Gone Girl

 Director David Fincher traffics in darkness. Whether it’s in his films Seven, Fight Club, Panic Room, or The Social Network, his movies are always interested in what goes on in the shadows both visually and thematically. Visually speaking, Fincher always achieves a hazy, dim look to his films. Whatever light we do see in a scene is usually antiseptic and white or lurid and yellow, like a streetlamp you don’t want to be caught under. As beautifully composed as Fincher’s shots are, they are never warm or welcoming to look at. He manages to make the brightest sunlit scene appear shadowy, as though daylight is fighting a losing battle with the imminent darkness.  

Thematically, Fincher only makes films about the dark corners of the human heart, the depths people sink to in moments of extremity. Extreme greed, violence, lust, obsession, and insanity are engines of the stories he tells. It’s no accident that Fincher’s last film, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, was marketed as “the feel-bad movie of the year.” He’s not interested in films about redemption.

This brings us to Fincher’s latest film, Gone Girl, the adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling novel. It’s the story of Nick and Amy Dunne, a once happy couple that has become spectacularly dysfunctional. On the day of their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick, played by Ben Affleck, comes home to discover overturned furniture, broken glass, and his wife missing. Police scrutiny quickly turns to him as all signs point to the likelihood that the frustrated, dissatisfied husband killed his wife and tried to make it look like a kidnapping. Affleck plays Dunne with a kind of crumpled arrogance and simmering unhappiness and we’re perfectly willing to buy the possibility that he might just be guilty. 

Amy, as played by British actor Rosamund Pike, is beautiful, brilliant, and unpredictable. We learn (or think we learn) about her courtship and early marriage to Nick through a series of narrated diary entries and flashbacks that contrast with the media firestorm that builds up around Nick as the search for his wife intensifies.

Now, it’s a thriller and there are plenty of plot twists that I’m not going to spoil here. If you’ve read the book, you already know how it ends, and If you haven’t, I’m not going to be the one to ruin it for you.

I will say it is a profoundly dark film. It is the story of unpleasant people doing unpleasant things. As I tried to decide what I thought it about it all, I finally figured out a way to interpret the film. Rather than thinking of it simply as a contemporary thriller, I understood it better when I began to think of it as an example of film noir.

 When we think of film noir, we envision black and white movies from the 40s and 50s that featured private eyes in trench coats and fedoras, guns, tough talk, and dangerous beautiful dames. Noirs always had morally ambiguous protagonists. We never know if the hero is actually heroic or just out for himself. They always had a femme fatale – a dangerous, calculating, sexually powerful woman who was willing to do whatever it took to get what she wanted. They were often shocking in their depictions of both overt sexuality and brutal violence. And true noirs never had a happy ending.

Gone Girl fits the bill perfectly. Besides the presence of color, the only non-traditional noir element of the film is the setting – classic noirs are set in the city, their dark, rain slick streets representing the twisty, confusing corners of the human heart. Gone Girl is set almost entirely in the suburbs – and for the 21^st century, that’s probably an appropriate change. I would argue as much alienation, dislocation, and dysfuntion happens in the burbs these days as anywhere else, - maybe more -  and the pleasant clapboard McMansions of the Dunne’s neighborhood can easily be read as symbolic of the pleasant exterior that hides the darkness inside.

Gone Girl is a fantastic example of how these old Hollywood tropes can be updated in ways that are compelling and vital rather than nostalgic and cute. As smart as it is in that way, it’s not a film I’d want to see again. It’s too graphic and rough for a softie like me. I like my films leavened with a little redemption, even if it’s very little.  I can respect Gone Girl for the well-crafted work that it is but not want to stare into that dark room again.