The most important thing about David Fincher is that he is a misanthrope. His dim view of humanity is on display throughout his career, if you know where to look, and he clearly sympathizes with characters who share his marrow-deep pessimism. The second most important thing about David Fincher, the thing that makes him a great filmmaker, is his persistent curiosity about humanity. He likes to expose uncomfortable things about human nature – maybe he even relishes the opportunity – and his method is more droll than desperate.
That tension between misanthropy and amusement is clearest in Gone Girl, which may not be Fincher’s best film, but it is certainly his funniest. It is an anti-romantic comedy, a film with almost zero sympathetic characters, and whose central purpose is to expose the foundational lie of all marriages. His source material, the massive bestseller by Gillian Flynn, is a twisty thriller that invents a new kind of femme fatale, along with a new kind of noir-adjacent dopey hero. The storytelling masterstroke is Fincher recognizing that all this material is comic, not salacious.
Many fans of the novel, myself among them, were initially skeptical with the casting. Ben Affleck plays Nick Dunne, a thirtysomething hapless bro with aspirations of depth, while Rosamund Pike plays his wife Amy, a model of sophistication who goes missing. To watch the film is to realize we should trust Fincher: Affleck’s performance is complex, a test of our sympathies, while Pike makes a meal out of her first meaty leading role. I interviewed Pike many years ago, and she struck me as the kind of woman who could not play stupid even if she wanted to. She spent the whole interview flirting with me – I was not going to stop her, since she is beautiful and charming – but we both knew it was not because she found me attractive. She flirted with me for her amusement, and nothing more. How very Amy.
Flynn adapted her own script, and she shrewdly jumps backward and forward through time, revealing key clues that make us wonder whether Nick murdered his wife or whether Amy is a master manipulator. The latter turns out to be true: Amy staged her own kidnapping and murder, just so she could get revenge on Nick for his abuse and mediocrity. Another great thing about the script is that the particulars of the crime are not the real twists. The real developments happen in the minds of Nick and Amy, two flawed people who come to understand each other but must communicate in coded secrets. By the end of the film, they find a measure of understanding, and only Fincher – not Flynn – has the insight to suggest this is synonymous with marital bliss.
Gone Girl is a talky script, full of characters crystalizing what they think. Sometimes they speak privately, like Kim Dickens and Patrick Fugit as the detectives assigned to the case, and other times they confide via voiceover, like Amy’s regular voiceovers. That is because not all that much really happens in the film: it is light on incident, except for one key murder, and is much more about perception. As if to bring this point home, Tyler Perry is brilliantly cast as Tanner Bolt, a hotshot defense attorney who intuits that the entirety of public is the real jury.
Talky dialogue and attention to interiority could be boring in the hands of another director, except Fincher and his actors understand that every line-reading and flourish of body language tells us a lot more. Nick is not merely a bro, he is a underestimated man who cannot see through his wife’s deception because he loves her too much. Amy is not merely a master manipulator; she is a deeply vain woman who blames her life on everyone but herself. Only Carrie Coon’s Margo, Nick’s twin sister, is sympathetic, because she serves as a Greek Chorus for how we all feel. Late in film, Margo desperately tells Nick he is breaking her heart, a throwaway line that is closest the film comes to pathos.
In an interview with James Corden from 2017, the actress Anne Hathaway said her favorite comedy is Gone Girl. The studio audience was shocked, not because it’s a bad comedy, but because they could not fathom how someone could find it so funny. Of course, the shocked audience only underlines Hathaway’s argument. Flynn’s script is sympathetic to Amy, a woman who lies with every cell in her body, because her daily “performance” is exactly what modern women must do every day. Flynn just has the wherewithal to exaggerate, and Fincher has the macabre genius to mine that exaggeration for comic wisdom, rather than problematic feminism. You can see that genius in the murder scene, a bloody Grand Guignol sequence where Amy murders Desi (Neil Patrick Harris), her ex who speaks in the right platitudes but still wants a prisoner, not a partner. You see it when Amy’s parents go through the motions of doting care, and realize what they really want is book sales, not her daughter’s safety. You see it when other lackeys, including Nick’s young lover, yearn for attention and not love.
At the end of the film, maybe Nick and Amy find love. They commit to one another, and announce a baby is on the way. Who cares that she attempted to frame him, and in his anger, he crossed a line and put his hands on her? Certainly not the public, the journalists, and lawyers who claim to want the truth. Certainly not Fincher, who sees through these characters and finds the ugliness that informs their essential nature. For all intents and purposes, the shared agreement at the end of Gone Girl is synonymous with a functional marriage. That realization horrifies Gillian Flynn.
To David Fincher, it is fucking hilarious.
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