I AM JACK'S MOVIE REVIEW

A review requested by Alex D, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

More than a decade and a half after its underwhelming theatrical performance that sneakily begot one of the most omnipresent movie cults of the early '00s (I was in college in those days; the film was inescapable), I have to admit that I really have no damn clue what to make of Fight Club. It would be an insane thing to deny that the film is consummately well-made, and it's impossible to overlook how much it starts to overreach in its second half and especially its final quarter, as it begins to lose sight of whatever the hell it was trying to do in a flurry of super-clever twists that are very similar to, but importantly distinct from the twists in Chuck Palahniuk's source novel, adapted by Jim Uhls.

It is, I think, the platonic ideal of A Film By David Fincher; not because it uses his skills to best effect, by any means (I am quite sure that honor belongs to Zodiac, and even by the time Fight Club came out in '99, the director already had Se7en behind him), but because it best typifies the thing that he always does, whether it works well (as in those two serial killer films), or whether it sets the movie on fire (most flamboyantly in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button): he always puts a lot of energy and investment into working out the mechanics of how he wants to make this film, attending to the craft of cinema with an almost holy focus. And he always does this at the expense of the connection between that craft and anything else. That's resulted in films that are, in the aggregate, worse than Fight Club, but I don't believe he's made anything as split between its intentions and its effect.

We'll circle back to that. Meanwhile, I do not, truly, know how much this film's cult remains robust and important in the daily lives of cinephiles, so I shouldn't talk about Fight Club like we all know what I mean. The film's unnamed protagonist, played by Edward Norton, is an insomniac office drone whose soul-crushing job involves, very specifically, trying to help his company determine how much money human lives are worth. He's found one unconventional and rather shady, if ultimately harmless way of releasing his stress and angst at the world not working out properly: he attends support groups for various grave illnesses, and lets himself be carried away on a wave of crying and intimacy (feigned intimacy, but it's the best he's got). The first serpent in his paradise comes in the form of Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter, in the role that inaugurated the "Crazy Wigs and Too Much Kohl" era of her career), who's also lying her way through the support group circuit, more out of boredom than anything else, and who naps his bubble of protection. The second, who at first seems like a divine guiding light, is Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a homemade soap manufacturer and salesman that our boy meets on a plane.

They end up living together in the ancient, falling-down mansion in the city's warehouse district where Tyler has planted his flag of late, after the narrator's posh-appointed apartment explodes in a freak accident. It's from this pre-modern base of operation that Tyler begins to craft his philosophy of anti-consumerism, seeking to replace the lost self-reliance of modern masculinity that has been bred out by too many white-collar jobs and bourgie junk shops like IKEA and Starbucks. Seized by a random inspiration on their first night, Tyler asks the narrator to punch him outside of a bar, and in hardly any time, they - and an ever-increasing circle of like-minded lost souls - have formed Fight Club, a basement athletic club of sorts in which men fight, one pair at a time, in unrestrained bare-knuckle brawls, just for the sake of feeling anything. And this seems to make everybody's life better, right up until the narrator starts to figure out that Tyler is actually planning a most destructive form of anarchy that goes far deeper than convincing middle-class men that they don't need so much stuff. And there's absolutely no point to talking about Fight Club 16 years later without letting spoilers happen, so if you haven't seen the film and think you might want to - even though I frankly don't like it very much, I still believe that it's an essential piece of American cinema that needs to be studied and grappled with for plenty of reasons - here's your place to bail out.

The issue with Fight Club that transcends all other issues is not a mysterious one; those of us who don't love it have been identifying it for years now (I, personally, first made a version of this argument in 2002, and I was already parroting someone else, long-forgotten). Basically, Fight Club is David Fincher being too good at his job in the wrong way. This is, pretty clearly, a satire of the kind of wannabe superhero American masculinity that felt weakened and feminised by the economic boom and attendant emotional introspection of the 1990s - this is such a Clinton-era movie, above and beyond the fact that it's final scene would be unthinkable just two years after its premiere, in the wake of 9/11/01 - that does exactly what satire is supposed to do: it starts out with perfectly simple precepts that anybody ought to be able to agree with (IKEA overcharges you for dubiously "stylish" particleboard crap with ludicrous names), starts nudging that towards a heightened level (which is why you should feel totally excited if your apartment and all your possessions blow up), and eventually races full-out towards the kind of clearly unacceptable claims that are meant to show the basic intellectual instability of a position that might not seem at all weird if you only encounter it one bite at a time. In this case, the idea that males can only defend their maledom through increasingly militarised acts of violence.

So what happens is that Fincher, with his methodical, surgical approach to building cinema, looks at the situation that must be devised: the narrator must be seduced by Tyler. So he very flashily visualises the choking ennui of a consumption-driven lifestyle - the film's IKEA catalogue montage is legitimately one of the finest sequences in the director's career at the level of technique - and he glorifies the DIY lifestyle that Tyler lives, treating it with a certain level of irony that's nevertheless clearly enthusiastic and friendly and funny, and he stages Fight Club with the intensity and dazzlement of '90s action cinema at its fleetest. Which was not too fleet, for the most part (not in America), and so it's easy for the fight sequences to feel absolutely stunning and exciting compared to almost everything else that shared its historical moment. And he has done such a great job of building all that up, he can't back out of it. The problem at the core of Fight Club is that it's appealing because of its style, and then it tries to walk back from that at an entirely intellectual level, and it's a mishmash of energies that makes absolutely no sense. The movie says that it's horrified at Tyler's excesses, but it feels jazzed up by them, and that's before the filmmakers make the absolutely unforgivable choice to let the destruction of skycrapers at the end play as the visual punchline for the narrator and Marla to end up together, the explosions filling almost exactly the same role as the fireworks in To Catch a Thief. Movies are a visual medium; if you show us explosions in a romantic, exciting way, that matters more than telling us that they are amoral at best, and by that point in the screenplay, Fight Club really isn't concerned with even telling us that. The result is a film that's irreconcilably broken between its thoughts and its guts, and there was no way the guts were going to lost. Not with such extraordinarily visceral work being done by cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth (whose offensively good capturing of the chilly shine of nighttime made him a great Fincher collaborator, making it dumbfounding and annoying they'd wait a whole decade before teaming up again for The Social Network), editor James Haygood (funneling with slurry abandon between moments, channeling music video technique with a keen sense of the needs of a feature), and electronic/hip hop producers Dust Brothers to provide the jarring, frequently toneless and always intensifying score.

The Big Ol' Twist really doesn't help matters. If this was a film about the narrator trying to stop his secretly insane buddy Tyler Durden, it would have been a great deal easier to sell the idea that the film's last forty minutes are there to disprove the first ninety; if this was a film about a man finding that he's secretly insane, and unpacking all the things that he's done as "Tyler Durden", it could have been a great psychological thriller. Doing both of those things gets muddy as hell. But I do have to hand it to Fincher and Uhls: having only finally seen the movie for a second time, knowing the twist on your way through is a marvelous experience. The way that dialogue and blocking very casually state outright things that we're simply not interested in learning yet is brazen in the best way; the weird one-frame insert shots of Pitt before he appears as a character go from being a punkish in-joke to crafty foreshadowing, especially since it's also much easier to see how much of the film is being presented from the narrator's sleep-deprived POV without actually flagging it as such. Take out the social commentary, and Fight Club, and the rather mean jokes at the expense of people trying to muddle through sickness with emotional support groups, and there's a fucking wonderful depiction of psychological unreliability that even makes Pitt's oddly uni-dimensional performance turn out to be a strength instead of a weakness. But that's taking a hell of a lot of things out.

So back to where we started: I really have no damn clue what to make of Fight Club. It's all technically gorgeous, and along with The Matrix, I'm inclined to call it one of the first American films of the 21st Century, for all its accelerated continuity and don't-stop-to-think aesthetic. But it's such a wreck of tone and intellect, and it's so inhuman in ways that all Fincher films ultimately turn out to be; but no other Fincher film takes place so necessarily inside one person's head for 100% of its running time. It's electrifying, stylish cinema, of course, and I honestly do get why people love it - whether they love its cool or its satire of the same cool. That right there, I think, is why I can't pretend to come even close to loving it myself.

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THE WORLD IS A FINE PLACE, AND WORTH FIGHTING FOR

A review requested by Mike Gibson, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

I shall start with a personal anecdote, since who doesn't love personal anecdotes from nominally objective arts critics? But "a man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man." And when the man now writing was a good deal younger - a boy, really, though I mightn't have thought it at the time, all of 18 and new to college - he saw for the first and until very recently the only time, David Fincher's 1995 breakthrough Se7en, the film with which that music video director proved that, absent the clusterfuck of studio intervention that made Alien³ such an unimpressive feature debut, he had the stylistic chops and tight control of tone required to be a Real Auteur. And upon this first viewing of Se7en, Wee Young Timmy Brayton was absolutely flattened - just so damn thoroughly unnerved and wrecked by it that, for 14 years and change, it was the one and only title on my list of movies So Good I Can Only Bear to Watch It Once. Now, obviously, the film's not that extreme, and in the intervening decade, I've watched many films that are far more punishing in every way, and for some years now, I've supposed that in this case, memory was exaggerating the titanic dreadfulness of how cruel and unabating the film was, and of course that turns out to be the case. Still, the point remains: it takes a hell of a movie to trigger that kind of response. And yes, Se7en is absolutely a hell of a movie - and a movie of Hell, I might idly throw out there, if I wanted to engage in feeble wordplay.

The film's impact has been seismic; along with The Silence of the Lambs, four years earlier, and maybe we could argue TV's The X-Files, which premiered in 1993, it's one of the creative works in what we might, for want of a clear term, call the Horror Cop genre: police procedurals which appropriate all they can from the gore and terror-driven horror genre (a genre that was, I suspect not coincidentally, in abeyance in the first half of the 1990s), to the point that they start to blur definitional lines. Silence, I think, is a horror film; Se7en, ultimately, probably isn't, but it's right there. And though these two films are, by themselves, almost the entire history of this experimental subgenre, their influence has been felt absolutely everywhere in the two decades since the latter film's premiere - Holy Mother of all things sacred, Se7en is 20 years old, when the fuck did that happen? - in less pure form. Take some of the horror back out, and you have the glut of TV procedurals in which grim-faced cops sorrowfully poke at the most hellaciously violent and often sexualised crimes, depicted with all the brio that standards and practices will permit. Go the other way, and lump in enough horror that it's impossible to deny that's what's going on, and you basically have Saw (a film whose aesthetic does not at all hide its theft from Se7en) and all its little torture porn offspring.

That's a pretty shoddy legacy, but let's not permit it to devalue Fincher's great achievement in anyway, which after 20 years - 20 fucking years - and countless copycats, hasn't lost any of its unnerving, devastating nihilistic power. It is a cruel, bitter movie, undoubtedly the film that most plainly expresses the theme common to all of Fincher's work, that humans are basically prone to cruelty and stupidity, and all decent people can do is try to not give into that impulse. And one may or may not respond to the bleakness and nihilism of that message - and if any English-language film can be confidentally described as "nihilistic", it's Se7en - but it's impossible to deny the potency and artistry with which Fincher and company execute it here. I do not hide my frequent lack of affection for the director's work, but this is a great piece of cinema, the kind that works on such a visceral, primal level to communicate its thoughts and feelings that quibbling with it like pissing in the wind. It is a powerful, brutalising thing, and maybe the most totally successful thing Fincher has directed; alongside Zodiac (which I'd call his best movie; it's also probably his most clinically intellectual), it suggests that whatever he does, Fincher should probably always make movies about serial killers.

The plot of the film, inspired by screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker's miserable stretch of time living in New York (it's a bit remarkable how not at all impressive Walker's subsequent career has been, when he's every bit as important for the film's impact as the director), is straightforward enough: in an unnamed city where it almost always seems to be raining, and which ends up even filthy after the rain than before it, Detective Lieutenant Somerset (Morgan Freeman) is in the last week of his employ with the police department, and is to spend the next seven days (the title has a double meaning!) showing the ropes to new transfer Detective Mills (Brad Pitt), who is more or less going to end up his replacement. On day #1, they find an appalling murder scene, where a man was tortured to death by being forced at gunpoint to eat till he burst; this turns out to be the first in a series of killings inspired by the seven deadly sins - gluttony, lust, wrath, sloth, pride, envy, and greed. As the two men investigate, the gulf between their respective worldviews begins to inform everything about how they respond to the ugliness and savagery of these crimes: Mills's conviction that right will out, and that the universe favors justice drives him towards passionate anger, while Somerset's work-honed certitude that there is more wickedness than the good people of the world can ever hope to combat leaves him doggedly pursuing clues with a detachment that's like depression, if only depression could somehow be even sadder.

The actual meat of the film is pretty easily gotten through; the content, for the most part, is a more or less literal tour of Hell. Not for nothing does the film heavily emphasise Dante's Inferno: like that poem, Se7en functions as a story of one wise old man guiding a younger, more optimistic soul through several tableaux vividly demonstrating the consequences of worldly sin. The difference being that, in Dante, the sins are against God, while in Se7en, they are punished only by one deeply broken human, played by - is a 20-year-old movie still covered by spoiler alerts? Because it's a huge spoiler - Kevin Spacey in the best work of his career, granite-faced as he spits out his bile in brittle, inhuman tones. There is definitely no God in the universe of Se7en; only psychopaths. And instead of the message "these are the punishments you might face if you misbehave", the lesson is the infinitely bleaker "these are the punishments you might face for having the misfortune to have been born".

Walker's script is insistently symbolic without being overbearing about it, and it's surprisingly willing to stop the narrative development entirely to favor scenes of the two leads talking about morality and philosophy, but the thing never drags. A lot of credit for both of these things must go to Freeman and Pitt, who might fall into the ordinary "sagacious black cop/fiery white cop" dynamic, but build such extreme personality into the parts that everything they say and do feels far more an extension of character than the requirement of the screenplay (it might be my favorite Freeman performance; it is, anyway, the one where he engages with his then-nascent "wise old black man calmly intoning advice" persona in the most interestingly off-kilter ways). And certainly, the quality of the filmmaking is at an extraordinary level: beyond Fincher's direction, there is the matter of Howard Shore's erratic, scraping score, Darius Khondji's cinematography, with its overtones of infection and dessication, and Richard Francis-Bruce's tightly controlled editing, all slow build-up to explosions.

It's an absolutely top-shelf thriller first and foremost; a movie that uses its nervy central gimmick as a great spine to pose the question, "so what happens next?" before plunging us through one of the most raw-nerve mysteries of its decade. The film is propulsive in the exactly the same gestures that it's nauseating and distressing. Hell, that's basically the thesis statement presented in the film's enormously influential opening credits, which combine punchy cutting and a thick visual sense of moral rot and so set the entire film off on the footing it will pursue forever after. Exciting on the one hand; immensely unpleasant on the other. It is a desperately involving and watchable film for something so absolutely starved of joy; it makes the expression of total nihilism vividly cinematic in a way that no other American film I can immediately call to mind has ever even attempted. It is not the kind of film I can honestly say that I could love, let alone do love; but I don't suppose I could possibly admire it any more than I do, for its absolute commitment to tone and the excellence of its construction in every scene and every frame.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2002: In which having too many resources can make interesting directors much less interesting

David Fincher has directed nine features as of 2014, and 2002's Panic Room is almost beyond question the least interesting one to talk about on its own merits (which isn't to say it's his worst: even that would make it more interesting). This is exactly why I picked it as his representative in this series: while Se7en is surely his most influential project, Fight Club the one with the most to chew on, and so on, Panic Room is the one that most emphatically shows what happens when fringe-type artists suddenly find themselves given room to do anything. While he had worked with big budgets and major studios before, it was always as an upstart music video director. The reception of Fight Club was the point that he landed as a newly-minted auteur, and thus Panic Room is the film that shows us what Fincher working with the freedom of a superstar looked like. And that does fascinate me a great deal, even if the movie itself fails to.

The film is a basic, snazzy little conceptual thriller. Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) is going through a divorce and looking to find a nice place in New York's Upper West Side where she and her daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart) can live relatively close to Sarah's dad. The solution is in an enormous old brownstone walk-up with all kinds of interesting nooks, but the one that creeps Meg out the most is a high tech "panic room", a kind of survivalist vault, built by the previous owner, a reclusive millionaire who feared everyone and especially his family. He also, apparently, left most of his millions hidden somewhere in the house, because soon after the Altmans take up residence, the house is broken into by a trio of thieves: Junior (Jared Leto), the grandson of the dead millionaire, proving the old man's instincts about his relatives to be correct; Burnham (Forest Whitaker), an employee of a company that installs panic rooms and other super-high-end security apparatuses; and Raoul (Dwight Yoakam), a paranoid thug who has been brought onto the project without Burnham's knowledge and for uncertain reasons. But he clearly represents a destabilising violent element.Meg wakes up early during the robbery, and is able to hide herself and Sarah inside the panic room, alerting the robbers to their unexpected presence. So begins a stand-off, heightened by Sarah's pressing need for an insulin shot, and Meg's failure to hook up the panic room's isolated phone line.

All the ingredients for Panic Room to be a vicious little thriller are right there: the single location (albeit a huge location with several unique sets), the easily-defined conflict, and enough high-tech gimcrackery baked into the concept that it doesn't risk seeming overly familiar to all the other "woman in a tense, dangerous situation" thrillers that one would otherwise flirt with as comparisons. It could be sleek and relentless; it could have a wry, detached sense of morbid fascination with the fishbowl it has presented. Neither of these things come to pass. In fact, Panic Room ends up being a rather puffy and overworked affair. Screenwriter David Koepp trues much too hard to keep raising the stakes and starting to push things into arbitrary escalations and at least one burst of comic book fantasy in a ridiculous scene involving a propane tank; Fincher directs with a glowering, severe tone, having ace cinematographer Conrad W. Hall (stepping in for Darius Khondji, no slouch himself, who left shortly after the production began) underlight things like his life depended on maintaining an impenetrable murk. This does pay off for the film somewhat: the contrast between the gloomy interiors of the house and the metallic lighting inside the panic room works marvelously well at creating whiplash-inducing shifts in mood that help the overall thriller tone. But it also means that Panic Room is, for the most part, terribly serious, much more a film from the director of Se7en than the director of Fight Club (it is, though, especially a film from the director of The Game). The screenplay, meanwhile, is pure pulp: it needed something crazier and nervier to match its frankly trashy piling-on of elements.

Really, though, it never quite feels like Fincher ever trusted the scenario (and I'm not looking to solely blame the director: the script is convoluted where it shouldn't be, offering up far too much complicated backstory in the wrong places, and too many of its developments feel like excuses for protracting the action, not like a natural evolution of the situation). For he spends a great deal of energy trying to compensate for the limited scope of Panic Room by using flashy, aggressive style that serves no purpose other than to call attention to itself. This is a film that dearly loves its amazing computer-aided tracking shots, sending the camera speeding through walls and vents and keyholes, and while it's impressive technique (especially by 2002 standards, when this kind of digital stitching was still fairly rare) it doesn't add anything other than the feeling that the film is impatient with itself, and wants to rely on all kinds of whiz-bang visual dazzle to distract us from the unfolding mechanics of the plot. If there's anything the film gains from this, I missed it; it doesn't even help establish the contiguous physical layout of the apartment. Indeed, the location never ends up feeling like an organic whole, always just a bunch of sets cross-cut together. And if the nifty tracking shots couldn't achieve that...

The issue, then, is not that the filmmaking is specifically bad, but that the film doesn't hang together. It's a hollow thriller that's too sober-minded to get away with just being a tense potboiler (though I have read both feminist and class-based analyses of the film, trying to reclaim it from its shallow nature; I have found them thoroughly unpersuasive), and it's a film whose individually well-staged moments of tension - the director of Se7en and later Zodiac certainly knows how to build a good chase scene, and Howard Shore's musical score is terrifically obliging in elevating one's heart rate in those moments - aren't tied together comfortably. The mechanics of the film's narrative structure and editing announce themselves too pridefully for it to be a completely absorbing work of fiction, so even though the mechanics are at times quite beautifully refined, they're hard to enjoy. The acting is all top notch - Whitaker especially (but when isn't he?) brings real soulfulness and doubt to the most humane of the three thieves, and Foster's desperation never feels like a generic scream queen, but like a real person - but it's in service to roles that are all the sum of their one-line descriptions.

If I had to pick the single crippling problem with the film, it's that it can't bring itself to be disreputable, wanting desperately to be anything other than a genre film. While it succeeds at creating a certain mounting sense of dread, right from its famous opening credits - words hovering over New York like the hammer of God - Panic Room is simply not any fun, and its slow, deliberate construction robs it of all its momentum as a thriller.

So the question is, how did Fincher - a director who is very good at supplying thrills to thrillers, whatever his other strengths or limitations might be - end up shepherding such a leaden film, one that amplifies its emptiness in the attempt to compensate for it? And to that, I have no answer, other than a suspicion that there was simply no motivation for it not to be the case. The film was infamously shot over more than one-hundred days, divided by Foster's pregnancy, with dozens of re-takes to satisfy Fincher's perfectionism and the technical complexity of his shot set-ups. That kind of thing can begin to leech into the finished production, just as surely as a breakneck pace of filming a fleet little indie (it's easy to imagine Roger Corman knocking out a film like this over a long weekend) informs its energy. Fussy and claustrophobic in the wrong ways, Panic Room feels like a film that was made with an indulgent production budget and more resources than it needed. It feels like a film where decisions were made on the basis of "what can we do?" rather than "what should we do?", losing all its edge and energy in the process. Fincher is by no means my favorite, but I at least admire him when he's trying to prove something. When he's just using studio money to play around with aimlessly, the results are simply joyless and dull, even when they work at the level of craft.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2002
-The U.S.-Canadian My Big Fat Greek Wedding becomes one of the biggest word-of-mouth hits of all time
-Barbershop breaks out critically and financially, a rare feat for a film focused on an African-American cast
-Scooby-Doo ushers in a grim new age of bringing old cartoons back to life as CGI/live-action hybrids

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2002
-Digital filmmaking advances permit Aleksandr Sokurov to shoot Russian Ark as one feature-length take
-The Irish Bloody Sunday introduces the world to Paul Greengrass and his shaky docufiction aesthetic
-Gaspar Noé perpetrates one of the most disturbing and controversial films of the decade, Irréversible

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TAKE MY WIFE, PLEASE

That Gone Girl is something close to a mechanically flawless thriller I take to be more of an objective reality than an opinion. There is great mastery to be found in Jeff Cronenweth's cinematography, using the harsh sharpness of digital video to render suburban spaces with an exaggerated realism, making them pop so hard that they go 'round the other side and start to feel like fake structures, all surface texture and color, and this turns out to be just about the perfect setting for the story. The subtle visual overlaps in Kirk Baxter's editing (he's working without reliable partner Angus Wall this time) and the pulses in the cutting rhythm nicely echo and reinforce the sense in all good thrillers of fate closing in, wrapping around, and choking the characters and audience, while also - crucially in this case, creating a steady enough flow that a 149-minute running time prances by unnoticed. It's never been clearer that these two men are, increasingly, as important components in the making of David Fincher films as director David Fincher himself, whose noted obsessive perfectionism is anyway ideally suited to making the kind of elaborate watchworks of a film like this, where the story progresses in three separate chronological registers (the present, the several years past, and the past of about a week ago), all building towards one unalterable doom, obvious in retrospect but terrifyingly confusing in the moment.

And for all that it's perfect, I find that Gone Girl suffers from that most amorphous and indescribable and subjective of artistic flaws: I just didn't like it. It reminds me most, out of Fincher's directorial canon, of The Game, another magnificently crafted device that ends up being too chilly and remote from its characters for its own damn good. It's not simply that they're unlikable, though the leads in Gone Girl are immeasurably unlikable. It's that there's not much reason offered within the film for us to have any kind of feeling about them beyond the sense that we're watching rats in an especially masterful maze - but nothing ever offers us the chance to feel like we're inside with those rats, nor apparently does the film even grasp why that might be a way to make a thriller that's generally gripping and involving, and not just a handsome exercise in structuring and executing a thriller whose outcome is largely of academic, not emotional interest.

(And yes, there's the contingent who have seen the movie, as they read Gillian Flynn's bestselling book, as a deeply intimate and involving study of marriage in free fall. I don't begrudge anybody that reading, but I think it only holds if you close the book or stop the movie at the halfway point, and thus save yourself the discovery that it is in fact a trashy potboiler about a psychopath being psychopathic, and if it resembles your marriage in even the broadest sense at that point, I hope with all my heart that you have a terrific counselor).

The plot, in brief, and largely for form's sake - it is an immensely spoiler-sensitive story. Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) and his wife, Amy Elliott Dunne (Rosamund Pike) have not been happy in their marriage for many years. On the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy mysteriously vanishes, and the evidence starts to pile up, especially when you start looking for it, that Nick maybe probably killed her. His sole allies are his twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon), a skeptical police detective, Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens), and eventually the tacky men's rights lawyer Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry). His opponents number just about everybody with eyes to look at the mounting circumstantial evidence, but most persuasive is Amy herself, who gets to tell her side of the story of how their marriage grew toxic and malevolent in a series of flashbacks to their life together, from dazzling meet cute to the shrill misery of their move to Missouri from New York, precipitated in part by Nick's mother's illness, mostly because of financial collapse during the post-2008 recession. And while I will not at any other point stoop to making a "the book does this, but the movie does this" comparison - both of them are ultimately sudsy, enjoyable, but aggravatingly insubstantial beach reads - I can't overlook how much better a job the book does than the movie of expressing the story as an extension of the general social malaise of economical despair.

Anyway, the question looms: did Nick kill Amy, and is Amy even for sure dead? And I'm going to avoid the Big Spoilers, but it's really not worth talking about the film without touching on at least some of the Little Spoilers, so please take that as your warning to skedaddle if you're inclined.

So if we've shaken off all the spoilerphobes, here's one of the really odd things about Gone Girl, the movie (not bad, necessarily, but odd): it's basically never plausible that Nick is actually guilty of murder. Blame the way that the cinema eye feels "objective" while first-person narration does not, blame the way that Affleck, however brilliantly cast as an arrogant dick who has to work enormously hard every minute to seem even a little bit less smug and off-putting, is still a charismatic movie star, and its damn hard to sell charismatic movie stars as villains, unless you go all the way over the top with it, and of course in Gone Girl, the whole point is to keep things as ambiguous as possible. But for all that he's unpleasant and off-putting almost constantly, the way the visuals are structured and the film is assembled simply takes it for granted that he's innocent, of this crime at least.

The result is a sleek wrong man thriller, nothing more or less, and I suppose there's nothing wrong with that; it's a bit lugubrious for a genre film, with its imposing cinematography and strangulating sense of things getting worse and worse and worse in the screenplay (also written by Flynn, who largely just transcribes and condenses her book, though there's a different final scene). But it also clips by, and there's a decent quantity of humor, almost all of it provided by the side character - almost all of it supplied by Coon's Margo, in fact, in what I'm tempted to call my favorite out of a good bunch of performances (Perry is a sardonic, self-aware reservation, and while Dickens is kind of playing a stereotype, she does it with energy).

The only weaker spots are the leads, really, though whether it's because the austere remove the film keeps us at from them that they seem so vague, or of the shortcomings of the performance are part of what drives the austerity, I cannot say. At any rate, Affleck is here more to be Fincher's handsome, thick-chinned prop of entitled manhood, while Pike, on top of employing a far too measured American accent that never falters, but which she obviously finds uncomfortable (the only time she ever feels like speaking is natural to her is when she adopts a broad Southern accent, which I believe to be easier for Brits to mimic than the studied Midland accent Pike shoots for), disappointingly stops her performance at whatever is obviously happening on the surface - Amy is undoubtedly a rich, chewy role for any performer, even without having to dig for undercurrents, and it's easy to see why Pike left things at the level the script dictates. But one of her best gifts has always been finding what's not in the script and playing a character who comes into the film slantwise, and that's not her Amy, not at all. Her Amy is exactly the Amy I had in my head reading the book, and anyone could have played that part. Pike didn't become one of my favorites of her generation from doing things I would have expected.

None of which really detracts from the pleasures of Gone Girl, since they are almost all formal in nature: the way that the images create tension, the way that the editing punctuates, and to a degree the way that the score keeps it all at a heightened pitch (I am undecided on the music - it works in the film's interests, but it's by far the least interesting of the three film scores that Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross have composed for Fincher). The film clicks along fluidily and icily; it's technically impeccable but the whole thing feels awfully dry to me, proof of the director's technical accomplishment, but even more, proof that he badly needs process-oriented stories to bring to life, like Zodiac and The Social Network, because he's just too damn chilly for character dramas.

7/10

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