David Fincher overthinks Gone Girl
No book is really unfilmable, though of course watchability is another matter. But some movie adaptations prove to be uncastable. That’s the main problem with David Fincher’s flawlessly engineered but inert Gone Girl, which asks more of Rosamund Pike than she can deliver. More, in fact, than just about anybody else could have, either — a limitation made plain by the movie’s slow storytelling.
Pike plays the title character of Gillian Flynn’s novel, which was the publishing sensation of 2012 and was therefore destined for Scarlett O’Hara-level debate about just who should have the role. Reese Witherspoon, who keeps a producer credit here, optioned the book for herself but yielded to Fincher when he signed on to direct and had other ideas. Olivia Wilde, Natalie Portman and Rooney Mara showed up on various speculative lists. You could picture them (and others) as icy sociopaths or as hypnotic desiderata, perhaps, but not as both, the way Flynn’s gleefully unrealistic story requires.
That mandate hinders the movie Gone Girl (which uses first-time screenwriter Flynn’s script). Over its 400-plus pages, Flynn’s novel casts an uneasy spell not because of its imposing schematic — chapters that alternate voice between a maybe-dead wife and a maybe-murderer husband — but because those two voices are utterly true to the plot’s absurd motivations. Viewed rather than read (despite voice-over guidance from both characters, some of it necessary but most superfluous), the onscreen version of Gone Girl‘s couple wanders through events as though guided by a book club yelling instructions at the screen. There’s precious little urgency in this 145-minute exercise, nearly all of it belonging to Ben Affleck, who plays the husband. And what insanity remains feels even more improbably deliberate than the book at its most batshit.
What’s so crazy? Marriage, for one thing — the sustained confidence game undertaken by anyone who hopes to keep a mate as engaged as he or she was at first blush. Transparency, for another thing — the incompatibility between fascinating someone and letting yourself be known by someone. Flynn’s book isn’t a mystery or a thriller. It’s a fantasy novel about how much one woman hates it when her husband asks, “What are you thinking?” and about the imaginative extremes that men suspect lurk just beyond the reach of that question. What am I thinking? I am thinking of an elaborate hurt for you.
The woman is Amy Elliott, privileged daughter of parents who made a fortune by turning her into the children’s-book character Amazing Amy, and wife to Missouri-bred lunk Nick Dunne (Affleck, great for the first time). Pike’s Amy is chilly from the start, though, making it hard to see her as Nick at one time must have. At the party where they meet, a moment recounted in flashback, she comes off like a robot who learned how to flirt by binge-watching Desperate Housewives.
The rest you know, having read the book or having overheard two or more people who loved it. There’s adultery, there’s a disappearance, there are violations of trust, and there’s a slaying. (These events achieve a modicum of believability, thanks to supporting actors Tyler Perry, Carrie Coon and Kim Dickens, each terrific.) It should be ideal material for Fincher, whose filmography includes a ready companion in his 1997 movie, The Game (which also uses a puppet to creep out its main man), and who usually flatters our intelligence by prizing our dread of what we already know over our healthy fear of the unknown. But Pike’s Amy — and Fincher’s conception of Flynn’s darkly amusing connubial odyssey — further flattens what’s already a dubiously two-dimensional invention. Is our e-reader age’s collective nightmare of failed marriage really just about the wife being the smart one in the family?
