On "Bajirao Mastani"

Princess Mastani, the eponymous heroine of Sanjay Leela Bhansali's latest, is extraordinary not just because she is beautiful (as played by Deepika Padukone, she looks like she might dissolve into sunlight and mist at any moment) or because she is a skilled warrior. Mastani is also fantastically cussed, a creature of shockingly little reason or sense. A brief flirtation with a Maratha general impels her to abandon her home and land up at his. She remains there in the face of insult and injury, degradation and ostracization, because she must have her Bajirao. And once she has him, Mastani makes him the locus of her existence, waiting for him, making love to him, bearing offspring for him, and eventually losing her child and her life for him. Padukone doesn't even blink when she looks at Singh; her splendid eyes are astar and a little deranged.

Bhansali has always romanticized (and eroticized) extreme submission. But the clever, brave, literate Mastani's self-effacement in the name of love is a dizzying new level in the sadomasochistic love games that often form the crux of his films. She's the Glenn Close character from Fatal Attraction, except Bhansali exalts her for her magnificent obsession instead of making her an object of derision. 

If you're the sort who expects characters in fiction and art to act in rational, constructive ways that best serve their own interests, Bajirao Mastani, Bhansali's retelling of an 18th-century noblewoman's love affair with an already married warrior-statesman, will annoy you as much as Bhansali's previous romantic dramas did. 

The principal characters in Bhansali's cinematic universe are all superego and id, sex drive and death drive, high passion and high dudgeon, and they, like their creator, do little by half-measures. I wrote in an earlier piece that a SLB love story, at least Devdas onward, is generally "a horror film of sorts. Love is both god and monster; and since there is no fleeing from it, the infuriating, fascinating victims in Bhansali's cavernous yet claustrophobic world run toward it, bloodied and crazed." 

Romantic love as sublime torture, as the thorn in your side (or, if we're being referential, in your foot) that you leave there till you are near-dead and orgasmic with the poison in your system, is not an easy or even pleasant notion to buy into, but Bhansali realizes this notion with such Quixotic mania in every aspect of his movies that I, for one, invariably find myself impressed, if not always moved. He is a true visionary, a filmmaker whose ambition is matched by an ability to hard-sell his worldview (perverse as it may seem to many) through the almost wracking beauty of his visuals and music and the dogged, unflagging thrust of his narrative toward the rousingly tragic. 

Bhansali's abiding interest has been viraha, the separation of lovers that is heavy with pain and an almost spiritual sort of longing. I was a little taken aback when I thought back on his oeuvre and realized that, despite the reputation his films have for the chemistry between their main leads, the lovers of his films spend very little time in each other's company. Kept apart by circumstances and wounded pride and intransigent families, they are, after the initial courtship, mostly shown pining for one another. The separation of the titular couple, less organic here than in Bhansali's other films (since she marries him and lives right across the hall, so to speak) might have become Bajirao Mastani's biggest downfall were it not for its lead actors. Singh and Padukone make so much heat and light out of the surprisingly meager screen-time they have together (and very little by way of interesting storytelling about the two of them as a unit post-marriage) that it is on the strength of their chemistry alone that the film holds together.  

Padukone is, in general, tremendous in the film, playing Mastani with an appealingly wanton quality and using those magnificent eyebrows and long, expressive hands to great effect in each of her magnificent dance numbers. It's a pity, then, that her Urdu is rather ragged and uninflected, especially given how solid her co-star's accent work is, alongside the rest of what he manages to accomplish in his superstar-making turn here.

I said a silent prayer of gratitude for Singh while watching the film. Thank heavens Bhansali wasn't able to make this film earlier with any of the other male stars he'd intended to cast. Singh is virile and beautiful as Bajirao, who is perhaps the most interesting male protagonist Bhansali has ever written. (The filmmaker's women are almost always the most compelling figures in his work; the men are generally immature, unworthy idiots or curmudgeonly saints.) Singh brings so much swagger to his deeply committed performance and is so ferociously, terrifyingly alive that the film almost seems like it's in 3-D when he's onscreen. His Bajirao is so many things — noble, funny, sexy, imperious, hotheaded, scheming, and eventually weary and broken — and the actor hits all of those notes without showing any sign of strain. You understand why the two women in his life are so hopelessly besotted with him. 

The second of those two women, Priyanka Chopra's Kashibai, is the film's most sympathetic character. Singh and Chopra's scenes with one another are full of warmth and humor in a way that his with Padukone just aren't. Chopra, in what is perhaps her best performance to date, brings reserves of dignity, humor, and warmth to Kashi and just about walks away with the film;  the wise, sweet Kashibai follows in the tradition of Madhuri Dixit's Chandramukhi (Devdas) and Rani Mukerji's Gulabji (Saawariya) as the character whom, despite her third-wheel status, the audience feels most for (and would probably like best in real life). 

Chopra gets the film's two most emotionally charged scenes — the first, where she finally reveals to Bajirao her anguish at having been abandoned; and the second, in which she visits her rival and encourages her to stay unwavering in the face of vitriolic intolerance. Chopra's Kashi is a paragon of traditional wifely virtue, but she is refreshingly uncompromising in her own way. She refuses to abnegate her self-respect by being content with her husband's second-best love. She refuses, also, to be unjust to the other woman; her resentment is reserved for the man who's made the decision to bring this other woman home.  

Chopra also gets the film's sexiest moment; she watches Singh bathe with unconcealed lust and is subsequently carried off to bed by him. Singh's romance with Padukone is chaste by comparison; the closest they get to physical intimacy is when he presses a dagger (no innuendo intended) into her back and when he helps deliver their baby. This bit is touching and funny, and not just because the baby is clearly fake.

Bajirao Mastani is Bhansali's first film based on historical events (if one discounts Black, which took significant inspiration from the Helen Keller story). Bhansali remains engaged primarily with the personal here, but he also concerns himself with the political in a way that he never did in his previous films. The film begins with Bajirao's declaration that he intends, by taking down the Muslim Mughals, to re-establish a Hindu empire in India. But he goes on to marry a Muslim woman and raise a Muslim son. The perceived corruption of the bloodline is what drives his mother, his brother, and the ruling religious order of his fiefdom to attack Mastani again and again. (All this maltreatment of Mastani gets a little repetitious, eventually; I'd rather have done away with it, and Singh's victory dance number, in favor of more of the lead pair together.) I was worried at the outset that Bajirao Mastani would take a troublingly of-the-moment Hindu supremacist view of the famed warrior's story, but it ends up being a fairly explicit call for inter-religious tolerance and harmony. As admirable as this message may be, it also feels facile, given that Bajirao's change of heart (which is what it really feels like, despite his subsequent claim to his mother that he was always fighting the Mughals, never the Muslims) isn't explored with any sort of nuance. And what of his massive ambition to conquer the entire nation? Bhansali doesn't quite know how to navigate Bajirao's aspirations as a statesman with the same level of engagement that he has with the character's domestic life. 

He does a better job of establishing Bajirao as a fearsome warrior, though, and Singh makes for a convincing and kinetic action star. Bhansali's aesthetic choices in the battle scenes are inspired by a couple unexpected sources: Wuxia films and graphic novels. (The thrilling opening credits make the latter inspiration explicit.) Despite these interesting influences, these scenes are not always visually successful. I wish Bhansali had relied less on CGI and more on practical effects and an impressionistic filming style, where cunningly chosen detail, rather than slightly incoherent editing and computer-generated trickery in unkind close shots, could have given us a sense of the action. 

Otherwise, however, this is an intimidatingly gorgeous film. Bhansali's visuals are, contrary to popular opinion, not pretty just for the heck of it. He gives the audience much to look at, but not out of a desire to pander. The glorious-looking worlds of his films, where each color and element is full and vigorous, are the most effective setting for the vivid, heightened emotional states of his characters. The compositional symmetry of his scenes and set pieces makes for the sort of backdrop against which the unrelenting forces of chaos set in motion to thwart his protagonists stand out in especially startling relief. 

Throughout Bajirao Mastani, I was almost afraid to blink for fear of missing some new wonder, some gleaming beauty. I almost laughed out of sheer disbelief during Deewani Mastani, a musical sequence of absurd, discombobulating beauty. (Mastani dances in a brazen whirl of gold in this number, but I was struck by how she, after her move to Pune, is almost always situated in enormous, ruin-like, shadowy rooms, a woman in the middle of hostile seas.) Bajirao Mastani's symphonic visual language is rich with diverse influences (Mughal tapestries, the Ajanta cave murals, Raja Ravi Verma paintings), but the resulting look is singular, purposeful, and memorable.

Ultimately, Bhansali and his team are trying to give us an experience, bold and large and go-for-broke, in Bajirao Mastani. The film has its faults, but halfheartedness or laziness are not among them.This is a film that is naked in its desire to stir and impress, and, to its credit, it often succeeds. Bajirao Mastani, exhausting as it can be, is a forceful, exhilarating work.

On "Tamasha"

Tamasha, Imtiaz Ali's latest film, is fortified with all the strengths the director's movies usually possess and weakened by a number of the same flaws. And just like most of his work, it is wonderful and frustrating. 

Here, too, is a man (Ved Vardhan Sahni, played by Ranbir Kapoor) who is broken and can only be fixed by the loving ministrations of a woman (Deepika Padukone's Tara Maheshwari) he puts through the wringer. Here, too, are the existential dilemmas of well-off folks who need to find themselves through tourism and romantic adventure in verdant, picturesque lands, far away from the quotidian distractions of work, family, and real life. Here, once again, are mental health issues, not fully understood or explicated,  and eventually  fixed rather conveniently, as they invariably are in his happy-ending films (Jab We Met and Love Aaj Kal before this one), by requited romantic love and the successes that love inspires in the world of his films.

But Tamasha, like the rest of the films in Ali's oeuvre, mines an almost spiritual sort of wonder from the notion that romantic love warms the great, cold gloom of life into something meaningful and transcendent. Ali has a way with making love's most ineffable experiences visible in his films. He insinuates himself into the companionable silences of kindred spirits, captures the barely contained heat that rises off lovers, simulates with an astonishing keenness of eye the childlike joyousness, the sun-dappled idyll of falling in love and the sad, clanging hideousness of trying to fall out of it. 

I found myself reacting intensely to Tamasha's conception of love as a force of freedom and for good. The film's lovers, in its halcyon Corsica portion, form a jolly, candid friendship right away. They feel emancipated by each other to find in themselves the sweet, unchecked vigor of childhood and also grow toward better, less phony versions of themselves. They both challenge and comfort each other. Well, Ved is challenged and comforted by Tara; the narrative shortchanges her and focuses on him. She is rounded out not by Ali's screenplay but by Padukone's generous performance. As she has been in all of her recent work, she is the cynosure of every scene she's in, bringing to the bracing, unembarrassed Tara a shimmering transparency.

Ali's vision has, in spite of its steadfast faith in the redemptive enchantment of love, darkened with each film, and he lets the shadows swallow his lead players whole before they find their happy ending in Tamasha. They lose hold on their dignity, their sense of self, even their sanity before they are allowed to find their way back to each other. And Kapoor and Padukone together are so vivid, so easy that I was convinced that their characters ought to be together, once he figures his shit out, of course. Some may, with good reason, find her acceptance of him at the end  too facile, even masochistic, but I bought it. Padukone turns into a creature of light and air when she's around the version of Ved that isn't a boring little office drone. (Ranbir, with his French beard, bad posture, and flattened out speech, plays this tedious, unctuous, flavorless man, the one who the girl would dump for the leading man in other love stories, with as much care as he does the flamboyant pixie that is, according to the film and Tara, Ved's true self.) When the two look at each other, you believe they're seeing each other.

But before he makes their match, Ali constructs an idealist's argument for the the value of a fully examined life. Tamasha is a lyric battle-cry against anodyne conformity. Ali calls, like Rajkumar Hirani (in 3 Idiots) and Zoya Akhtar (in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara and Dil Dhadakne Do) before him, for the liberation of the (generally straight, cismale) self from conformity through joyous art-making, lovemaking, and travel. But he makes his case with wit and audacity, creating a kind of arch collage of image and sound for his film. He directs his actors to play straight, and stages stretches of the film with casual naturalism. But he also calls attention to the artifice of film as a medium of storytelling with playful, showy touches.  He marks "chapters" with French pulp illustration-style title cards that reference pulp Bollywood movies. He slices up the narrative often so the audience is kept just a smidge disoriented by the back and forth of the non-linear narrative. He spins a haze of golden, wine-soaked glamor all over the couple's romp in Corsica, which unspools with a delightfully relaxed unpredictability, and then shoots the Delhi portions like a thriller, mostly at night (the daylight scenes are mostly of Ved going through the motions, again and again, at home and work; if one were to name an Instagram filter inspired by the tone of these parts, it'd be called "Antiseptic"), with silences that are always on the threshold of ominous. He has the characters from the tales little Ved likes to listen to (in a flashback marked "flashback") haunt the streets of Shimla in costumes clearly realized in the imagination of a child. (Laxman is wearing a school-uniform sweater under his bow.) 

Ali also makes cunning, unexpected use of AR Rahman's score; troupes of balladeers in Punjab sing to the audience as Tara struggles to recover from her love affair in Kolkata. An autorickshaw driver is seen, in his memory, singing a lusty folk number, while he reminisces about his past glory in the presence of a lost Ved at a roadside dhaba. The sad, sweet Agar Tum Saath Ho plays as Ved leaves Tara, his walk slowed to the herky-jerky movement of an eight-bit video game. All this showy technique doesn't bug, however, since this is, after all, a film about finding new ways to tell old stories and choosing new stories to tell about oneself. 

Tamasha and its protagonists are idiosyncratic enough, its play of wide-eyed hopefulness and quiet despair compelling enough, that the film develops an appealing strangeness that overcame, for the most part, my instinctual desire to roll my eyes at its earnest insistence on individualism in a story about pretty, privileged, able-bodied people in a society that sets very few challenges in the way of their path to self-actualization. Tamasha's weirdness, and the radiant conviction of its female lead, save it from smugness.

On "Haider"

Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider is an achievement of lyrical, humanistic storytelling. Dense with history, but never pedantic, the film asks why people - creatures of flesh and blood, of love and desire, of songs and laughter - are the first to stop being of significance, to become invisible, to disappear in times of sociopolitical conflict. It is a pointed, sorrowful question, and Haider is a pointed, sorrowful movie.

Bhardwaj's retellings of Shakespeare's tragedies have always felt flavorful and specific, because he always finds a milieu for these centuries-old stories that gives them a jolt of immediacy and topical charge. You may not know the ins and outs, the various versions of the Kashmir story, or be intimately acquainted with this particular moment (the mid-nineties) in its history. But Haider's world will seem at least a little familiar to you, because various iterations of this setting – places of fear and grief and resentment, of soldiers in the streets and of diminished families in homes – are so often in the news that we are probably horrified when we pause to consider how used we've grown to the sights and sounds of people suffering. 

Haider's Kashmir is remarkable not just because of its powerful depiction of that sort of suffering, though. (At one point, a doctor diagnoses Haider with PTSD, but it isn't just him, the film suggests. The entire state is shellshocked. The trauma runs so deep that men have forgotten how to enter their own houses without being frisked.) It is also deeply moving in its evocation of a way of life that we haven't seen often enough on cinema screens. Bhardwaj goes in search for the color and richness in that way of life. He puts a ear to its heart for the music and the poetry in its voices. Fathers and sons sing together. Children learn and play. The dizzying patterns of flowers woven into the carpets and the shawls and painted onto the stoneware shimmer even as life after life goes barren. Haider casually situates its characters amid the flames of Kashmir's gulmohar trees and the elegant inevitability of its snowdrifts, not because these are picturesque, but because these characters belong to this beauty, and this beauty belongs to them. Haider reminds the viewer that the lives that we reduce to numbers (these many dead, these many wounded) are not abstractions. Bhardwaj doesn't dramatize this assertion with cinematic patness or with a heavy, accusing hand. He lets the intimate, warm, lived detail accumulate in each scene until this place feels real and bloody with life - life lived, savored, lost, wasted, truncated. Just as the Faiz Ahmed Faiz verses that close the film, Haider grieves the dead and the living left behind.

The question of grief is of great interest to Bhardwaj here. Haider doesn't know how to even begin grieving. How to process his beloved father's disappearance, his beloved mother's apparent betrayal? He acts out, he comes undone, he haunts the ruins of his childhood home. (Ghosts are a preoccupation in the film. The absence of disappeared family members haunts the lives of their loved ones, holding them in limbo. The specter of old joys and old loves hangs heavy. Men with mutable identities resurface from certain death and disappear into the snow. The Kashmir of Haider is, among other things, a cemetery, and nothing in it is completely dead.) Haider is furious and confused and unhinged and broken, sometimes all at once, and he stumbles painfully in his darkness. Shahid Kapoor, whose melancholy prettiness, sweet voice, and slightly manic way with comedy (and there is a good deal of twisted, Kafka-esque comedy here) suit him to Bhardwaj's cinematic vision, drives that pain home with emphatic grace. His scenes with Tabu (who plays his mother, Ghazala) are devastatingly romantic, the two performers responding to each other's faces and bodies and voices with clarity that feels instinctual. 

While Haider mourns as if that mourning is all that is real to him, Ghazala is aching to be done with mourning. She wants to free herself from the unhappiness of an unsatisfactory marriage, of a missing husband, of a long-absent son. Tabu, as this complex, fascinating character, does the kind of magisterial work that stays with you for a long time. Here is an actor whose unnervingly beautiful face I can watch for hours as it changes shade and register. She brought so much (sex, sadness, intelligence, charisma) to every line, every glance, every silence that I began wishing that the movie were entirely from Ghazala's perspective. Both mother and son are sympathetic. (Very few characters are painted entirely black in Haider; even Kay Kay Menon's unctuous, plotting uncle is lovelorn and wracked with guilt.) The plight of these two allows the film to wonder about the dilemma faced by a wounded people. Ought they to move forward? Can they move forward? Or must they engage again and again with their grief? Haider doesn't come to straightforward conclusions, but it nods toward both remembrance and compassion. The story ends, as everyone knows, in death. But Haider is not merely dirge; it is also serenade.

On "Gone Girl"

The protagonists in Gone Girl are lovely to look at, but they do ugly things to each other and to the people around them. Their first encounter is charming; the kiss it culminates in is one of the prettiest things I've seen at the movies this year. Powdered sugar swirls in the air, dusting Rosamund Pike's movie star face (a face that like her performance is much more uncompromisingly chilly than one might have expected for Amazing Amy, but perhaps much more interesting for that unexpected touch of ice), and Trent Reznor's gleaming, potent score is full of twilit magic. The proposal of marriage is also charming; Ben Affleck's Nick gallantly saves Amy from embarrassing media questions with cute compliments and a ring. But the marriage itself is neither charming nor charmed for long. It becomes an unhappy, unfortunate thing when the marital set these two perform on changes to a space that is less prettily designed, harder to "block." There's this moment (maybe made up) when Amy asks Nick why he's forcing her to be that wife – the nag, the harridan. That's not the role she wants to play. She'd rather be the cool wife, the good wife, and he is to be the good husband. But it isn't easy to be good or cool when there is no more money and no more big city glamor. It is easier to lie and to cheat and to hate each other. Nick doesn't make Amy feel light like he used to; he drains her of her patience and her resources. Amy doesn't make Nick better or smarter anymore; she makes him feel cornered and diminished. The relationship goes from symbiotic to vampiric. People stalk and beat and kill in Gone Girl; gore is splattered in sick, abstract-expressionist tableaux. But what makes this movie scary is the notion that love warps so easily into something monstrous and keening for blood. We claim to know, really know our life partners, our spouses, but can we really know another person? Can we know what will make the switch flick and the light go out in the beautiful, beloved heads of the people we hold closest to ourselves. Fincher suggests that the most frightening monsters might not be under the bed but in it, right next to us.

Gone Girl sets its mystery, with the sort of mounting pressure that makes you feel like you're arrested in the final moments of an unpleasant dream, struggling to wake up but also curious to see how it all turns out, against an inquiry into the workings of a marriage. That relationship, much like the town that Amy goes missing in, is portrayed here as a thing of sunny surfaces and a cankered underbelly. New Carthage is photogenic suburbia peopled with sunny Midwesterners in some scenes, and seedy ruins full of broke, broken shadow-folk in others. In marriage too, there are the stories one tells – of annual wedding anniversary treasure hunts, for instance, or of little signals to signify trust or love that only one's significant other can recognize, and then then there are the resentments that charge these benign-seeming totems of the relationship and turn presents into weapons and shared vulnerabilities into exploitable weaknesses. Gone Girl is interested in the falsehoods intrinsic to romantic relationships that couples hide out of sight underneath the signifiers of a fairy-tale romance. The film asks us to consider that the marriage narrative is one that inevitably loses steam as time goes on, has its powdered-sugar enchantment rubbed off it by the banal realities of strained finances, say, or unmet expectations. Perhaps the way to avoid the commonplace ending – the prolonged low-key misery of long-term unhappiness or the charmless grotesquerie of divorce – is to borrow tropes from outside the genre, so to speak, of the love story. Both Amy and Nick are writers, after all. While Nick, often the less sharp mind in the relationship, writes in clichés outside the margins of his marriage, Amy much more inventively borrows from the whodunit, (She even does homework for her plan with books on murder.) Just as she plotted games in which her husband looked for clues that led him to a present, she plots a jape in which he might end up in jail for her murder. Fun!

Fincher plays at length with the idea of marriage as a fundamentally performative construct, a story to be written and read and acted out, a spectator sport. The neighbors, the friends, the parents, even the media in a certain kind of relationship are watching open-mouthed and hungry for the next twist as they would a film, a television show, or a play – and then passing judgment as they would on said film, television show, or play. Gone Girl's twisted sense of humor comes from its investigation of real life as reality-TV-esque spectacle. The entire nation is perversely gripped by the Nick and Amy's strange situation. They want more. In a deliciously ironic scene, Nick sees that his once-failing bar is the town hot-spot, now that its owner might be a murderer. A woman, styled like someone out of the Real Housewives franchise and volunteering at Amy's search headquarters, wants to take a smiling selfie with Nick and later sends it to a smarmy, outraged newsperson. Tanner Bolt (played with glorious, amused understatement by Tyler Perry) tells Nick: "You two are the most fucked up people I know, and I specialize in fucked up people." He is laughing; he is entertained by their spectacle. And he is not alone. Everyone wants to watch, hear about, and be part of Nick and Amy's freak show.

But the outsiders are not the only spectators here. Nick and Amy watch each other, and watch themselves watch each other. At first, they act out better, cooler versions of themselves to reel the other in, and then, when Nick loses interest, Amy decides it’s time to amp the drama up. And it works. Because Nick is paying attention not only to Amy’s machinations, but to his own responses. He preens after getting a TV interview right, for instance. He’s made an impression. He’s got through to her. Even after she comes back, and he finds himself stuck in the mousetrap of his marriage, he is at least a little into it. Because there are ways out of that mousetrap, if he really wanted to make a run for it. The audience knows it, his endlessly supportive sister Margo (Carrie Coon, a dry, authentic standout in a terrific supporting cast) knows it, and he knows it. But Nick, with his folders full of ideas for novels he's never written, is now living in an interesting story, is finally an interesting character. Amy, too, returns to him, risking exposure, because she finally feels seen. For Amy, to be seen as she is - devious, destructive, exacting, uncompromising - is to be loved. If Nick knows her, he loves her, must love her, will love her.

While Gone Girl manages to hint at all these engaging ideas within the framework of a relentlessly entertaining thriller, While Gone Girl manages to hint at all these gripping ideas within the framework of a relentlessly entertaining thriller, I think its critique of marriage could have been more nuanced if the narratorial scales had been more balanced. Both Nick and Amy are fucked up people who do fucked up things. Nut since the narrative is mainly focalized through Nick for the first half of the film, and he is being hounded and grilled (though we don’t know yet for certain if he deserves to be or not), we react with cautious sympathy to him, handsome and likable, albeit, as we learn, pretty flawed. Amy, on the other hand, emerges initially from her journal entries. She is perfect and love at first in these entries, and then perfect and scared. But we are meant to think that she might already be dead when we hear from her via the journal. So her voice is not as real to us, her troubles not as immediate and pressing as Nick's. (Though her diary indicates that he was physically violent with her, that he was a profligate spender, that he didn't want her to get pregnant, his bafflement at these charges reads as pretty genuine to us.) By the time we learn that she isn't dead, and we finally get her "true" perspective, she is revealed to be a diabolical villainess, hell-bent on destroying her husband's life for a crime he didn't commit. And she's destroyed a former paramour's life. And she'll go on to kill another lover. While her husband's misdeeds – the cheating, the neglectfulness – are crappy, they are also human. Amy does evil things because she wants revenge. We never truly get to see the character as a fully realized person as opposed to a figment of her own diabolical imagination or an almost-mythic beast of vengeance. She tells us that the initial years of her marriage truly were good, that Nick really did make her feel happy. We also get to see a brief glimpse of her as someone with emotions other than rage when she finds out that her husband is now enamored with a younger woman, even though she has given up her money, her life in New York, and a good deal of her emotional energy for him. Rosamund Pike brings a world of shading to that wordless, almost throwaway moment. But it is not enough. If the story is about a philandering doofus and the psychopath who brought him to heel, its reflections on the psychosis of marriage itself become less provocative. The film, then, functions as a very solid example of modern noir, but maybe not much more. And it becomes a more troubling piece of art, too, since Amy's legitimate complaints and concerns about men who don't try hard enough and expect too much, about women who have to keep trying with diminishing returns, become moot, since they're coming out of the mouth of the person who cried rape and murder. I worried that the film could be trivializing the issues of violence against women, that a certain kind of person, who unfortunately abounds in society, would take away from this film the moral that women do make this shit up all the time, or that they're crazies who asked for it.

But I think Fincher is actually interested in more than a crackling genre exercise or a blasé indictment of “psycho bitches.” Its interrogation of how people in relationships connect to and alienate each other, put on a show for and reveal themselves to each other feels neither incidental or accidental (and it helps that Affleck and Pike play their characters as more than just a hapless schmo and an ice-demon, respectively). The failure, then, is one of (too-faithful) adaptation, to borrow a phrase from this sharp piece. Sure, the idea of this force of implacable evil as a villain makes for compelling storytelling, but we see (in her scenes at the motel, at Desi’s house) that Amy has glimmers of more than that. What if Fincher and Flynn had gone mining for more of those glimmers instead of giving in to the temptation of creating a Big Bad? What if they’d disposed of that previous boyfriend and given Nick a different hook to claw his way into Amy’s psyche with? I wonder, but as it stands, Gone Girl still feels like something more than soapy, scary fun. I find myself wrestling with its pleasures and problems days after I watched it, and I suspect that while it doesn’t marry (ha!) its more interesting concerns entirely successfully with its pursuit of more pulpy pleasures, it still manages to poke around in some dark, troubling places in that attempt.