Film Carew: Gone Girl

David Fincher has described Gone Girl, his 10th feature film, as being “about the façade of the good neighbour, the good Christian, the good wife”. But the prism through which the story - adapted from a popular novel by Gillian Flynn - looks at this, says more than the theme itself. It’s, effectively, about Missing White Woman Syndrome, that phenomenon in which the media, a loose collective galvanised only when in the throes of mob mentality, obsesses over the abduction of someone deemed Too Beautiful, Too Wealthy, and Too White to ‘deserve’ such a fate.

Part of the reason the film works - and it does - is because Fincher commits to the book’s text.

In its portrayal of the feeding-frenzy that comes when a news story captures the public imagination (and/or garners ratings), Gone Girl paints the media in a profoundly unpleasant light, an act that seems, in many ways, to be its raison d’être. But it stops short of the outright social satire of, say, Bobcat Goldthwait’s Father Of The Year, in which the late Robin Williams rewrites the popular perception of his deceased, despicable-when-alive son, as the film skewers the hypocrisy of faddish mourning and media canonisation of the recently-deceased.

Gone Girl doesn't have the clarity of simple social satire, but saying what it does have - and what it actually is - is tricky. Part of the reason the film works - and it does - is because Fincher commits to the book’s text, allowing the varied plot-twisty revelations to change the film’s feeling as it goes. Fincher’s career is long on literary adaptations, but this one clocks closer to the B-movie pulp of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo than the sweeping Oscar-bait of The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button.

It begins as if panhandling for Gold Statues, with Ben Affleck playing the husband who comes home on the morning of his fifth anniversary to find his wife, Rosamund Pike, has vanished in ‘mysterious circumstances’. But Affleck is notably less-than-sad his girl is suddenly gone. And, to the media witch-hunt covering every press-conference with escalating self-congratulation, this surely means he must’ve murdered his wife; made her not just missing, but vanish. When Tyler Perry’s Tyler Perry swans onto screen as Affleck’s freshly-hired, press-savvy celebrity-attorney, he’s concerned less with justice, more with trying to “realign the public perception”; the Land of the Free, as ever, the home of the Trial By Media.

Gone Girl moves with a familiar mystery structure: as the procedural continues apace - with Kim Dickens as the wry, unruffled local cop investigating the case - the story pirouettes back into the past, taking the absent figure, the media cipher of the Blonde Wife, and bringing Pike to life. The flashbacks to the initial Affleck/Pike courtship are told super-fast and come filled with unconvincing banter, but this, too, seems like a stylistic choice: a way of planting the subliminal seeds of the unreliability of memory, of character, of narrator.

When they meet, our Guy and Girl are budding New York writers; he of upwardly-mobile ambition, she born into status and privilege. But when the years are unkind - “add one recession, subtract two jobs” - they end up living in a McMansion in Missouri, the epitome of the miserable couple. Gone Girl happily depicts Middle America as a hellscape: an abandoned shopping-mall, haunted by the homeless, addicts, and peddlers, comes straight out of a post-apocalyptic movie. “This place literally smells like faeces,” winces upper-crust mom-in-law Lisa Banes, when she blows into in Small Town America to search for her daughter. The flyover states are a place where once-happy people lose their happiness, where those once full of life just give up and die.

Flynn’s text saves its most lacerating strokes for marriage itself; the blessed union a place of resentment, control, pain, war, and delusion. “I’m the cunt you married,” Pike spits, when the flashbacks start to turn truly nasty, a theatrical moment that gives rise to the idea of Gone Girl as a masculine anxiety nightmare. “I’m sick of being picked apart by women,” Affleck whines, at one point, playing the victim. Pike, it turns out, is no vanished trophy wife, but a vixen not taking her Middle American imprisonment meekly.

“I’m the cunt you married,” Pike spits, when the flashbacks start to turn truly nasty, a theatrical moment that gives rise to the idea of Gone Girl as a masculine anxiety nightmare.

When Gone Girl wholly handballs the narrative to her, the film performs its most impressive reverse; pulling out of its noir-ish, male-panic downward-spiral and becoming far more theatrical and thoughtful, far more audacious and silly. The marriage-as-hell horrors initially seem indebted to something like Claude Chabrol’s L’Enfer, which wore its opinion of the institution in its title. But as the revelations mount, Gone Girl is reminiscent of everything from Basic Instinct to The War Of The Roses, the final reel finding the film finally taking the evolutionary leap into outright comedy.

The tone remains, throughout, dark and eerie: Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor's unease-inducing score and Fincher's well-honed genre-movie chops giving the film a sustained, dour mood. But by its end, Gone Girl’s gone to a curious conceptual place: as its Missing-Wife parable is turned into ridiculous potboiler, its study of media tiptoes smartly, symbolically into social media. With Affleck’s life turned into television fodder, Fincher explores how performing for the cameras has become a standard, sustained human state; the omnipresence of online profiles and CCTV cameras turning 21st-century existence into a sustained pantomime. Gone Girl isn’t just about the façade of the good neighbour, but the façade of contemporary life.