A marriage procedural

A pretty blonde head is stroked by a masculine hand that looks equally capable of tenderness or terror. The owner of the hand wonders what’s inside that head. “What are you thinking? What have we done to each other?” The story of a wife who goes missing and the abyss of suspicion her husband’s plunged into in the wake of her disappearance, Gone Girl undergoes several sea change-shifts, offering multiple perspectives then promptly prompting us to question the validity of those perspectives. Adapted by Gillian Flynn from her own novel and directed with characteristically cool precision by David Fincher, the film is murder mystery, domestic horror, the blackest of comedies, social satire—perhaps the only way of containing all these is to call it noir. Above all, it’s a forensic analysis of love turned venomous in decay. In keeping with many Fincher films, it reaches heights of intrigue and resonance by focusing on detail and causality: it’s a marriage procedural.

Nick and Amy Dunne (a brilliantly cast Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike) moved from New York to Nick’s hometown of Carthage, Missouri after both lost their jobs and Nick’s mother fell ill. Was financial strain the source of their marital mire? Was it the confines of Carthage? Was it some inherent flaw in love’s DNA, something that went undetected during those early days in which each longs to fulfil the other’s bliss-blinded vision of their beloved? We know from Nick’s private conversations with his sister Margo (Carrie Coon) that things likely went south long before they moved to the Midwest, but after Amy disappears Nick is compelled to behave as though their marriage was idyllic. Once signs of struggle are found in his house the investigating detectives (the superb Kim Dickens and Patrick Fugit) clearly view Nick with suspicion. Once Amy’s disappearance makes the news it becomes fodder for a media machine eager to package tragedy into sensational narrative—and Nick’s initial resistance to ostentatious displays of grief immediately render him the potential bad guy.

But Gone Girl is most closely aligned with Nick’s point of view. We’re inclined to believe him, even when we know he’s no angel, even when Affleck is pleasingly low on affect. Yet Amy’s version of their marriage intercepts the Nick narrative: we’re offered passages from her diary that detail an protracted honeymoon period tainted only by references to a devious chin (a nice bit of business that playfully pokes fun at Affleck’s physiognomy). As the dueling plots thicken we wonder when Amy’s tale of marital bliss will overlap with Nick’s history of misery and suffocation. Gone Girl proliferates in subplots and slippery twists, accumulating crimes and misdemeanors, building toward a satisfying thriller climaxes and a denouement distinguished by its poisonousness as a date night movie, an even more unnerving mirror held up to married life than Before Midnight.

I mentioned noir. While Fincher’s supple classicism and delight in making the darkest mainstream movies imaginable recalls Hitchcock, throughout Gone Girl I kept thinking how much this material would have appealed to Billy Wilder, who was never better than when he met a script that could vindicate his cynicism with earned wit and a sense of lived experience. Flynn’s script depends on certain flights of artifice (which I will refrain from spoiling) yet resonates in countless ways. The concern with optics informing the story will no doubt come into play in the film’s reception: a woman can be accused of misogyny just as easily as a man, but the fact that Gone Girl’s primary authorship is divided between a man and a woman probably helps to navigate a minefield of gender representation—we’ll be discussing how that plays out for some time. For now we can simply surrender to this film’s seductive sway, its cool surfaces and wicked humour, its myriad traps and wrong turns which, like the Dunnes’ cat, we can only sit and silently witness. But wait, whose side does that sphinx-like tabby take in the end?

                        

The mark of Cain

Here’s what I think of when I think of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944): Barbara Stanwyck’s legs, coming down the stairs, wearing that anklet, of course, but more than that it’s the gait, the stride of a woman (or a jungle cat) who knows, somehow, that she’s finally been cued to assume her long-anticipated, destined role; Fred MacMurray’s apartment, where he and Stanwyck luxuriate in barely disguised postcoital bliss; the grocery store where Stanwyck and MacMurray meet, in sunglasses, to discuss their nefarious plan in deadpan tones, not facing each other, surrounded by anonymous canned goods; the cigarette Edward G. Robinson lights for MacMurray while MacMurray lies slumped in the front doors of his insurance company’s headquarters—it is the only moment of genuine affection shared by any two people in the whole film. MacMurray and Stanwyck’s story is one of lust; MacMurray and Robinson’s is the film’s (platonic) love story.

So: an insurance salesman (MacMurray) conspires with the wife (Stanwyck) of a client to have the client die in an ostensible accident and thus collect twice the normal rate on client’s life insurance policy. That’s the story in a nutshell, but what we’re trading in here is philosophy, impulse and, above all, mood. Double Indemnity is the inaugural film to be screened in Metro Cinema’s Film Noir series for a reason: the film encompass myriad elements that, about ten years later, would be declared key motifs of the noir style, ie: voice-over, low-key lighting, hard-boiled banter, lust, crime, fatalism and femme fatale. But, unlike so many other beloved and canonical films noir, it was also classy, very much an A-picture, with stars, production value and the kind of backing that gets you seven Oscar nominations. (Though the film didn’t win a single statue.) Its narrative trajectory and heavily poured-on attitude has become so ingrained into our collective notion of noir that some viewers may regard it as trope-laden kabuki, but the film, which was co-scripted by none other than Raymond Chandler, transmits these elements with such confidence as to feel sui generis, organic, and though it were inventing its own ritual and cosmology as it goes along—which it basically was, even though Chandler had considerable contempt for his source material.

But the source material was absolute gold. James M. Cain wrote novels that practically begged to be filmed—if only they could make it to the screen with all their tawdrier bits intact. There are many things to recommend in Tay Garnett’s adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), but the sunny ending ties itself into increasingly risible knots in its effort to try and redeem Cain’s hell-bound characters. (I remember watching it with a packed house at the Film Forum some years back and getting irritated by all the laughter coming from the audience, though in those final scenes, who can blame them?) Whereas Todd Haynes’ five-part miniseries adaptation of Mildred Pierce (2011) is as brilliant and transportive as it is in part because it’s so faithful not only to Cain’s narrative but to his dialogue and character conception. Double Indemnity kind of splits the difference, cloaking its less savoury traits in a tasty fusion of Chandler’s romanticism and Wilder’s wickedly cynical humour. The result is smoldering, seductive and unforgettable. No one film defines noir, but this one is as good as any for getting the conversation started.