(Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2014)
It's true: Anderson doing Pynchon doing oddball late-sixties stoner gumshoe picaresque has a sort of groovy ring to it. But after all of the smoked numbers and frolics and gags, one can't help but wake up, hungover and funky-smelling, and ask of their inner square: Does it work? In parts, yes, absolutely. Inherent Vice has stretches of bravura cinema, captured in grainy glory on bonafide celluloid. The extemporaneous, the whimsical, the gorgeously far-out are all there to be dug. And yet there were moments when it lags; it has that same creeping sense of latency, of unused space, that has afflicted his work since TWBB. But it casts a spell, it has a presence, indeed a very strange one; it is almost-just-about-there. At the theater (a lucky last-minute coup of free tickets to a press screening) I was forced to sit in front row, enveloped in the screen, my neck craned back the whole time. The frequent close-ups of faces took on an Easter Island aspect. Not an inappropriate way to view this movie, all in all, but the distortion eventually became wearisome, and prevented a better appreciation. I'm eager to see it again.
Sunday, December 7, 2014
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Story of My Death
(Albert Serra, Spain, 2014)
My first Serra, and it was a pleasure and an inspiration. I like his sly, playful, yet grounded and poetic use of ideas and the permutations of those ideas, principally: the transition from the bright, rational Enlightenment into the crepuscular Romantic sensibility, the immemorial binaries (dialectics, if you're of that persuasion) of freedom and power, sex and violence, knowledge and innocence. A major theme - perhaps THE major organizing theme, if the film actually has one at all - is that of transformation: scientific, aesthetic, mystical, metaphysical. Grapes become wine. Food becomes shit. Shit becomes gold. Life turns to literature, and to death, which is then renewed as new life, perhaps a supernatural one at that. Even vanquished, Casanova lives!
Less commented upon, among the notices I've read, is how beautiful Serra manages to make his digitally captured images; he adroitly adheres to the wisdom of digital-as-digital, rather than the awful fallacy of digital-as-film, and in doing so joins (for me) the ranks of filmmakers doing exciting things with this (relatively) new and quirky medium - David Lynch, Jia Zhangke, Alain Resnais, JLG, etc. In Story, Serra truly paints with the flat, slightly murky images, and produces something that reaches heights that are transcendently beautiful, diaphanous, oneiric. His film is far more poetic, intuitive, and sensual than the occasional flirtations with formalism have led some critics to believe and allege. And the soundtrack is another tour-de-force, with the basso profundo horns and drums that accompany the views of Dracula's castle prompting the most authentic shivers of fright and delight I've had in a theater since as long as I can recall.
All in all, a masterwork, with new dimensions to be divined, and new possibilities portended for the medium.
My first Serra, and it was a pleasure and an inspiration. I like his sly, playful, yet grounded and poetic use of ideas and the permutations of those ideas, principally: the transition from the bright, rational Enlightenment into the crepuscular Romantic sensibility, the immemorial binaries (dialectics, if you're of that persuasion) of freedom and power, sex and violence, knowledge and innocence. A major theme - perhaps THE major organizing theme, if the film actually has one at all - is that of transformation: scientific, aesthetic, mystical, metaphysical. Grapes become wine. Food becomes shit. Shit becomes gold. Life turns to literature, and to death, which is then renewed as new life, perhaps a supernatural one at that. Even vanquished, Casanova lives!
Less commented upon, among the notices I've read, is how beautiful Serra manages to make his digitally captured images; he adroitly adheres to the wisdom of digital-as-digital, rather than the awful fallacy of digital-as-film, and in doing so joins (for me) the ranks of filmmakers doing exciting things with this (relatively) new and quirky medium - David Lynch, Jia Zhangke, Alain Resnais, JLG, etc. In Story, Serra truly paints with the flat, slightly murky images, and produces something that reaches heights that are transcendently beautiful, diaphanous, oneiric. His film is far more poetic, intuitive, and sensual than the occasional flirtations with formalism have led some critics to believe and allege. And the soundtrack is another tour-de-force, with the basso profundo horns and drums that accompany the views of Dracula's castle prompting the most authentic shivers of fright and delight I've had in a theater since as long as I can recall.
All in all, a masterwork, with new dimensions to be divined, and new possibilities portended for the medium.
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
Foxcatcher
(Bennet Miller, USA, 2014)
I was left with the phrase "senseless tragedy" buzzing in my head. There is no faulting Bennet Miller's craft, and his actors are spectacular - Tatum is all repressed fury and sorrow, Ruffalo exudes his usual decency and intelligence, and Carrel ought to enter the annals of great portrayals of monsters in cinema, but the story offers little besides residual sadness. In reflection, its biggest flaw seems to be in the character of du Pont. This is no fault of Carrel's, who commits himself totally to a full-on impersonation of the sad, eventually deranged man. Although it's clear that the filmmakers want du Pont to be a classically drawn character - with three dimensions, a history, and thus worthy of empathy - they cannot find a perspective on him other than a kind of bewildered pity. He is doomed from the outset by his privilege and his remote, domineering mother, and so has become an overgrown adolescent: socially inept, entitled, desperately lonely. His eventual schizophrenia is only hinted at, and the story, bowing to the crushing demands of its classical structure, becomes one of thwarted love. We're meant to see that du Pont had something of a crush on Mark - perhaps romantic, perhaps sexual, perhaps merely the desperate seeking of companionship and validation; but it offers us no way in to this doomed attraction, since it's clear from the start that du Pont is terminally clueless in the world of human affairs. We feel sorry for him, and we feel even more sorry for Dave Schultz when he's pointlessly murdered by du Pont, but the effect is the same as if Shultz had been hit by a bus; it comes out of nowhere, despite the story's endeavoring to make it otherwise. We're left where we started, in Miller's oppressively somber winter of discontent: an America of fatherless boys and mad misfits, hopelessly grasping for some semblance of identity.
I was left with the phrase "senseless tragedy" buzzing in my head. There is no faulting Bennet Miller's craft, and his actors are spectacular - Tatum is all repressed fury and sorrow, Ruffalo exudes his usual decency and intelligence, and Carrel ought to enter the annals of great portrayals of monsters in cinema, but the story offers little besides residual sadness. In reflection, its biggest flaw seems to be in the character of du Pont. This is no fault of Carrel's, who commits himself totally to a full-on impersonation of the sad, eventually deranged man. Although it's clear that the filmmakers want du Pont to be a classically drawn character - with three dimensions, a history, and thus worthy of empathy - they cannot find a perspective on him other than a kind of bewildered pity. He is doomed from the outset by his privilege and his remote, domineering mother, and so has become an overgrown adolescent: socially inept, entitled, desperately lonely. His eventual schizophrenia is only hinted at, and the story, bowing to the crushing demands of its classical structure, becomes one of thwarted love. We're meant to see that du Pont had something of a crush on Mark - perhaps romantic, perhaps sexual, perhaps merely the desperate seeking of companionship and validation; but it offers us no way in to this doomed attraction, since it's clear from the start that du Pont is terminally clueless in the world of human affairs. We feel sorry for him, and we feel even more sorry for Dave Schultz when he's pointlessly murdered by du Pont, but the effect is the same as if Shultz had been hit by a bus; it comes out of nowhere, despite the story's endeavoring to make it otherwise. We're left where we started, in Miller's oppressively somber winter of discontent: an America of fatherless boys and mad misfits, hopelessly grasping for some semblance of identity.
Sunday, November 16, 2014
Stranger by the Lake
(Alain Guiraudie, France, 2013)
A compressed, elegant thriller that upon close inspection discloses subtle layers, like a polished sedimentary rock. The uppermost layer is that of a sexual thriller, and at this it works marvelously. Tense as hell, edited with Hitchcockian precision. Beneath this is an incisive commentary on sociopolitical themes: queer life, the legacy of bigotry and persecution, the pressure-cooker that makes for a subculture that is both dangerous and honest, a haven and a prison, a paradise and a wasteland. The are moments of erotic straightforwardness and erotic bliss that are, I think, designed with gorgeous sincerity, purely celebratory in nature. The lake and it's environs as a kind of Arcadian wonderland of male homosexual desire, playful, open, free of shame or fear. This is the film at its most happily meditative, smitten with the natural beauty of lakes, rocks, trees, and naked male bodies.
But boundaries are doomed to be porous. The outer world cannot be kept at bay forever, and the inner world, with its snarls of conflicting impulses, will out. Love becomes possessive. Desire clouds judgement. Solidarity only goes so far; here, by this lake, it is repeatedly trumped by lust, and also by fear - fear of too much visibility, fear of rejection, but strangely, very little fear of death. Not many critics seem to have noted that the action of the film (pun intended) is darkened by the long shadow of the AIDS crisis, itself a byproduct of social neglect, fear, and hatred. Michel, then, besides being a statuesque god of sex, is also an avatar of the danger inherent to gay sex of a certain era; the threat that any unknown partner could carry a death sentence. We see hints of this - a squabbling over the lack of protection (Franck is blithely unconcerned with wearing a rubber, but one of his partners is more circumspect), the indeterminate time period (although likely contemporary, there are no specific markers of when or where this is taking place), and the preference for giddy barebacking shared by Michel and Franck. We're at least partly removed from the height of the crisis, but the acts of forgetting and remembering are subject to human capacities and priorities, which are shown here to be slippery at best.
Finally, this symbolic dimension connects us to the old imponderables - the proximity of sex and danger, the power plays that cannot be fully purged from intercourse, the existential quandaries posed by our basic needs and our better judgement. Sex as holy rapture, sex as one-way ticket to hell, sex as haunted always by death. Nature giggles at our binaries and our boundaries - straight or gay, naughty or nice. Desire is as undeniable and inarticulate as a tree (or, as Giraudie is eager to remind us, as an erect penis.) We can play at being naturists, but in the wild, we are never far from peril. Nobody knows what monsters lurk in the lake, or what secrets a stranger holds, which may be exactly what turns us on. On a strange lake, or in a strange forest, among strangers, we're all cruising.
A compressed, elegant thriller that upon close inspection discloses subtle layers, like a polished sedimentary rock. The uppermost layer is that of a sexual thriller, and at this it works marvelously. Tense as hell, edited with Hitchcockian precision. Beneath this is an incisive commentary on sociopolitical themes: queer life, the legacy of bigotry and persecution, the pressure-cooker that makes for a subculture that is both dangerous and honest, a haven and a prison, a paradise and a wasteland. The are moments of erotic straightforwardness and erotic bliss that are, I think, designed with gorgeous sincerity, purely celebratory in nature. The lake and it's environs as a kind of Arcadian wonderland of male homosexual desire, playful, open, free of shame or fear. This is the film at its most happily meditative, smitten with the natural beauty of lakes, rocks, trees, and naked male bodies.
But boundaries are doomed to be porous. The outer world cannot be kept at bay forever, and the inner world, with its snarls of conflicting impulses, will out. Love becomes possessive. Desire clouds judgement. Solidarity only goes so far; here, by this lake, it is repeatedly trumped by lust, and also by fear - fear of too much visibility, fear of rejection, but strangely, very little fear of death. Not many critics seem to have noted that the action of the film (pun intended) is darkened by the long shadow of the AIDS crisis, itself a byproduct of social neglect, fear, and hatred. Michel, then, besides being a statuesque god of sex, is also an avatar of the danger inherent to gay sex of a certain era; the threat that any unknown partner could carry a death sentence. We see hints of this - a squabbling over the lack of protection (Franck is blithely unconcerned with wearing a rubber, but one of his partners is more circumspect), the indeterminate time period (although likely contemporary, there are no specific markers of when or where this is taking place), and the preference for giddy barebacking shared by Michel and Franck. We're at least partly removed from the height of the crisis, but the acts of forgetting and remembering are subject to human capacities and priorities, which are shown here to be slippery at best.
Finally, this symbolic dimension connects us to the old imponderables - the proximity of sex and danger, the power plays that cannot be fully purged from intercourse, the existential quandaries posed by our basic needs and our better judgement. Sex as holy rapture, sex as one-way ticket to hell, sex as haunted always by death. Nature giggles at our binaries and our boundaries - straight or gay, naughty or nice. Desire is as undeniable and inarticulate as a tree (or, as Giraudie is eager to remind us, as an erect penis.) We can play at being naturists, but in the wild, we are never far from peril. Nobody knows what monsters lurk in the lake, or what secrets a stranger holds, which may be exactly what turns us on. On a strange lake, or in a strange forest, among strangers, we're all cruising.
Saturday, November 15, 2014
The Neon Bible
(Terrence Davies, UK, 1995)
Streamed via Amazon Instant Video, and the quality was abominable: Lo-res and chopped on either side of the frame. Still, Davies' images astound. He works very much at his own tempo, and the film sometimes gets tripped up, but when he's in the groove, it's a masterpiece of poetic cinema. Painterly, yesofcourse. The film abounds with perfectly apposite frames for the world he depicts: a hothouse of desire and yearning under the sway of repressive, dogmatic powers. Davies channels the American South beautifully, hauntingly, proving himself an apt student of Williams, O'Neill, Faulkner, O'Connor, and (of course) Toole: a place of overabundant fertility, almost seethingly erotic, strange, gloriously weird, but which, perhaps by virtue of these same qualities, attracts such vicious hatred and fear that it seems always to be under the shadow of tragedy.
We see this in his portraits and still-lives. But there are no truly static scenes; everything in the film seems to breathe, rising and falling almost imperceptibly, as we're borne back into the past through a string of vignettes. There is plenty of camera movement, too; the frame moves up, down, over, sideways - never ostentatiously - to depict not just physical but emotional movement, and movement through time. It's a montage of his own, abounding with possibilities. And all the while there is sound - crickets at night, the creaking a screen door, branches tapping at the window in a storm, and music, music, music. Davies works in the dream-mode most prominently; he has mastered his own cinema as a vehicle of memory, dream, and interior experience, both musical and literary, both historical and intimate. Despite the occasionally clashing notes (certain performances don't fit into his staging, which requires a kind of theatrical brilliance and stillness that is exceedingly difficult to capture on film, and the final, desultory burst of violence) it is a film, and a style, to be reckoned with and rejoiced for.
Streamed via Amazon Instant Video, and the quality was abominable: Lo-res and chopped on either side of the frame. Still, Davies' images astound. He works very much at his own tempo, and the film sometimes gets tripped up, but when he's in the groove, it's a masterpiece of poetic cinema. Painterly, yesofcourse. The film abounds with perfectly apposite frames for the world he depicts: a hothouse of desire and yearning under the sway of repressive, dogmatic powers. Davies channels the American South beautifully, hauntingly, proving himself an apt student of Williams, O'Neill, Faulkner, O'Connor, and (of course) Toole: a place of overabundant fertility, almost seethingly erotic, strange, gloriously weird, but which, perhaps by virtue of these same qualities, attracts such vicious hatred and fear that it seems always to be under the shadow of tragedy.
We see this in his portraits and still-lives. But there are no truly static scenes; everything in the film seems to breathe, rising and falling almost imperceptibly, as we're borne back into the past through a string of vignettes. There is plenty of camera movement, too; the frame moves up, down, over, sideways - never ostentatiously - to depict not just physical but emotional movement, and movement through time. It's a montage of his own, abounding with possibilities. And all the while there is sound - crickets at night, the creaking a screen door, branches tapping at the window in a storm, and music, music, music. Davies works in the dream-mode most prominently; he has mastered his own cinema as a vehicle of memory, dream, and interior experience, both musical and literary, both historical and intimate. Despite the occasionally clashing notes (certain performances don't fit into his staging, which requires a kind of theatrical brilliance and stillness that is exceedingly difficult to capture on film, and the final, desultory burst of violence) it is a film, and a style, to be reckoned with and rejoiced for.
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Recently Viewed
La Bête Humaine - (Jean Renoir, France, 1938)
More catching up with Papa Renoir. A striking, powerful variation on several noir themes (the femme fatale, the twinning of adultery and murder, and more broadly, sex and violence, skepticism if not dread of modernity and industrialization, etc.) Elegant, yet simmering with appropriately animalistic menace. The scene in which Jean Gabin's Jacques encounters Blanchette Brunoy's Flore, after she has just shoved an ogling farmboy into the river, is mastery exemplified. The scene starts out bucolic, with a healthy dash of pastoral eroticism, and then moves into surprisingly dark, violent territory, as Jacques, seized with a mysterious "fit" that seems to fuse lust and murderous aggression, nearly strangles the young woman, only stopping when he's brought to his senses by the rush of the oncoming train, which passes by only feet away from where he is attacking Flore. Jacques as the tragedy of modern man: alienated from humanity, he retreats to the impersonal din and granduer of industry. His love for trains as a way to bind his murderous energies to something that can resist or subsume them. Also contains some of Renoir's incisive commentary on social mores, and some fantastic views of the Gare St. Lazare, including one that could be Manet's view from his studio at the time of his painting Le Chemin de Fer.
Bob le Flambeur - (Jean-Pierre Melville, France, 1956)
Delicious stuff. Perfectly atmospheric, combining postwar anxieties and nostalgia with crackerjack plotting and swift, sharp characterizations. Breezy fun that still has serious heft. Glad I finally caught this classic. The introduction, from the gritty streets of Montmarte at dawn, to the introduction to Bob, as panache personified, even sleep-deprived in his seedy, checkered lair of iniquity, is simply sublime.
Monsieur Verdoux - (Charlie Chaplin, USA, 1947)
Chaplin can do no wrong. Hilarious, deft, his performance as dextrous as his handling of the story, which manages to remain piquant despite its sordid subject matter, until Chaplin reveals his political hand, at which point, the mood gets surprisingly grave, and we find ourselves in an odd parable about human depravity. While the concluding portion of the film could be critiqued for being heavy-handed, it's elevated by the brilliant nuance Chaplin brings to his portrayal of Verdoux, who, despite being a wholly self-righteous serial killer, seems also to be one of the few civilized men left in Europe.
More catching up with Papa Renoir. A striking, powerful variation on several noir themes (the femme fatale, the twinning of adultery and murder, and more broadly, sex and violence, skepticism if not dread of modernity and industrialization, etc.) Elegant, yet simmering with appropriately animalistic menace. The scene in which Jean Gabin's Jacques encounters Blanchette Brunoy's Flore, after she has just shoved an ogling farmboy into the river, is mastery exemplified. The scene starts out bucolic, with a healthy dash of pastoral eroticism, and then moves into surprisingly dark, violent territory, as Jacques, seized with a mysterious "fit" that seems to fuse lust and murderous aggression, nearly strangles the young woman, only stopping when he's brought to his senses by the rush of the oncoming train, which passes by only feet away from where he is attacking Flore. Jacques as the tragedy of modern man: alienated from humanity, he retreats to the impersonal din and granduer of industry. His love for trains as a way to bind his murderous energies to something that can resist or subsume them. Also contains some of Renoir's incisive commentary on social mores, and some fantastic views of the Gare St. Lazare, including one that could be Manet's view from his studio at the time of his painting Le Chemin de Fer.
Bob le Flambeur - (Jean-Pierre Melville, France, 1956)
Delicious stuff. Perfectly atmospheric, combining postwar anxieties and nostalgia with crackerjack plotting and swift, sharp characterizations. Breezy fun that still has serious heft. Glad I finally caught this classic. The introduction, from the gritty streets of Montmarte at dawn, to the introduction to Bob, as panache personified, even sleep-deprived in his seedy, checkered lair of iniquity, is simply sublime.
Monsieur Verdoux - (Charlie Chaplin, USA, 1947)
Chaplin can do no wrong. Hilarious, deft, his performance as dextrous as his handling of the story, which manages to remain piquant despite its sordid subject matter, until Chaplin reveals his political hand, at which point, the mood gets surprisingly grave, and we find ourselves in an odd parable about human depravity. While the concluding portion of the film could be critiqued for being heavy-handed, it's elevated by the brilliant nuance Chaplin brings to his portrayal of Verdoux, who, despite being a wholly self-righteous serial killer, seems also to be one of the few civilized men left in Europe.
Saturday, October 4, 2014
Gone Girl
(David Fincher, USA, 2014)
A marvelously nasty piece of work. It flirts shamelessly with pulpy nihilism but is ultimately much too fun to be bleak. As for its treatment of male-female relationships, it's neither insightful nor shocking, mostly because its analytical interests lie elsewhere. First and foremost, Fincher's latest is a thriller. And it delivers thrills and chills aplenty; I can't remember the last time I was so deeply engrossed in the plot of a film, practically squirming in anticipation of the next beat, no matter how silly or bizarre it might be. In the grand tradition of Hitchcock, Fincher not only dispenses with plausibility but actively ridicules those who would seek it. Gone Girl is, at its most sociological, a dark mirror reflecting a culture that is so awash in superficiality that it no longer cares if the lies its being fed are persuasive.
We shouldn't make too much of this, though. Although Gone Girl has some acute observations about life and love in 2014 Amerika, they exist mostly in the background of the action, which is both insane and compulsively watchable. The most trenchant stuff lies on the margins, like the haunting scene where the cops descend into the Stygian remains of what appears to be a shopping center. Occasional glimpses of this blight intrude on the green-lawned development of McMansions where Nick and Amy live. This is one of the best jokes of the film; for Nick and Amy, the worst crisis in their life is losing their brownstone and gaining a massive, airy house in a quiet suburb. What used to be a prototype for the American dream has become, for these two self-involved drips, slumming it. Far more extreme suffering exists all around them, but it barely intrudes on their consciousness. Nick is vaguely aware that there is a "homeless problem," apparently because some of the untouchables have been appearing in their manicured neighborhood. Maybe one of these specters made off with Amy. That's the best explanation he has for her disappearance, until he realizes that it was an inside job.
All of Fincher's films are essentially whodunits; they are powered by the insatiable urge to know what happened. This desire is fixedly rearward-facing; although there are some striking affinities between Finch and Hitch, the latter's great subject was knowing what was going on in the present tense, expressed with the doubt and paranoia of encroaching madness, whereas the former is concerned with the limning of the past. Benjamin Button, his most emotionally naked and personal film, attempts to answer this by reversing the flow of time. It is a fairy-tale for grownups, a touchingly straightforward bromide about how life isn't erased by death, not completely; that it slides often and easily into stuttering sentimentality is why it's affecting.
Time, the greatest and most diligent of serial killers, was Zodiac's principal subject. Even the most heinous crimes are eventually forgotten. What could be more terrifying?
Gone Girl is Fincher's take on the revenge plot. Never has his sympathy for deviance and deviousness been more eager and obvious. Fincher is a cynic, but he is blissfully ignorant of tragedy. For him, shit happens, occasionally horrible shit, but there is nothing cosmic about it. What he admires most is mastery. For Hitchcock, the human tale was essentially a tragedy - humans, mostly men, being undone by the intensity and the persistence of their obsessions. His heroes are bunglers, fools, fatuous imposters, who move forward (which they learn eventually is actually an inbent spiral) only through flailing doggedness. Fincher, himself possessing a razor-sharp wit and a fine sense of humor, sees a silver lining: through mastery, one can resist, if not avoid, the depredations of the world. There is little doubt that Amy is the hero of Gone Girl. She might be psychotic, but she gets things done, and for Fincher, there is no greater virtue. Like Nick, we can't help but feel a certain grudging admiration for her resourcefulness, her doggedness, even if she is thoroughly immoral.
Like Hitchcock, Fincher delights in goosing his audience, playing to their fears and desires. He loves nasty fun, but he isn't a scold. There's a dozen instances in Gone Girl that seem designed deliberately to dare the prigs in the audience to reject the film. If you can't take a joke, Fincher seems to believe, that's your problem. He isn't interested in lecturing, or in being responsible. He does what the various demagogues in his film do not; he leaves the moral judgements to us, the audience. To make moral judgements, we first have to decide how seriously we're meant to take any of the action. This is also, thankfully, our problem. I don't know how seriously to take it, but if anything, I am amazed that he is able to tweak the ambiguity so exquisitely. From scene to scene, tone to tone, there is no solid ground to stand on. It's a virtuosic performance of directorial craft.
Despite that, Gone Girl has some gaps in its excellence. The performances vary in quality; Affleck is very solid in some scenes, but elsewhere seems unfocused. Especially in the beginning, he is so sapped of vitality that it seems like the actor or the character is stoned on muscle relaxants. Rosamund Pike fairs better; there are flashes of otherworldly brilliance in some of her scenes, but also some odd flatness, perhaps the fault of the script, which, while structurally excellent, falters on character and dialogue, betraying the pop-thriller fare that is the source material. Tyler Perry is consistently excellent, as is the great Kim Dickens, and Carrie Coon, as Nick's twin sister, is a revelation in a difficult and somewhat thankless role.
A marvelously nasty piece of work. It flirts shamelessly with pulpy nihilism but is ultimately much too fun to be bleak. As for its treatment of male-female relationships, it's neither insightful nor shocking, mostly because its analytical interests lie elsewhere. First and foremost, Fincher's latest is a thriller. And it delivers thrills and chills aplenty; I can't remember the last time I was so deeply engrossed in the plot of a film, practically squirming in anticipation of the next beat, no matter how silly or bizarre it might be. In the grand tradition of Hitchcock, Fincher not only dispenses with plausibility but actively ridicules those who would seek it. Gone Girl is, at its most sociological, a dark mirror reflecting a culture that is so awash in superficiality that it no longer cares if the lies its being fed are persuasive.
We shouldn't make too much of this, though. Although Gone Girl has some acute observations about life and love in 2014 Amerika, they exist mostly in the background of the action, which is both insane and compulsively watchable. The most trenchant stuff lies on the margins, like the haunting scene where the cops descend into the Stygian remains of what appears to be a shopping center. Occasional glimpses of this blight intrude on the green-lawned development of McMansions where Nick and Amy live. This is one of the best jokes of the film; for Nick and Amy, the worst crisis in their life is losing their brownstone and gaining a massive, airy house in a quiet suburb. What used to be a prototype for the American dream has become, for these two self-involved drips, slumming it. Far more extreme suffering exists all around them, but it barely intrudes on their consciousness. Nick is vaguely aware that there is a "homeless problem," apparently because some of the untouchables have been appearing in their manicured neighborhood. Maybe one of these specters made off with Amy. That's the best explanation he has for her disappearance, until he realizes that it was an inside job.
All of Fincher's films are essentially whodunits; they are powered by the insatiable urge to know what happened. This desire is fixedly rearward-facing; although there are some striking affinities between Finch and Hitch, the latter's great subject was knowing what was going on in the present tense, expressed with the doubt and paranoia of encroaching madness, whereas the former is concerned with the limning of the past. Benjamin Button, his most emotionally naked and personal film, attempts to answer this by reversing the flow of time. It is a fairy-tale for grownups, a touchingly straightforward bromide about how life isn't erased by death, not completely; that it slides often and easily into stuttering sentimentality is why it's affecting.
Time, the greatest and most diligent of serial killers, was Zodiac's principal subject. Even the most heinous crimes are eventually forgotten. What could be more terrifying?
Gone Girl is Fincher's take on the revenge plot. Never has his sympathy for deviance and deviousness been more eager and obvious. Fincher is a cynic, but he is blissfully ignorant of tragedy. For him, shit happens, occasionally horrible shit, but there is nothing cosmic about it. What he admires most is mastery. For Hitchcock, the human tale was essentially a tragedy - humans, mostly men, being undone by the intensity and the persistence of their obsessions. His heroes are bunglers, fools, fatuous imposters, who move forward (which they learn eventually is actually an inbent spiral) only through flailing doggedness. Fincher, himself possessing a razor-sharp wit and a fine sense of humor, sees a silver lining: through mastery, one can resist, if not avoid, the depredations of the world. There is little doubt that Amy is the hero of Gone Girl. She might be psychotic, but she gets things done, and for Fincher, there is no greater virtue. Like Nick, we can't help but feel a certain grudging admiration for her resourcefulness, her doggedness, even if she is thoroughly immoral.
Like Hitchcock, Fincher delights in goosing his audience, playing to their fears and desires. He loves nasty fun, but he isn't a scold. There's a dozen instances in Gone Girl that seem designed deliberately to dare the prigs in the audience to reject the film. If you can't take a joke, Fincher seems to believe, that's your problem. He isn't interested in lecturing, or in being responsible. He does what the various demagogues in his film do not; he leaves the moral judgements to us, the audience. To make moral judgements, we first have to decide how seriously we're meant to take any of the action. This is also, thankfully, our problem. I don't know how seriously to take it, but if anything, I am amazed that he is able to tweak the ambiguity so exquisitely. From scene to scene, tone to tone, there is no solid ground to stand on. It's a virtuosic performance of directorial craft.
Despite that, Gone Girl has some gaps in its excellence. The performances vary in quality; Affleck is very solid in some scenes, but elsewhere seems unfocused. Especially in the beginning, he is so sapped of vitality that it seems like the actor or the character is stoned on muscle relaxants. Rosamund Pike fairs better; there are flashes of otherworldly brilliance in some of her scenes, but also some odd flatness, perhaps the fault of the script, which, while structurally excellent, falters on character and dialogue, betraying the pop-thriller fare that is the source material. Tyler Perry is consistently excellent, as is the great Kim Dickens, and Carrie Coon, as Nick's twin sister, is a revelation in a difficult and somewhat thankless role.
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