Gone Girl

One of the key moments at the onset of Gillian Flynn’s novel “Gone Girl”, and one of the key images in David Fincher’s film adaptation, is Nick Dunne’s “killer smile”.

Flynn’s description has a wry double meaning obvious to anyone. He’s flashed this plucky grin at a press conference for his missing wife, and it hardly bodes well for his appearance to the media, public or police.

In Fincher’s film, Ben Affleck splashes on the movie star charisma for that crucial second, just enough time to send our heads spinning.

Both Fincher and Flynn, who also wrote the screenplay, are receptive to the miniscule gestures that can shape perception. They recognize how timing and spin in the contemporary media can shift the tides in an instant. They understand that people are often only as bad as we perceive them. “Gone Girl” is all about these perceptions, and while one of the strengths of Flynn’s masterpiece novel rested in its structure of alternating POVs from Nick to his wife Amy, Fincher’s brilliance is in his ability to balance them both.

Watching “Gone Girl” is like gnawing at a nagging itch, with each detail of Nick and Amy Dunne’s unraveling marriage and her impending disappearance continuing to burrow into your skin and jab at your sides. Fincher is remarkably attentive to the expressions, emotions and tones of voice that in sensitive situations like this can make us conflicted, uncertain and on edge. His film is as aware of the ways we project ourselves in the modern age as “The Social Network” did before, but “Gone Girl” also combines the meticulous mystery of “Zodiac” and the feminist charge of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”.

Yet “Gone Girl” is not a traditional caper. It’s quietly unsettling rather than nervously thrilling, and it’s calmly witty and funny in a way that complicates the movie and the characters’ ice-cold tone even further.

Nick and Amy Dunne (Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike) live in an upper-middle class mansion in an otherwise rundown Missouri suburb. The recession has left them both jobless transplants from New York, with Nick pouring the couple’s savings into a bar while Amy sits at home with her hobbies. The morning of their fifth anniversary, their door is left open, there are signs of a struggle in their living room, and Amy is nowhere to be found.

All is not well in the Dunne household, neither in the crime scene nor in the state of their marriage. Detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) starts to suspect Nick of foul play when he seems oblivious to his wife’s hobbies, friends or blood type. And evidence in the home has all signs pointing to something fishy: a mopped up blood stain on the kitchen floor, delicate picture frames left untouched during the struggle, and an envelope conspicuously labeled “Clue One”, a riddle Amy leaves for Nick during each anniversary.

Intercut with these procedural sequences are flashbacks to Nick and Amy’s courtship via her diary. For as distant as the two are now, it’s clear when they were dating that they have a brilliant chemistry and sharp wit between them. They know each other all too well, even if the police don’t seem to think so.

Flynn’s novel conveys this through alternating chapters and identical turns of phrase that show the two characters’ similarities. Fincher finds a calm rhythm to the numerous jumps in time, and the small details that continue to incriminate Nick slowly mount up and simmer.

It gets chilling awfully fast. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score amounts to light, industrial background noise that chillingly clacks and pops in a way that might be therapeutic in another setting. Similarly, Jeff Cronenworth’s cinematography captures picture-perfect, nuclear family suburbia, but everything about his lighting and bluish, yellowish hues are muted in a way that makes these images seem like an unsettling forgery.

And after all, that’s exactly what “Gone Girl” is about. It dives deep into the images and perception the media can create. The film has a Nancy Grace inspired blonde who lambasts Nick on camera, accuses him of murder and suggests he may be sleeping with his twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon). And the snide wit both Nick and Margo share is an example of just how self-aware and ironic both Flynn and Fincher treat this material.

Perhaps no actor other than Ben Affleck could have pulled off Nick’s sarcastic charm so perfectly. As Nick shows the police around the house, he’s inviting and calm in a way that makes us like him while suggesting he’s not all there. Affleck inserts lines about checking out the homeless in a carefully nuanced way that shows he cares, but also might be trying to divert the conversation. Neither Fincher nor Flynn want us siding completely for or against Nick, and Affleck’s mix of movie star good-guy and stuck-up prick go a long way to keeping us in that fog.

Rosamund Pike is his equal in a striking, breakout role. For those who haven’t read the book, her part is bigger than you might imagine. In fact, Amy Dunne is one of the more important female literary figures of this century, and Pike has a calm, loathing tone about anything West of the Hudson or of Nick’s protruding chin. Nick isn’t alone in causing this marriage to deteriorate, and Pike is key in helping Flynn and Fincher find that nuance.

For as popular a novel as “Gone Girl” has become, this story of perceptions has created its own polarizing tone. From women who don’t like what they see to men who don’t like how it ends, Flynn’s story has a way of leaving people unsettled, just as it should. And regardless of its story, what Fincher does is carry that disturbing sensation throughout. “Gone Girl” is a mystery, but not a procedural. It’s tense and nerve wracking, but hardly a thriller. What might look on the surface like another meticulously crafted genre movie is actually Fincher bending expectations in a way few other directors can and in a way few other great stories truly deserve.

4 stars