Gone Girl

Information. That’s the real object of David Fincher’s obsession. It’s the reason he keeps coming back to police procedurals. In a world flooded with information, it is the job of the detective to wade through the mess to find the truth: Mills and Somerset (Se7en), Toschi and Graysmith (Zodiac), Blomkvist and Salander (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), they all fulfill the job in some capacity. In Gone Girl, Fincher’s latest, this thankless task falls to Detective Rhonda Boney. 

As played by Kim Dickens, Boney comes across as intelligent and empathetic. Like Fincher’s previous protagonists, she is meticulous and committed to her job. In many ways, she embodies the role of the prototypical Fincher protagonist but with one minor modification: she’s not the film’s protagonist. Gone Girl is not the story of a determined detective seeking the truth (like Zodiac or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Instead, the film centers on the subjects of her investigation, Amy and Nick Dunne. 

At the start of the film, “Amazing” Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), the woman who inspired a popular children's book series, has gone missing. Rapidly, the high-profile case attracts the attention of the media who immediately hunt for a suspect, stumbling upon Amy’s husband, Nick (Ben Affleck.) At first, Nick seems innocent and distraught, but Fincher soon reveals that he had been having marital difficulties and an affair. The media quickly jumps on this and starts calling for his head. To counter this perception, Nick gives interviews in which he paints himself as a bad man who nonetheless loves his wife, a move that wins him some sympathy in his community. In retaliation, Amy, who turns out to have framed her husband, places anonymous calls to the police that point to Nick’s guilt. Gone Girl is structured around Nick and Amy’s manipulation of information to forward their agendas, and, in most instances, their manipulations work. Boney’s partner, for example, buys entirely into Amy’s staged narrative of her disappearance and would like to arrest Nick with little evidence to save himself the trouble of working on the case. Boney, the only character who resists manipulation, is pushed to the sidelines. 

As soon Fincher establishes that nearly all of his characters are either manipulative or subject to manipulation, Detective Boney, even though she does not get significant amounts of screen-time, becomes the only reliable surrogate through which the audience can view the film. Throughout, she is the only character who withholds judgement and looks for substantial evidence to carefully consider before accusing, let alone arresting, anyone. At first, she is hesitant to believe Nick was responsible for Amy’s disappearance, but at the same time, she knows that there is more to him than meets the eye and never comes to trust him completely. In the last part of the film, she becomes the sole crusader willing to question Amy’s shady captivity story and unlikely escape (which Amy invented to return home safely), but, in a sick twist of fate, no one onscreen acknowledges the truth she tries to pursue.

Like her idiot partner whose opinion constantly sways back and forth with that of the public, her superiors would rather believe in the story fed to them than to question the incongruities of Amy’s tale. Sadly, the hard work Boney puts into this hellish case ends up being for nothing. Kim Dickens’ resigned attitude in her final scene is heartbreaking. She’s not devastated or angered, she merely stops caring. In Fincher’s cruel world, only people like Amy, those who can dexterously manipulate information, succeed. 

In the end, Gone Girl is not a tragedy because Nick is forced into a life with the psychopathic Amy; the two twisted souls deserve each other. The film is a tragedy because Boney, the only person equipped with uncovering the truth, gives up the fight. Her work of finding out the truth, revealing the real criminal (central to films like Zodiac and Se7en) has been marginalized. Boney accepts that the truth doesn't matter nearly as much as public opinion. In a world where people would rather turn away from reality than tarnish the pristine image of Amazing Amy and her perfect family, there is nothing she can do, and it is terrifying. 

Verdict- 4/4

Gone Girl (2014) 2h 29min. R. 

Random Thoughts 

- Rosamund Pike, who plays Amy, has been doing great work for years now but has just now gotten the recognition she deserves. She's amazing, as always, but Kim Dickens is simply better this time around. For more of Pike's work check out her role as Bond Girl Miranda Frost in Die Another Day and Jane Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. 
- Watch Deadwood! Kim Dickens plays Joanie Stubbs. 
- Ben Affleck never stopped being a great actor. Here's more proof. 
- And Tyler Perry shows up as a crooked lawyer who turns out to be the character with the most integrity because this is a David Fincher film. 
- Neil Patrick Harris is in here too. This movie is a treasure trove of incredible actors. 

A Most Wanted Man

A Most Wanted Man begins with a closeup of a harbor in Hamburg, Germany. Waves rhythmically crash against the cracked stone structure of the piers, probing its defenses. Onscreen text informs the audience that Mohammad Atta conceived the September 11 attacks from that city, an event that went ignored by it’s inefficient intelligence community. Since then, it says, Hamburg has been on high alert, intent on not repeating past mistakes. Immediately afterward, director Anton Corbjin cuts to a man, later identified as Issa Karpov, as he suspiciously rises out of the water and, with the cover of the night, disappears into the open, unprotected city. In a few minutes, Corbin effectively establishes the paranoia that took a hold of the city after 9/11, and he works hard to build that same fear in his audience. He forces it to ask, is this Hamburg’s next mistake? The world’s next threat?

The rest of the film focuses on the efforts of several individuals, many of them spies, as they struggle to locate and deal with Karpov and what he might represent. Gunther Bachman (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a German spy, leads the chase for Karpov with a team that includes his protege, Erna Frey (a fantastic Nina Hoss), and an American diplomat, Martha Sullyvan (Robin Wright). The case later involves Karpov’s reluctant banker Tommy Brue (Willem Dafoe) and the goodhearted lawyer Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams) who decides, against all advice, to defend Karpov. All of the characters are forced to ask themselves tough questions. None is spared: Who are these “terrorists” we deal with regularly? Why do the act the way they do? Most of them would like to believe in the innate goodness of themselves and other people, but the memory of the attacks linger in their minds, making them adopt a “guilty until proven innocent” mindset that by the end of the film proves catastrophic for all involved. 

While Corbjin exploits the political atmosphere of the post 9/11 world, he restrains himself from ever declaring a political agenda. He is not concerned, for example, with the morality or effectivity of torture, nor does he make a case for or against intelligence institutions and their increasing prominence in recent years. Yes, torture is a part of our world. Yes, institutions like the CIA have massive powers that they didn’t have before. But Corbjin doesn’t use these universally accepted truths to make argue for or against a political position. Instead, he uses them to explore how they have affected the people involved with them. In that way, A Most Wanted Man is more philosophical than political in the question it raises. “Every good man has a little bit of bad, doesn’t he?” the cynical Martha tells Gunther. In this modern, post 9/11 world where people are inclined to see the worst in each other, A Most Wanted Man dares to see the best, and central to this viewpoint is Philip Seymour Hoffman's humanizing performance.

Hoffman plays Gunther as a disillusioned, beaten down spy. Gunther’s job consists mostly of gathering information, talking with his sources, and persuading other people to help him achieve his goal. He is the anti-cinematic spy, which is to say real life spies probably have jobs more akin to his than to that of any other spy ever depicted onscreen. Hoffman’s labored breathing and broken expressions convey the great weight the job has on Gunther, but no matter how hard it gets, he keeps pushing through “to make the world a safer place,” an idea that makes the horrors of his job bearable.
There are so many tired tropes Corbjin could have lazily relied upon, not just with Gunther, the hardened spy, but with the rest of the characters as well: the evil businessman (played, of course by the devilish Willem Dafoe), the seemingly peaceful Muslim who is lured by the terrorist cause, the naive idealist lawyer whose rosy world view is shattered by the events of the film. It’s a miracle that none of these characters ever become as simple as they could have been. Take Dr. Faisal Abdullah, a suspected terrorist whom Gunther and his team closely survey. He could have easily been the big bad bearded terrorist out to destroy Western civilization. Instead, he turns out to be a genuine philanthropist and a family man with a strong bond to his son. Though he’s not shown much, Corbjin makes an effort to understand him, and so does Gunther in a powerful scene in which he tries to think through the other man’s motivation. Both see the humanity in a person many would like to believe is a faceless monster. 

In the end, the film is optimistic in that it truly believes in the efforts of its protagonists, but it is never delusional. It ends with a (literal) crash that seems to wake up its characters to their harsh realities. Corbjin does not pretend that a few good people will change the way society behaves. What they can do, he seems to say, is to keep working on changing the minds of the majority until they see the light, but that takes time and effort, generations, even. (The film is full of sons intent on correcting the mistakes of their fathers.) In that sense A Most Wanted Man is neither like the idealistic "The West Wing" (1999) nor the hopeless "House of Cards" (2013) (two of the representative pre/post 9/11 examples of political filmmaking), but it's certainly a step in the right direction.

Verdict- 3.5/4
A Most Wanted Man (2014) 2h 2min. R.