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