face and his characterisation is richly layered:  he’s unusually skilled at suggesting someone thinking hard and deep.   Sharmila Tagore, who has also enjoyed enduring success as an actress, was only fourteen years old when she played Aparna.  You can sense her tentativeness but she is naturally expressive and humorous.  Swapan Mukherjee is Pulu and Alok Chakravarty is Kajal.  Ray’s screenplay was adapted, like the second part of Aparajito, from Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novel of the same name.

    27 August 2013

    [1] Afternote:  Fast forward nine years … I saw Pather Panchali and Aparajito at BFI’s retrospective to mark (slightly belatedly) the centenary of Satyajit Ray’s birth.

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