“Gone Girl,” the new film from David Fincher based on the best-selling book by Gillian Flynn, does not need much explanation. If you don’t know what it is or have never heard its name, you probably don’t pay attention to things like the Internet or TV or newspapers. But to get it out of the way, the gist is this: the missing girl at the center of the book is Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike) and the main suspect in her disappearance is her husband, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck). What happens within that one line synopsis is weirdly funny, constantly on edge, and horribly depressing. The film premiered September 26 at the New York Film Festival to a packed crowd of journalists, and it has retained tight control on my fragile headspace ever since. If you’ve read the book you’ll know that’s not a great headspace to be in, especially if you’re in a relationship.
“Gone Girl” is really a love story in its own bizarre way — a story about how love is impossible or meaninglessness or simply dishonest, perhaps, but still a love story. And Fincher, in his clinical dissection of the cat-and-mouse game the couple plays, is taking a stab at contemporary upper-middle-class values. All the things we’re told we want, all the goals and aspirations that have become locked in our collective conscious as markers of a meaningful life, the film seems to be saying, are a sham. We’re all actors in a constantly shifting narrative that’s out of our control and deeply influenced by the media that surrounds us. Happiness has nothing to do with keeping a relationship going. It’s all about knowing the role you’re supposed to play and staying in character. It’s a horribly bleak way to look at human relationships, bordering on the nihilistic. But since Flynn’s “Gone Girl” was a huge success, I have to assume there is more truth to that view than I’d like to admit — truth in numbers or something like that.
Here I should say that I have not read the book. I wanted to experience the movie free of preconceptions, as a work existing in a world separate from its origins. This was a decision I was glad I made. I’m not sure how closely the movie follows the book, or what was left out — something I’m sure people will fret over. These conversations often mean nothing when thinking about a film as a film. But what Fincher does with the material, completely detached from its previous incarnation between paperback covers, is pretty astonishing. The film opens on a strange sequence of quick cuts of suburban postcard tranquility — quiet houses, perfectly manicured lawns, empty streets — that zooms past us. It implies tension or suspense, and then jumps right out so suddenly that I was sure something was wrong in the projection booth. Titles appear and disappear before they can even be registered. It’s a jarring shift in tone and makes for a disorientating sequence.
For most of the film Fincher isn’t working in his normal modes. There is a sense of dread that lingers throughout the almost three-hour running time, but it’s different than “Zodiac,” to throw out on example. In that film, the accumulation of information — and all Fincher’s films in some way are about how we organize information — drives the characters insane, sometimes literally. It’s different here. There are scenes of intense violence, but they do not anchor the story in any way, and if anything they seem odd within the rest of the film. “Gone Girl” is not trying to shock its audience. It’s more about surprise, which is a different thing. What you think is there is not there. You never really know what is happening, and you never will.
There’s a lot going on in “Gone Girl,” from an exceptional score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to a larger incitement of the media’s obsession with tragedy, not to mention Fincher’s dense visual style, which seems at once naturalistic and overly precise, as if the camera is aware its creating a semblance of reality within the frame instead of simply capturing reality. I’ll be thinking about this one for a long time and will need to see it again, and maybe again and again, before I put more words down. For now, I’m going to go hug my girlfriend and make sure she doesn’t want to kill me.
