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.

On Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby"

If you haven't been scared away by the loud, gaudy, Fergie-laden TV spots already, be warned. Give Baz Luhrmann's latest a wide berth if you're looking for a quietly respectful, conventionally tasteful, prestige-picture adaptation of The Great Gatsby. You'll have much better luck (and a much duller time) with the tepidly elegant version from the seventies.

This Gatsby is a wonder. It is often marvelously good entertainment, and even more frequently a grandly mournful thing. It lurches drunkenly sometimes between the frantic fun of it all and the big, blue sadness at the heart of the story it wants to tell. One worries if the whole ambitious enterprise, with its gleefully unashamed visual fakery and its brassy, anachronistic soundtrack, is going to come crashing down around the burnished ears of its beautiful lead players. But it never slips completely, and stays engrossing for the entirety of its generous run- time.

The makers don't toy much with the structure or content of the novel (except for adding an unfortunate and unnecessary framing device, in which Nick Carraway is shown writing the novel at a sanatorium. Even as he voices Fitzgerald's words, they leap, redundantly and stupidly, off his typewritten pages and onto the screen.) Carraway recounts the story of how he met Jay Gatsby, owner of a mysterious fortune and many beautiful shirts. Gatsby has bought an enormous Long Island estate, where he throws vast parties and generates wild rumors about himself, right across the bay from the Buchanans, a young married couple of pedigreed fortune. As it turns out, Mrs. Buchanan, Carraway's cousin, is Gatsby's old flame, and he wants her back. The setting is at once a wonderland and a waste. Most of the characters are either monstrously privileged or of shady provenance. Almost everyone behaves badly.

Luhrmann doesn't need to tinker with the story to make this cinematic iteration of the book entirely his own. The film takes time to get there, but Luhrmann's vision clicks loudly into place in the lurid party scene at Myrtle's apartment, filmed in the color-drenched, acid-trip style so beloved of the director. The camera weaves madly in and out of the chaos to bring us into the experience of a very drunk Nick who, at one point, spies himself outside in the street, looking up at him. He is the observer even as he has finally been forced to participate. The relationship between the observer and the observed was at the heart of Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, where the writer falls headlong in love with the performer onstage - a courtesan who seems, despite her profession, impossibly perfect to him. That dynamic is foregrounded in Gatsby, too, making his version curiously singular. The primary love story here is the one between Carraway and Gatsby. Carraway watches Gatsby, awestruck, as the latter narrates how he conjured himself out of nothing, as he moves confidently through various glittering, mindless hordes, as he falls valiantly to pieces. Nick, like Moulin Rouge's Christian, is a writer, albeit one who has set aside his artistic ambitions. He, too, falls in love with a performer. James Gatz heroically acts the monumental role of Jay Gatsby, and Nick can't tear his eyes away, though he knows that his idol, the crook in whom he perceives an uncorrupted soul, is doomed. I wonder if Luhrmann is perhaps projecting a personal love of movie stars - those glamorous shadows, both mercenary and idealized, with whom our love affair is magical and tragically brief - onto the stories he chooses to film. At any rate, Luhrmann realizes the equation between Carraway and his hero (played with warm chemistry by DiCaprio and Maguire, who brings to Nick an effective mixture of lost-boy creepiness and wide-eyed empathy) with the kind of nuance that many, for whom Carraway is rather flat even on the page, would not have thought possible. The successful fleshing out of Carraway renders the framing-device nonsense even more egregious, and adds unforgivable minutes to a film that, in spite of all its candied frenzy, moves at a stately pace, and could have benefitted from a good fifteen minutes of trimming.

The film may overstay its welcome, but I found not much else else to dislike about it. The digital wizardry that I was so skeptical about allows the film an air of macabre enchantment, but also gives it a plasticky vulgarity when required. The party scenes, with their whirling, Prada- clad extras and their wall-to-wall musical flourishes, are seductive and sickening. You want to be in that drunk, thrashing crowd, but you also know you might feel lonely and tired and sad at the end of all the revelry.

All of it would come to naught, of course, if Gatsby himself were boring or unconvincing. But Dicaprio is winningly unbowed by the pressure of playing American literature's most iconic man. I've been growing a little tired of the actor's grimacing and brooding, all of it done expertly, of course, in film after film. But here, he is excellent. He brings a beating heart to Gatsby; the shadows of the character are fuller in his performance, the lights more lively. (And those eyes haven't been bluer since Romeo+Juliet.) His best moment is when he comes in from the rain, terrified and eager and in pain, to see Daisy after five years. The tremulousness is unexpectedly out in the open and just right.

When I'd fantasy-cast Gatsby, Carey Mulligan was my pick for Daisy. The British actress certainly has the sweet, expensive prettiness for the part. But Mulligan is surprisingly reticent early on, keeping the charm turned down when you'd expect it to be at full, fluttery blast. But when Daisy meets Gatsby in Carraway's cottage, Mulligan comes thrillingly alive. She uses her sweet, sorrowful face to full effect in DiCaprio's arms, or when her lover and her husband (Joel Edgerton, who plays Tom Buchanan with a boar-like ugliness and heft) tussle over her. Amitabh Bachchan (the Indian acting legend whom Luhrmann cast in the part of a Jewish gangster because . . . he could?) is reliably witty, and Elizabeth Debicki, arch and dismissively sexy as Jordan Baker, is a find.

Gatsby is going to be a widely hated film. Several critics have damned it for its excesses, for its shallowness, for its lack of reverence for its source material. It is certainly excessive, refusing to maintain a chilled, ironic distance from the unhinged, amoral celebrations it depicts. This is a film that wants to have a grand time, never mind reverence. But it is also a work of sustained sadness, aware of the tragedy that awaits not just at the story's end, but around every corner. I walked out of the theater, feeling an inevitable and not unpleasant sort of melancholy, much like I had when I first read The Great Gatsby at fourteen. I am not suggesting, of course, that this imperfect film is an artistic equal to that gemlike book. But it is certainly a memorable thing in its own, vigorously odd fashion.