FILM REVIEW OF ''GONE GIRL" (2014)

Watching David Fincher’s deliriously tantalizing whodunit “Gone Girl,” (**** OUT OF ****) a melodrama about a troubled married couple wrestling with compatibility issues, reminded me of the film classic “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1946) co-starring Lana Turner and John Garfield.  Turner and Garfield played illicit lovers who arranged the murder of Lana’s elderly husband so Garfield and she could indulge their lust.  Eventually, each had second thoughts, and murder reared its ugly head.   In “Gone Girl,” Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike experience somewhat similar woes.  They are cast as a husband and wife who have lost their jobs and find their marriage unraveling with ugly ramifications. They embark on a nerve-racking odyssey through Hell with more outlandish things happening to them than you can possibly imagine—unless you’ve read the novel.  “Gone Girl” constitutes another Hollywood adaptation of a runaway bestseller.  Happily, for a change, director David Fincher hired bestselling author Gilliam Flynn to adapt her own work.  Yes, I’ve perused Flynn’s masterpiece, and she has exercised good taste and judgment in modifying her compulsive page-turner for the screen.  Basically, this Twentieth Century Fox film release is about as faithful as any movie can be to its source material.  Minor changes occur, and some characters have been eliminated.   Nevertheless, nothing substantial has been altered.   In other words, if you loved the novel, you won’t hate what Fincher and Flynn have done with it.   As much as I enjoyed “Gone Girl,” I’ll concede the novel is slightly better than the film.   Principally, Flynn cannot translate to the screen the depths of Amy’s subversive thoughts.   Meantime, Fincher has done an admirable job of orchestrating the ‘he said; she said’ shenanigans of husband and wife.  Mind you, “Gone Girl” qualifies as more than just a spine-tingling exercise in suspense and tension where the authorities believe the husband is the prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance.   This movie succeeds on multiple levels as Fincher and Flynn skewer gender politics, scandal-mongering television news personalities, marriage dynamics, and essentially society in general.

 

Nick (Ben Affleck of “Argo”) and Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike of “Die Another Day”) are a sophisticated New York couple who lost their jobs as a result of the recession.  When his mother is diagnosed with cancer, Nick persuades Amy to forsake her elegant brownstone in New York City, and they relocate to his North Carthage, Missouri, hometown.  Amy buys Nick a tavern called ‘The Bar’ with her trust fund to keep him busy, and Nick’s twin sister Margo Dunne (Broadway actress Carrie Coon) helps manage it.  Meantime, Nick and Amy’s marriage steadily erodes as trust issues and power dynamics exert a toll on it.  A life-long city dweller, Amy feels miserably out of place in a small town in the middle of Heartland America with too little to occupy her imagination.  She doesn’t adapt as well to this dire change of scenery as her husband.   As the morning of their fifth anniversary dawns, Nick leaves Amy at home and cruises into town to check up on his sister at the bar.  No sooner has Nick gotten there and swapped shots with Margo than a neighbor calls Nick and informs him that his front door is standing mysteriously wide open.  Rushing home, Nick finds pieces of furniture either smashed or overturned in the living room.  Amy is nowhere in sight.  Nick alerts the authorities.  North Carthage Police Detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickins of TV’s “Lost”) and Officer Jim Gilpin (Patrick Fugit of “Almost Famous”) comb the premises and collect clues.  Later, the North Carthage crime scene crew uncovers evidence of a huge blood puddle in the kitchen that had been sloppily mopped up.  Repeatedly, Nick swears his innocence, but things spiral hopelessly out of control.  He learns from the police that Amy was pregnant.  Ultimately, in an act of sheer desperation, Nick hires celebrity lawyer, Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry of “Alex Cross”), to defend him.  Worst, the jealous college girl with whom Nick was having an affair exposes their adultery on prime-time television.  Although the detectives have amassed an abundance of evidence implicating Nick, Boney and Gilpin have no luck finding Amy’s body.

You could watch “Gone Girl” a dozen times and come away with something memorable each time.   Fincher has fashioned a tense thriller just as immaculate and flawless as his best movies, including “Fight Club,” “The Game,” “The Social Network,” and “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”  Affleck is at the top of his game as the gullible husband with something to conceal, while Pike deserves an Oscar for the many faces that she forges as Nick’s long, lost Amy.  Neal Patrick Harris displays his chameleon ability to play a cross-section of characters.  He emerges as one of Amy’s warped lovers who once stalked her.  Clocking in at virtually two hours and half, “Gone Girl” defies expectations—unless you’re conversant with the novel.  Just when you think you’ve got everything figured out, Fincher and Flynn twist another loop into their Gordian knot of a narrative.   The effect is similar to being spun around about every half-hour and gaping at the experience.    Beware, “Gone Girl” boasts a blood-soaked murder scene that is rather graphic, but this thriller remains extremely literate.   Anybody who abhors HLN ‘victim’s rights’ advocate Nancy Grace is going to appreciate the pompous character of Ellen Abbott who goes after Nick’s scalp after Amy vanishes.   Tyler Perry plays it straight as Nick’s high-profile attorney Tanner Bolt who coaches him throughout the ordeal.   In one scene, Tanner prepares his client for an important television interview.   Each time Nick answers a question with either an inappropriate tone or expression, Tanner bombards him with jelly beans.   Anybody who has ever complained about Ben Affleck’s smug pretty boy persona will love this scene.   As much as I would love to divulge some of the juicier scenes in “Gone Girl,” I cannot without spoiling the outcome.   If you love husband and wife murder movies or murder melodramas altogether, “Gone Girl” shouldn’t disappoint you.

FILM REVIEW OF ''PANIC ROOM" (2002)

David Fincher has fashioned some first-rate films since he started directing movies back in 1992. The Colorado native called the shots on “Se7en” (1995), a gripping serial killer saga starring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman as the cops and Kevin Stacey as the villain, that disturbed as much as it enthralled audiences. He toyed mischievously with audiences in “The Game” (1997) toplining Michael Douglas and Sean Penn in the tradition of George Roy Hill’s Oscar-winning Best Picture “The Sting.” The incomparable and offbeat “Fight Club” (1999) qualified hands down as Fincher’s finest, reuniting him with Brad Pitt and co-starring Edward Norton in a pre-terrorist 9/11 opus. Until he made the Jodie Foster crime film “Panic Room” (*1/2 out of ****), “Alien 3” ranked as Fincher’s least distinguished epic, with a shaven-headed Sigourney Weaver impersonating science officer Ripley for the last time as a flesh & blood human being. Comparatively, as the least commercial entry in the creature-feature franchise, the anemic “Alien 3” induced sleep rather than suspense. No matter how atrocious “Alien 3” seemed, “Panic Room” weighs in as infinitely worse. Only deep-fried Jodie Foster fans will savor this superficial, occasionally sadistic exercise in futility. Actually, the producers cast Nicole Kidman, but she injured herself and pulled out. A hopelessly miscast Jodie Foster brings a certain elegance to this unexceptional nail-biter. Indeed, lensers Conrad Hall and Darius Khondji’s atmospheric cinematography, the eerie lighting, and the looming interiors win “Panic Room” brownie points, not nearly enough.

This inferior feminist fable takes its title from a 12 by 12 foot, steel-plated, concrete bunker inside a four-story Brownstone in Upper West Side Manhattan. The reclusive tycoon who owned it has died, and our divorced heroine, Meg Altman (a bespectacled Jodie Foster) and her diabetic daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart of “Twilight”) now occupy the place. Plagued by paranoia, the late millionaire equipped the townhouse with a secret room. This impregnable bomb shelter boasts a high tech surveillance system with a cameras that scan the premises 24 hours a day from every angle inside and outside. The chamber contains its own ventilation system and features a separate telephone line. During the first night that Meg and Sarah sleep in their new beds, they awaken to find themselves at the mercy of three harebrained hoodlums out to steal millions of dollars worth of bearer bonds that the dead financier concealed in a vault in the safe room.

Predictably, Meg and Sarah hole up in the bunker while Junior (Jared Leto of “Girl, Interrupted”), Burnham (Forrest Whitaker of “Bird”), and Raoul (country singer Dwight Yoakam of “Sling Blade”) toil incompetently to evict them. Aside from their vulnerability as females-at-risk with flaws—Meg suffers from claustrophobia, while Sarah requires insulin shots)—these females do little to appeal to our sympathy. Ironically, Whitaker’s character emerges as not only the most sympathetic but also the most interesting. Poor Patrick Bauchau of “A View to a Kill” plays Meg’s millionaire, ex-husband (no relation to the deceased tycoon) and takes a hellacious beating from Raoul in a scene which will undoubtedly sicken some viewers.

This tedious, third-rate tale unravels from the outset with a premise as contrived as it convoluted plot. What veteran scenarist David Koepp of “Stir of Echoes” fame doesn’t steal from his own scripts, he appropriates from the durable Audrey Hepburn thriller “Wait Until Dark” (1967) and the exciting Sean Connery caper “The Anderson Tapes” (1972). The Raoul character clearly recalls the Mafia thug in “Anderson Tapes” that veteran character actor Val Avery played in a ski-mask with a penchant for violence. The ending that disposes of the bearer bonds comes straight out of John Huston’s “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948). Had the “Panic Room” been a tenth as entertaining as any of those classics, this derivative mishmash with its unintentionally hilarious histrionics might have proven tolerable. Instead, “Panic Room” resembles a heavy-handed Lifetime channel version of “Home Alone.” Decked out in a black, tank-top to display cleavage, Jodie Foster imitates the antics of Macaulay Culkin as she battles a trio of bungling burglars. These clueless cretins make the Three Stooges appear like intellectual titans. Foster is a top-flight actress who shouldn’t have stooped to this one-dimensional nonsense. Koepp’s script bristles with inconsistencies. After making a big deal about Meg’s claustrophobia early in the film, Fincher and Koepp unaccountably drop it from the plot when they tighten the screws on our protagonists. The scene with the butane gas tank elicits derision more than dread, and the flashlight batteries in another scene were clearly of the Eveready variety.

Don’t get trapped in the “Panic Room.”