My latest film review 

Like blood for sharks: “Gone Girl”
rakes the headlines of Fox News

David Fincher’s new film “Gone Girl” is a faithful adaptation of the best-selling novel by Gillian Flynn, which earned the former Entertainment Weekly writer almost universal kudos for her smartly crafted thriller. Luckily for Flynn, the screenplay (which she adapted herself) wound up in the capable hands of director Fincher, who gives “Gone Girl” the same exacting treatment as his other recent films. I say luckily, because in the hands of a lesser director, “Gone Girl” could easily have come off as pandering as the Fox News sensationalism it employs as a target of mockery.

Even as “Gone Girl” poked fun at the American public’s tabloid tastes, the novel’s success hinged on delivering exactly the same kind of rewards as those “Kidnapped Coed” headlines the news media so dearly loves: Sex, shock, betrayal!  However cleverly the titillations were clothed in the book behind spunky post-modern prose, stripped down as a film, “Gone Girl” could have unraveled into the kind of potboiler that comes and goes without leaving much of an imprint beyond the smiles on a few studio accountants’ faces.

That is why putting a cool operator like David Fincher, with his dissection-lab sense of aesthetics, at the helm of the movie was either a stroke of genius or tremendous luck; I can think of no other working director who could have more nimbly prevented “Gone Girl” from becoming a trashy film version of a pseudo-trashy book (The novel, perhaps tellingly, battled it out for supremacy on the New York Times best-seller list with “50 Shades of Gray”).

I hardly want to delve into the plot of “Gone Girl” as the slightest giveaway will have filmgoers hurling “spoiler” epithets in my direction. In a nutshell, when unemployed writer Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck, looking suitably booze-bloated for the role) returns home to find his beautiful ice queen of a wife, Amy, missing (Rosamund Pike in an appropriately pitched performance), a media feeding frenzy ensues. Headed by a Fox News-Nancy Grace caricature (Missi Pyle), the war tom-toms soon lead everyone to suspect Nick as his wife’s slayer. But his devoted twin sister (Carrie Coon) and his thousand-dollar-suited lawyer (stubble-coiffed Tyler Perry) see otherwise — and soon the audience does, as well.

The film’s advertising touts the story as an examination of the deception that lies behind everyday marriage when, in fact, it feels more like what lies behind the doors of the C.S.I writers’ room. Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage” it is not. Hardly subtle, it is pleasingly tabloid, but luckily that is where Fincher stepped in.

Fincher is the new Truman Capote of the cinema, an artist who has perfected a balance of blending truth and fiction so seamlessly that something entirely new is born of the merger. What Capote called his “non-fiction novel,” Fincher has reversed, creating something along the lines of “non-dramatic movies.” That’s not to say Fincher makes dull films, far from it. But for all their brilliance, there is nothing overtly theatrical about Fincher’s recent films.

Dispensing with showy direction, he never uses his tools to emotionalize material and wrest a response out of the audience. Instead, his films tick neatly and precisely along as the Swiss chapter of Eurorail, with nearly the same dramatic weight being given to moments of epiphany as to moments of minutiae. He’s like a bastard child of Hollywood and Lar Von Triers’ Dogme 95 — a group of aesthete Danish filmmakers who have vowed to put aside special effects and melodramatic flourishes in the pursuit of a purer cinema. Unlike the Dogme 95 adherents, Fincher moves his camera and actors with studio perfectionism (and cuts equally immaculately), but tone of his films embrace the kind of kind naturalism that the restrained Danes admire.

Fincher never over-varnishes a scene with emotion, never lingers on a moment longer than is required. He’s so deft as a director that he’s  nearly invisible, moving through commercial thrillers like “Zodiac” as subtly as a documentarian. In comparison to flamboyant stylists like Wes (or Paul Thomas) Anderson and hyper-visualists like Kubrick, Fincher is a Shaker-furniture maker — keeping his films religiously simple, but honing them with such master-craftsman precision that he makes even a straight line feels exquisitely wrought.

One gets the sense that Fincher is first and foremost concerned with the structure of his films. He is superb at the logic of storytelling which, in filmmaking, generally means rigidly adhering to a script. (“Gone Girl” is being called Fincher’s “Hitchcock” film, and Hitchcock was notably famous for the vast amount of time he spent mapping out his scripts and storyboards with wife Alma Reville; so much so that the shooting process itself was almost perfunctory).

That may explain why Fincher’s films come off so intelligently on the screen: Fincher is a craftsman of story, rather than hyperbolic visuals. And that’s likely the reason why a garish tale like “Gone Girl” works so well under his control. “Gone Girl” was praised as a novel for rising above its potboiler storyline through clever writing, but normally there’s no hiding behind prose at the cinema. Take, for instance, Faulkner’s books adapted for Hollywood. With the poetry of their corn-whiskey patois stripped away, classics like “The Sound and the Fury” felt like little more than steamy southern gothics.

Fincher’s literary rendering of “Gone Girl” manages to capture the smarty-pants tone of Flynn’s novel which is vital, because without that tone the guilty pleasures of plot twists and slain lovers meant to satisfy the thriller-reading public would have sunk the film.  Consequently, “Gone Girl” is probably one of the luckiest collaborations to come to the screen in a long time, especially for  Flynn, whose tale was spared combustion under the xenon arc lights by Fincher’s cool-headed read. There’s no need to worry about Fincher going up in flames, because it’s always those thoughtful craftsmen who labor well into their golden years, and just keep getting better at it.