Gone Girl

In the opening shot of David Fincher's Gone Girl (2014), we see a beautiful woman, sleepy and, apparently, post-coital -- "What are you thinking?  Are you thinking of me?  What have we done to ourselves?" a voice questions.  Chaucer's Wife of Bath spoke of the "wo that is in mariage," and this seems to be the subject of Fincher's film, paranoid uncertainty with respect to the answer to these fundamental questions whispered in the first scene.  What if the companion of your bed were, indeed, not only thinking of you, but, also, deviously and assiduously plotting your doom?  What if your wife (or husband) was not only your adversary, a necessary condition of marriage, but, also, a monstrous nemesis, the embodiment of a catastrophe custom-designed for you, and only you?  This is the lurid premise of Gone Girl, a film featuring a femme fatale so completely calculating and lethal as to be almost comically absurd.  Gone Girl is about marriage, the way that de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom is about sex or the way that Euripides' Medea is about motherhood.  It's difficult to write about Gone Girl without revealing plot twists.  Normally, the fear of "spoilers" doesn't inhibit me -- but Gone Girl is primarily entertaining because of its melodramatic and shocking plot and, since I (reluctantly) recommend this movie, I don't want to deprive the viewer of the modest, but very real, pleasures of surprise that the film affords.  Therefore, my narrative summary is perforce a bit obtuse and abstract.  A dimwitted hunk played by Ben Affleck, a man a bit like John Heard in Body Heat, encounters a beautiful and highly accomplished woman.  This woman, Amy, is famous because her life has served as the model for a series of wildly popular children's books featuring a spunky character called "Amazing Amy."  The hunk marries the enigmatic woman, drawn to her by their sexual rapport.  When both characters are laid-off and the husband's mother is diagnosed with cancer, the couple move to a small town in rural Missouri.  Amy uses her trust fund to buy a bar in town that her husband manages with his loyal twin sister.  Then, as their marriage is deteriorating, Amy simply vanishes.  Forensic evidence in their home suggests that the woman has been killed, probably by her husband.  As evidence mounts that the husband is the murderer, cable news networks pick up the story and Affleck's character is tried and convicted in the media.  Supported by his twin sister, the husband hires an expensive lawyer who specializes in defending men accused of murdering their wives.  The defense team is convinced that Amy has fled the marriage and is hiding somewhere; their strategy is to flush her out into the open.  Amy seems to have engineered an extraordinarily complex and air-tight scheme to frame her husband for her murder.  As hysteria mounts in the community -- there are candle-light vigils and the streets are clogged with TV broadcasting trucks -- the story becomes increasingly bizarre and, indeed, grotesque.  A number of sequences are completely "over the top" -- that is, exaggerated to the point of becoming almost comic.  Fincher's little Missouri town features a subterranean ruin filled with sinister criminals and there is an immensely creepy rich man with a scary mansion that also serves as a kind of dungeon.  The film hints at all sorts of perversity including incest and sado-masochism and ends on a nightmarish note that is ludicrous but, certainly, horrific and frightening.  Ben Affleck is effective as the fly caught in the Black Widow's elaborate web and the femme fatale, played by Rosamunde Pike, who has the demeanor of a bruised Madonna, is eerily vacant, sometimes alarmingly plain and, in other shots, radiantly beautiful -- the actress embodies sheer malice, and, although her motives are apparently insane and possibly incommunicable, she is certainly a frightening figure.  Disrespected by a casual acquaintance, Amy waits until the girl goes into the bathroom and, then, calmly spits into her Big Gulp Mountain Dew.  Fincher uses muted colors and his direction of the minor characters is impeccable -- indeed, the supporting cast is more believable and compelling than the two principals, both of whom seem like the figures in a stormy Baroque canvas, trapped in histrionic postures that really don't make any sense in the real world.  A lady homicide detective embodies cool, skeptical intelligence and her yokel side-kick discloses a subtle, class-based animus against the unlucky husband.  Tyler Perry is charismatic as the cynical defense lawyer, the two actors portraying Amy's parents are unctuous and creepy, and Neil Patrick Harris is frighteningly intense as the monomaniacal rich man.  There is a vivid portrait of a white-trash couple, a hillbilly Bonnie and Clyde, hanging around a ramshackle resort in the Ozarks and a rogue's gallery of casually vicious media "talking heads" -- the parody of CNN's Nancy Grace is particularly vivid, cruel, and truthful, sophisticated satire of a high order.  Indeed, all the supporting roles in the large cast are exceptionally good, probably better than the rather improbable script deserves.  The soundtrack by Trent Reznor is suitably sinister and, sometimes, yields moments of quiet grandeur -- there is a haunting, triumphal theme that sometimes serves as a counterpoint to the action, underlying exterior scenes of processions of police cars and broadcasting trucks, and that music is very beautiful. a somber hymn.  The film is exquisitely crafted, exceptionally gripping, and, more or less, totally bonkers.  The last hour is wholly unbelievable but, nonetheless, has a sort of dream-like intensity.  When the resurrected Amy gives a press-conference covered from head to toe in gore, the image is completely absurd and, yet, also horribly compelling -- it's ghastly romanticism is like something from Brian De Palma's prime.