Every year, my futile hope that David Fincher will return to the pungent auteurism of his mid-aughts output seems more and more futile. I was never really excited for him to potentially direct the Steve Jobs story, but was a “World War Z” sequel any more promising?
Fincher has directed the pilot of Netflix’s upcoming drama series “Mindhunter,” which will see a release later this year. The seductive trailer looks to be a welcome, appropriately shadowy return to Fincher’s preferred wheelhouse of mad killers and obsessive loners. Still, is it too much to ask for something approximating the greatness of “Zodiac” or “The Social Network”? I’m thinking I’d even take a “Benjamin Button”-style experiment in radical style-for-style’s sake at this point.
This is not me saying I don’t enjoy parts of Fincher’s “Dragon Tattoo” adaptation, or his cool, cruel and mostly mesmerizing “Gone Girl”. These are muscular, confidently made, darkly comic thrillers that more or less check all their required boxes, even if they make you yearn for the reservoir of personal anguish (not to mention the fastidious commitment to audio-visual perfection) that marked the director’s early works.
By my estimation, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and “Gone Girl” are the only two films in Fincher’s filmography that feel as though they could have (potentially) been made by other directors — nevermind the fact that they’re both adaptations of popular paperbacks with considerable respective readerships. Of course, both films contain Fincher’s signature gruesome detachment and his astute eye for framing and symmetry. And yet these elements sometimes feel deployed in service of a story that feels, shall we say, impersonal for the guy who sewed the tissue connecting lifestyle pornography with domestic terrorism in “Fight Club,” the “Clockwork Orange” of Generation X.
In “Gone Girl”, Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike circle each other hungrily like two snakes ensnared in a duplicitous and deadly game of entrapment. Gillian Flynn’s controversial, ice-pick sharp suburban meta-noir, which Fincher generally adheres to with great faith, is more than just yesterday’s buzzed-about bestseller. Flynn’s flawed, often hilarious book is also a hip, sensationalized treatise on modern marriage, gender relations and the 21st-century media frenzy. Say what you will about the author’s willful rebuttal of good taste: it’s nothing if not timely.
It’s tempting to see why this lurid, vaguely satirical material appealed to Fincher. Even in his later, more overtly mainstream output, the former MTV whiz kid remains fascinated by the sinister duplicity of surfaces: how language, identity and ultimately, life itself, can be a grotesque manipulation of the plain and simple truth.
The real horror in “Gone Girl” lies in the fact that, for the first time, the threat doesn’t stem from the unhinged mind of a psychotic murderer, the dank basement of a dive bar that doubles as a boxing club, or a New York brownstone under siege from thieves. The snakes in Fincher’s most recent film are your neighbors, your friends, the people you see at the grocery store every day. Like “Fight Club’s” Tyler Durden says, these are the people who connect your calls and haul your trash.
Menace ripples like a gorgeous decorative pool just beneath the inky, sleek surfaces of Fincher’s film, lacquering everything in a lustrous, borderline-Satanic sheen of black. Ben Affleck, himself no stranger to being disparaged the media, gives the most subtle performance of his career as Nick Dunne: a grown-up frat boy of a man who comes home from a morning slosh of bourbon to find his living room littered with broken glass, blood splattered about his elegant mid-century furnishings, and no immediate visible sign of his wife, Amy.
Amy is an untouchable blonde beauty embodied in a controlled, terrifying performance by Rosamund Pike. In flashbacks detailing her storybook romance to Nick on the dreamy streets of New York City, we sense a happier life that could have been — one that seems like a distant, almost purposefully exaggerated memory when the viewer is confronted with the passive-aggressive resentments of the film’s present-day, where Amy and Nick lived in a hemmed-in suburban domicile that doubles as a kind of prison.
As Nick recedes into junk food and video game binges, Amy ultimately becomes frightened of her husband’s eerie remove and latent aggression. When questioned by the authorities following his wife’s disappearance, Nick is tense, aloof, cagey and seemingly without sympathy for his vanished spouse. Did Nick murder his wife? Fincher does open the film with Affleck’s character telling us he’d like to smash his spouse’s head open and play around with her brains. The character doesn’t use language that blunt, but the implication is all the more chilling for being so affably restrained.
To reveal anymore would be to spoil some of the movie’s sicko surprises, suffice to say the second and third act sees Fincher throwing realism to the wind and going Brian De Palma on everyone’s ass. While both Fincher and De Palma share an affinity for the Grand Guginol set piece — a collective nod to their shared cinematic idol, Alfred Hitchcock — it must be said that Fincher works better in tense, scaled-down, real-life scenarios than De Palma ever did. He’s more adept at realism — melodrama has never been his strong suit. This makes “Gone Girl’s” decision to pivot into blood-splattered hysteria in its concluding passages all the more curious. The movie is arguably as stylistically rapturous as anything Fincher’s ever made — is there another director alive who can make the suburbs look so gloomily uninviting? And yet, as with “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” I occasionally found myself wondering if a surplus of style was actually working to the movie’s benefit, or if it was a kind of distraction from a fairly meager story.
Looking at this performance through the lens of 2017 Ben Affleck is interesting. After he became a kind of critical punching bag with the one-two punch of “Batman Versus Superman: Dawn of Justice” and “Live by Night,” the Boston actor turned into a living, breathing Meme: here he was, huffing E-cigarettes, slouching in designer shades, looking generally miserable. It’s unfortunate that the shallow derision that has followed Mr. Affleck for most of his career hasn’t settled, because he’s a genuinely fine actor and “Gone Girl” is one of his better performances to date. Obviously, there’s a Meta component to casting Affleck as a man that the general populace loves to hate, and it’s one that Fincher wisely takes advantage of. As for Pike, this is the role that should have made her a star: she sells the movie’s appalling third-act twist with such conviction, you’d think you were watching a young Nicole Kidman.
The two leads are anchored by an almost uniformly strong supporting cast, particularly Kim Dickens as a wry, good-tempered female cop, Patrick Fugit as a “gee-whiz” milquetoast, the marvelous Carrie Coon as Nick’s unwaveringly loyal sister, and Scoot McNairy as a squirmy nerd who may or may not have raped Amy. Personally, I would watch a whole movie about Tyler Perry (a revelation here) as an oily, cocksure attorney who tells Nick and Amy “you two are the most fucked-up people I’ve ever met. And I specialize in fucked-up people.”
While “Gone Girl” is still technically an adaptation, the end result is still very much a David Fincher film, even if it’s a somewhat far cry from his early masterpieces. The director’s composition and pace remains as unerringly precise as a switch watch, and his ability to suffuse any story with a deeply lived-in sense of dread gives what might otherwise be a slipshod picture a nervy kick of pure, unfiltered verve.
I understand that at this point in his career Fincher is essentially the best Director-for-Hire a studio can hope to get. He’s expressed a clear interest in making commercial movies for the foreseeable future, which means that some of his fans, like myself, may have to reconcile with the fact that Fincher may never make another movie as arresting as “Se7en” or as eerie and mannered as his underrated, Michael Douglas-starring shocker “The Game”. And in the end, that’s okay. “Gone Girl,” though it’s certainly not Fincher’s most essential work, is still a great anti-date movie, and an entertainment that’s weirdly emblematic of the twisted, self-worshiping present we currently occupy. Best to see it with someone you hate.
