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Showing posts with label Rosamund Pike. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rosamund Pike. Show all posts
Monday, September 29, 2014
Monday, September 29, 2014
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Gone Girl is a beautifully crafted film. From its elegant editing to the moody Trent Reznor score to Jeff Cronenweth's evocative cinematography to the career-best performances from Affleck and Pike it radiates quality like a 100w bulb. David Fincher has been a personal favourite since a torrid teenage love affair with Fight Club, and my admiration of him only grew after Zodiac and The Social Network. Sure he's had a few bumps along the way, but even his failures are interesting. The release of a new Fincher film is a red letter day in cinema - audiences expect something special. So it's with no huge surprise that I happily confirm Gone Girl is a cornucopia of cinematic delights.
Problem is it's also a misogynistic piece of shit.
Oh fuck! The M-word! Deploying it is like waving a big red flag that says "liberal guilt incoming". Pallid and worn out from overuse it's a spat epithet used in haste as a weapon to shut down discourse: "X is misogynist, end of discussion." Using it casually kills its power; after all accusing something or someone of 'hating women' is a big claim to make.
So let me get a couple of things straight; I don't think David Fincher quivers with rage at the sight of a Tampax advert. I don't think author/screenwriter Gillian Flynn loathes her own sex. I don't think Ben Affleck gleefully rubbed his hands when he got the part, happy to finally stick it to those uppity dames. I doubt anyone at all involved on a creative level in this production literally hates women. Despite all that, in collaboration they have produced a profoundly misogynistic movie.
(There's no way to explain this without spoiling the film so considered yourself warned from this point on. I eventually give it two stars.)
Gone Girl showcases the unhappy marriage of Nick and Amy Dunne (Ben Affleck & Rosamund Pike). Nick returns home on the day of his fifth wedding anniversary to find a broken coffee table, a suspicious blood spot in the kitchen and no Amy. She has vanished. Amy is the basis for her mother's popular 'Amazing Amy' children's books, and thus a minor celebrity, so her mysterious disappearance rapidly becomes a major news event.
Meanwhile Nick is not doing a particularly good job of media management. He appears callous in interviews, acts suspiciously and, worst of all, smiles during the press conference appealing for information. As the days stretch on suspicion increasingly begins to fall on Nick, the media all but accusing him of murder. The public turn against him, the police consider him the most likely suspect - even his twin sister begins to have doubts.
Twist time. It turns out that Amy has faked her own murder in order to get back at a husband she perceives as ruining her life. Concealed underneath her wifely demeanour lies the heart of a Lecter-esque sociopath, one with the cunning and skills to create a perfect trail of breadcrumbs trail that leads the police to Nick, and leads Nick to the electric chair. The more we learn about Amy the more her evil is revealed; she has a history of falsifying rape allegations; she ensnares innocent men by stealing their precious bodily fluids and impregnating herself; she plays the perfect lover only to strike like a scorpion - at one point she literally bathes in male blood.
Amy is the physical manifestation of every masculine fear of femininity; the quintessential black widow that lures you into a relationship, paralyses you and holds you captive as she gloats over your misfortune. Skulk around the more pathetic corners of the internet and you'll run into Men's Rights Activists; a laughable bunch of losers who believe they're trapped in some kind of misandrist matriarchy. In Amy they will see their paranoid nightmares brought to life.
To give Gone Girl some credit Amy isn't entirely two-dimensional. The film tries to set out the roots of her sociopathy: intense frustration at a lifetime under other people's control. Her fictional counterpart Amazing Amy is shown to lead her life but better, embodying in fiction what she failed to achieve in life. She explains that she feels intensely claustrophobic in her marriage to Nick, especially when moving to his podunk town where she doesn't know anyone.
In a nicely written monologue she decries how he subtly forced her into the role of a "cool girl"; she has to be smart, sexy, fun, "one of the guys", thin and beautiful all at once. Later we see her being controlled more directly, the character moving between a series of gilded cages. Theoretically this gives her moral license to violently kick back against the pricks that try to mould her life without her consent, casting her campaign of manipulation and murder as feminist liberation. It's a pulpy, dime store kind of psychology, but it's this that Fincher relies on to justify her deeds.
Undermining this is the extremely sympathetic treatment of Ben Affleck's Nick. I don't know what he's like in the book, but here he's an unambiguous hero, we never suspect him of murder, his return home to care for his dying mother is noble and - crucially - we never see him mistreat Amy from an objective viewpoint. Sure he's got his flaws, notably that he's conducting an affair with a student behind his wife's back, but given that Amy is a straight-up, sadistic, cold-hearted monster who can blame him? The sympathy we feel for Nick robs Amy of her motive for framing him, resulting in her ending up (despite the author's protestations) as a simple "crazy psycho-bitch".
Even leaving Amy aside for a moment, Gone Girl makes a series of curiously anti-feminist statements. The arena for Nick's condemnation and shaming is The Ellen Abbott show. Abbott is a typical Fox Newsesque bundle of shining teeth, big-hair and perfect makeup and runs a show that appears to revolve around highlighting crimes against women.
This is Nick Dunne's crucible, Abbott constantly hurls insinuations of rape and incest against him, poisoning the well of public opinion against him. She invites on talking heads (who appear to be caricatures of feminists) to decry Nick. I'm just not sure what satirical point Fincher is making here - is there an abundance of rabidly ill-informed feminist news shows that needs to be exposed? Their presentation here is a strawman set up to be demolished.
What we see in Gone Girl is a flawed 'nice guy' under assault from an army of harridans with "fucking bitch" Amy leading the charge. Her instrument of destruction is a weaponised vagina, transformed into a tool to destroy men. Given that her Amy's motivations are unconvincingly defined, that her evil is defined purely in terms of her gender, the argument that the inevitable flipside of female liberation is male subjugation, the parade of vapid, ill-informed female characters and the heroic portrayal of Nick, Gone Girl is misogynist.
Pity, because otherwise it's a really good film. So good that I was scrabbling for a sympathetic reading that would allow me to enjoy it.
But I can't.
★★
Gone Girl is released 3rd October.
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
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"What We Did On Our Holiday is like a stick of rock with ‘bad idea’ written right the way through it. This is essentially the film version of British family sitcom Outnumbered, whose central gimmick is the semi-improvised children’s dialogue. Here’s your basic gag formula: cute kid says something innocently outrageous, cut to British character actor looking politely shocked and amused. By and large it’s ‘Kids Say the Darndest things’ the sitcom.
Needless to say I wasn’t exactly buzzing with anticipation. First impressions confirmed my suspicions. As David Tennant argued in confused amusement with a six year old I felt twinge of sympathy for him being stuck in this garbage. Soon after came a light smattering of actually-okay jokes. Oh well, if I’m going to be stuck watching syrupy garbage, at least it’s tolerable syrupy garbage.
Then the jokes kept coming. And – god help me – I laughed."
Read the rest at We Got This Covered.
★★★★
What We Did On Our Holiday is released on the 26th of September
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Sunday, December 30, 2012
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'Jack Reacher' isn't just a bad film, it's a poisonous one. The film deifies dead-eyed, masculine narcissism, showing us a portrait of a monster and expecting us to wank ourselves silly in admiration and respect. What 'Jack Reacher' asks us to admire and emulate is the hateful and negative: emotional auto-castration, superiority complexes, alpha male posturing, casual sadism and the paternalistic shaming of sexuality. Among shitty films it's a rarity, being not only boring and offensive but one that will make the world outside the theatre an imperceptibly worse one.
The film revolves entirely around Tom Cruise's Jack Reacher, a character so utterly ridiculous and preening that only someone with Cruise's grotesquely overdeveloped ego would even consider playing him. This is the kind of film where when our hero is not on screen, the characters are talking about how amazing he is. When he is on screen he smirks and slimes his way through scenes, every action calculated to show up exactly how incompetent every other character in the film is compared to the inestimable Jack Reacher.
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| Rosumund Pike as she realises she needs to get a better agent. |
He's the kind of man who can do everything a little better than you. You know that prick friend-of-a-friend who's always desperate to one-up everything you do? If you tell him that you've done a bungee jump, he's done a skydive. If you went out for a nice dinner, he's just got back from a Michelin starred private tasting. That kind of dick. Well, that's Reacher. If a character in the film has any kind of talent, then Reacher effortlessly outclasses them. He's not just a soldier, he's a policeman of soldiers! He's an expert driver! He's got a photographic memory! He can fight five men at once! He's a crack shot! He can see the links in the case that no-one else can see! Women collapse into shuddering piles of pleasure at his presence! Men cower in fear at the sight of him!
If this character were written by a five year old I might be able to understand it. He's the parody action movie character played straight, the kind of person so ridiculous that the audience should be giggling at his vanity. The cherry on top of this shit sandwich is that this supposed titan is played by a saggy looking Tom Cruise. He is a ridiculous little man, and none more so than when he expects us to take him seriously as the paragon of masculinity.
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| Inflicting pain is so 'in', darling. |
If you want to see the real-life Jack Reachers in action just spend five minutes reading a Men's Rights forum (or see them on this tumblr). These towering examples of manhood equate success with an emotional numbness, a smug denial of affection and kindness towards others and a certainty at their own rightful place as the centre of the moral universe. 'Jack Reacher' validates this warped philosophy, giving these damaged people a peek into a world where their twisted self righteousness causes them to be revered as gods.
This is a dangerous film, it actively encourages a conservative, pettily violent, vindictive small-mindedness and ignores any negative consequences. Jack Reacher has no friends, no passions except violence and lives on the margins of society. The film romanticises this lone wolf lifestyle, characters that do develop interpersonal relationships in the film are invariably betrayed or abandoned. It's a conscious rejection of the rest of humanity: taking solace in the knowledge that if you can't love your fellow man, you can at least break his fingers one by one as he screams in terror.
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| a real hero a real human being a real hero a real human being a real hero a real human being |
I was reminded repeatedly during this film of Nicholas Winding Refn's 'Drive', which might be my favourite film of 2011. Why do I find Ryan Gosling's 'Driver' more interesting and acceptable than Jack Reacher? Driver is a very similar character to Reacher, both live solitary lifestyles, both are emotionally stunted and both are capable of extreme, reflexive violence. 'Drive' is a success because it shows us the recognisable human reaction to the extreme violence meted out by its hero. There is a scene where Driver realises that he and the women he has grown to love are in immediate danger, he kisses her, then turns and beats a man to death, stamping on his face over and over again. He looks up see her shocked face as she realises his real nature. It's this look of fear from her that's key. As much as we might take a thrill in the violence of the 'Drive', it's leavened with the message that actions like these lead to isolation, a lonely, aimless emptiness.
'Jack Reacher' takes the opposite tack; violence and antisocial behaviour leading to isolation is a good thing. What's important is proving that you're more of a man than anyone else around you by either inflicting pain or demonstrating how you're effortlessly 'better' than them. How else can you explain the scene where Reacher begins to explain to Helen (played in a kind of numb stupor by Rosamund Pike) what really happened in the case the plot explores? He refuses to actually tell her what's happened, but writes down the solution on a post-it note and hands it to her, telling her to work it out for herself and then check the note. You want to yell at the screen "just fucking TELL her you dick!", but we're forced to sit through another scene of Reacher posing smugly waiting for everyone to catch up with him.
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| Women are sluts am I rite? |
Every single second of the film is repugnant to various degrees, but there are a few moments that define this nihilistic apocalypse of a human being that we're supposed to be cheering on. He tortures a man by systematically breaking his fingers, a wry smile on his face as he gets the information out of him. He bullies a terrified teenage girl into giving him her car. He sexually intimidates the female lead. He executes a defenceless man. He calls a woman a "slut" for coming onto him in a bar.
Perhaps the defence for all this is that he's not supposed to be a hero, after all, he does say "You think I'm a hero? I am not a hero. And if you're smart, that scares you. Because I have nothing to lose.". But despite saying this, he clearly is the hero, at least as far the narrative is concerned. He beats the bad guy, saves the day and rescues the girl. Perhaps another actor could have injected the role with a certain knowing attitude, someone who could play an egotistical 'Mr Perfect' like Reacher and get away with it purely through a natural charisma. Tom Cruise is not that person, there's not an ironic bone in his body, every mannerism here is that of the well-fed, self satisfied star who is absolutely sure they're the most important person in the film, and probably on the planet. The entire exercise reeks of stroking the Cruise ego, especially an excruciating scene where he lounges around without his shirt on.
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| .... christ man, why.. |
So there's that. But there's worse. The villain in this piece of shit is played by none other than Werner Herzog. Oh Werner. Whatever they've got on you wasn't worth this humiliation. There's nothing more painful than watching someone you respect debase themselves. Herzog is probably my favourite director, and I always enjoy his acting performances whenever he pops up in random films (he was primarily why I saw this film). But not this time. His arch, doomy persona is prostituted to the fullest, pimped out in service of a z-grade Bond villain gimmick. He makes the best of some atrocious dialogue, but there's a sense of shame behind his eyes that I've never seen in him before. The jungle couldn't defeat him. 'Insignificant' bullets barely faze him. He even survived the towering rants of Klaus Kinski. He looks lost, confused as to how he's ended up in what he must know is a terrible film. I hope to god whatever he got paid for this was worth it.
A defender of this film might point out the realistic nature of the action sequences, the clever sound design of the car chase sequence, the tactical realism of the final bullet-strewn action sequence or the visually enticing introduction scenes. But these are nothing more than blossoms haphazardly poking out of a freshly laid turd. Film is a powerful medium, and films like this fuel violent, solipsistic power fantasies in stupid, frustrated people. It's a dangerous piece of propaganda for stunted emotional growth, and everyone involved with it should be utterly ashamed of themselves.
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