Three happy marriages, beginning to crack; three dissatisfied blondes; and, crawling out from the cracks, the thought of violent crime. Such is the substance of three new films, all derived from works by popular authors. The longest is “Gone Girl,” adapted by Gillian Flynn from her own novel; the most nattily dressed is “The Two Faces of January,” taken from Patricia Highsmith; and last, courtesy of Georges Simenon, comes “The Blue Room,” the Frenchest of the three, so much so that the plot relies on confiture de prunes.
“Gone Girl,” directed by David Fincher, starts with Nick (Ben Affleck)—in his own words, “a corn-fed, salt-of-the-earth Missouri boy.” He used to live in New York and write for magazines, but the work dried up and he returned home, to the uneventful town of North Carthage, with his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike). According to your point of view (and the film is all about viewpoints, and the urge to shuffle them around), Amy is one or more of the following: the inspiration for the “Amazing Amy” series of children’s books, written by her parents; a flat-out dazzler, too cool for the neighborhood; a rich kid, spawned by a snotty family; the original desperate housewife, becalmed and unadored; or a heap of trouble—the Clytemnestra of the Midwest. Oh, and another thing. She may be dead.
Nick owns a bar with his twin sister, Margo (Carrie Coon), and he stops there one morning for an early Scotch. He then drives home to find the front door open, a glass table smashed, and no sign of his wife. Their cat is a witness, but, if it knows anything, it’s not coughing up. The police arrive, and Detective Boney (Kim Dickens) declares a missing-persons case; before long, Nick is knee-deep in press conferences, candlelit vigils, and public appeals, flashing a polite, reluctant grin that is parsed, by tabloids and TV hosts, as proof of guilt. (You can’t blame them. The Affleck smile, from the dawn of his career, has looked more creepy than consolatory—softening that firm, all-American jaw but never quite reaching the eyes.) Suddenly, after an hour, we flip to Amy, and to her version of what happened—so different, and so close to wacko, that it seems like another story altogether. I would happily unveil the rest of it, but, in deference to the twenty-one people who have yet to read the novel, I will say nothing more without a lawyer present.
At first blush, “Gone Girl” is natural Fincherland. Not geographically; he seems less absorbed in North Carthage, described by Amy as “the navel of the country,” than he was in the California of “Zodiac” or the Harvard of “The Social Network.” Those are his masterpieces: the two movies that I can’t not watch when they turn up on TV, and the two occasions on which his pedantry and his paranoia have fused together, engrossing us in a crazed aggregation of detail. Nothing could equip him better for the coiled and clustered goings on in the new film, and, for good measure, he has hired Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, whom he last used for “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” to compose the score. They don’t let him down. “Gone Girl” boasts one major act of savagery, drenched in a downpour of blood, and what we hear during it sounds like the wah-wah pedal of Satan. So why doesn’t the movie claw us as “The Social Network” did? Who could have predicted that a film about murder, betrayal, and deception would be less exciting than a film about a Web site?
The glum fact is that “Gone Girl” lacks clout where it needs it most, at its core. We are accustomed to Fincher’s heroes being as obsessively smart as he is, if lacking his overarching patience, whereas Nick remains, to put it gently, a lunkhead. Amy has twice the brain, and ten times the cunning, but, despite the best efforts of Rosamund Pike, her character, onscreen as on the page, feels cooked up rather than lived in. That can work on film, as shown by another beauty, Gene Tierney, in “Laura” and “Leave Her to Heaven,” but the scheming of Tierney’s heroines was matched by a rare, ornate febrility in the movies themselves. Fincher’s method, on the other hand, is dogged and downbeat, so that Amy sticks out like a cartoon in a newsreel. (One expected the same of the title character in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” who was equally extreme, but somehow Rooney Mara gave her life—all drilled intensity where Pike offers elegant drift.) “Gone Girl” is meant to inspire debates about whether Amy is victimized or vengeful, and whether Nick deserves everything he gets, but, really, who cares? All I could think of was the verdict of Samuel Butler on Thomas Carlyle: “It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable and not four.” Or, in the words of Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry), Nick’s unflappable attorney: “You two are the most fucked-up people I have ever met, and I specialize in fucked-up people.”
Perry has a grand time. His wave to the press corps, camped out on Nick’s sidewalk, is a cool mixture of dismissal and salute. He knows that our attention is straying from the main couple toward the outlying figures: Tanner himself, Detective Boney, and, best of all, Margo—a fine performance, both grounded and wounded, from Carrie Coon. Against that, we have Desi (Neil Patrick Harris), a wealthy ex of Amy’s, wandering in as if from another film, and eating up the final slice of the action with a silly Gothic subplot. It comes straight from the novel, and you can picture the outcry if Fincher had chopped or changed it, but so what? A director’s task is not to suck up to readers, or to flatter his source, but to imagine it afresh, as film, while seizing on those aspects that matter to him most. What grabs Fincher about “Gone Girl,” I suspect, is not the mystery in Missouri but the sight of a media wolf pack in full cry. Hence the time that he devotes to two cable-TV hosts, played by Sela Ward and Missi Pyle, who rifle through Nick’s privacy, and his state of mind, in their lust for a story. Fincher is right: these days they are the story, and I wish that he would tell it again from their angle, through the eyes of bloggers, and via the phones of the people we see laughing outside Nick’s bar, taking selfies at a hot spot of fame. So, “Gone Girl Redux”: the campaign starts here.
At one point in “Gone Girl,” the preposterous Desi talks of quitting America for Greece. There a new life awaits—“Octopus and Scrabble,” he says. So much for the land of Plato. In “The Two Faces of January,” much the same dream possesses Chester MacFarland (Viggo Mortensen) and his wife, Colette (Kirsten Dunst), whom we meet at the Parthenon. The year is 1962, and they are clad like modern deities, in creamy white—she in a dress and sun hat, he in a crisp suit, tie, and shades. Typical American tourists of the time, you presume, noting the guidebook in his hand, but this is a Patricia Highsmith fable, which means that you would be wrong.
Risking heresy, I would argue that Hossein Amini, the writer and director, actually improves on Highsmith in these early scenes. She stresses, in her first chapter, that Chester is a fraud, leaving behind him a trail of swindled investors and coasting through Europe on ill-gotten gains, one step ahead of the law. Onscreen, however, that discovery is slow to come. Chester exudes such worldly charm that we take him on trust; how could he not be a gentleman, inside and out? The role is deliciously ripe and ready for Mortensen, who demonstrated, in “A History of Violence,” how the shell of a regular guy can be broken and peeled away, and who times to perfection the hollowing out of Chester—a worried glance here, a watery smile there. Even his hair, brushed and waved at the start, becomes a mussed-up clue, flopping gray and sweaty over his brow. His very handsomeness is a mask.
The MacFarlands have a couple of stalkers. One is a detective, who confronts them in their hotel room and suffers the consequences. The other is Rydal Keener (Oscar Isaac), a Yale graduate turned scam artist, acting as a tour guide first to rich American girls and second, for more insidious reasons, to Chester and Colette. He spirits them out of Athens to Crete and obtains false passports for them, but why? Can he smell a profit? Is it because he wants Colette? Or because Chester reminds him of his father, recently deceased? The magnetic pull of restless souls toward one another, and thence into calamity, was an abiding theme for Highsmith, and Anthony Minghella caught it well in “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” Amini lacks the daring of that film; he tamps down the sexual forces that should flame among the trio, and the Cretan scenes grow strangely errant and flat. Even in the ruins of Knossos, with a labyrinth of unease at his disposal, Amini seems to lose the thread. Still, there is beauty and perversity enough in the remainder of the movie, and you should see it just for Chester—the adventurous sham, running ever deeper into a maze of his own devising.
The story goes like this: Alfred Hitchcock calls Georges Simenon, who is among the speediest and most prolific authors of the twentieth century, with nearly four hundred works to his name. A secretary answers, apologizes, and explains that Monsieur cannot be disturbed, because he has just started a new book. Hitch: “That’s alright, I’ll wait.”
Untrue, of course, but apocrypha don’t always lie. Simenon had a matchless ability to take the first narrative step, without fuss, and then to forge ahead, as though beckoned by the destiny of his characters, and that untiring purpose has proved invaluable to the movies. The list of his beneficiaries runs from Jean Renoir, with “Night at the Crossroads,” in 1932, to Béla Tarr and “The Man from London,” in 2007, and now we have “The Blue Room,” directed by Mathieu Amalric. The room in question is a bedchamber in a small provincial hotel, where Julien, played by Amalric, meets his lover, Esther (Stéphanie Cléau)—only eight times, but that is sufficient, as Simenon fans will confirm, to precipitate any man’s ruin.
The great virtue of the movie is its length: a fat-free seventy-six minutes, leaving “Gone Girl,” which lasts almost two and a half hours, looking dangerously bloated. To pass from the exploits of Nick and Amy to the worlds of Highsmith and Simenon is to trade contrivance, however entertaining, for something palpable, reeking of moral seediness and disrepair. Julien, like Chester and Rydal, appears to behave as he chooses, yet something deep in the natures of such men—the itch of recklessness, the gluttonous demands of wallet and loins, the mere wish to learn more—hurries them along their fateful paths. What we understand, in retrospect, is that they had no real choice at all.
That is why Amalric, following Simenon’s slippery example, oils so smoothly back and forth in time. We see Julien on holiday, at the beach, with his wife, the fair Delphine (Léa Drucker), and their daughter; we see him and Esther sprawled in bed, perspiring; and, in the wake of a killing that we don’t yet comprehend, we see him interviewed by a judge, a psychiatrist, and two cops, who, under French law, are required to utter things like “You say no other woman brought you the fullness of physical love.” These interrogations weigh too heavily on the film, which could have been trimmed further still, but I liked the fact that the walls of the courtroom, where the case is tried, are of the same midnight hue as those in the bedroom, where the seed of the crime was sown. Blue is the warmest color, and the coldest. Judgment matches desire. ♦
