Don’t tell them your name, Pike! The Gone Girl.

Well, actually Rosamund Pike has been telling us her name for a least a dozen years now, and shouting her versatility out loud.  From here on it will be really well known.   She was the Bond Girl Miranda  Frost in her debut film Die Another Day, (2002), then  Austen’s Jane Bennett in  Pride and Prejudice, (2004),   in Made in Dagenham, Barney’s Version and An Education, (all released in 2010), then she moved from Bond to Johnny English,  Reborn (in 2011),  to America for Jack Reacher in 2012, and  home to an Ealing comedy (well, as near to an Ealing comedy as we get nowadays) in The World’s End, 2013.    But her performance in David Fischer’s latest, Gone Girl, is really something else.  May she  follow in the footsteps of Emily Blunt, the other Brit currently wowing Hollywood. 

David Fincher must have known that Rosamund was in Terry Johnson’s 2003 play Hitchcock Blonde, as the actress auditioning to be the body-double for Janet Leigh in the Psycho shower scene.    Rosamund also plays a naked shower scene in Gone Girl, and has said that she  ‘is intrigued by characters like the icy blondes who seduce and deceive in Hitchcock’s films- women who are compelled by their power as objects of desire.’ (an interview in W Magazine).   

The influence of Hitch on Fischer is well documented, (just Google ‘Fincher and Hitchcock’ and enjoy the links)  and can be seen here in the film’s theme and in particular shots - not just the naked shower scene (which actually plays a knowing joke on Psycho fans).     Fischer says that  he learnt from the Master that ‘as a director, film is about how you dole out information so that the audience stays with you when they’re supposed to stay with you, behind you when they’re supposed to stay behind you, and ahead of you when they are supposed to stay ahead of you.’ (Fincher quoted on IMDB).   Gone Girl is very good at doling out information, in truly Hitchcockian style, but how reliable is the information?   Much of it comes in flashbacks, and well into its running time the whole film turns on a swivel, just as in Psycho and Vertigo.  Gillian Flynn, who adapted her novel for the screen,  is also a keen Hitchcock fan.  In her novel she even puts to use the name Madeleine Elster, taken from Vertigo.

Ben Affleck is the Gone Girl’s husband.   She has gone, but has she joined the departed?    And if so did he have  any part in her departure?     Affleck plays the ambiguity well,  and there is a running theme about public performance and private feelings.    The voracious American media want to stage their own trial – and his performance as the anxious husband does not convince them.    But does it convince us?

This is a slow burning psychological thriller, and as Fischer says about Flynn’s source novel, when you peel back the layers and get to the kernel, you think, Wow, I feel queasy for a whole different set of reasons I thought I would’.   He has also said that he wanted to put onscreen “disturbing ideas about very disturbed people and their facades of normalcy, (people who are) irredeemable and yet intensely human”.    He has certainly succeeded in that, keeping the audience on edge, uncertain about what it knows and does not know,  what is truth and what is illusion, who is the victim and who the villain.  

These ‘disturbing’ themes are amplified by the grey/green colour palette of Fischer’s usual DP Jeff Cronenweth, and the music from his collaborators on The Social Network, Trent Rezzno and Atticus Ross.   Among the cast Neil Patrick Harris takes a step up from a busy TV and voice-over career (Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs),  as do Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens and Tyler Perry (a busy writer, producer and actor who is given an opportunity to play it big here and takes it).  Fischer has always looked for new talent.    Se7en was made in the same year as The Usual Suspects, catapulting Kevin Spacey to stardom and was a big break for Gwyneth Paltrow,   Fight Club took Helena Bonham-Carter to Hollywood,  The Social Network unleashed (sic) Jesse Eisenberg and  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo made Rooney Mara a star.    

At one level this can be seen as a film about sin, not just the ‘breaking the 10 Commandments’  kind, but sin as a falling short of who we truly are.  Failing to be authentic - and the consequences of that failure.  Hell is not just living with other people, it is sometimes living with ourselves.    If you are willing to be entertained – and disturbed – I recommend this film; for Ben Affleck’s  best performance for (too) many years; for being what I think is Fischer’s most interesting film to date; and for Rosamund Pike achievement in fully inhabiting – and developing – the Hitchcock Blonde for the 21^st century.   

(Sorry for the joke in the title, which must be a total blank for my non-British readers.    You see there was this TV comedy series about the Home Guard, and they captured a German Officer, who asked Captain Mainwaring......oh, never mind.)

Under The Skin

How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways.

I love thee because Jonathan Glazer and Walter Campbell have adapted Michael Faber’s 2000 novel in ways that make it less explicit and   more mysterious and a-literal.   You are a true movie, not a filmed novel.

I love thee because  you are beautiful and terrible,  evoking curiosity, horror and pity.  And do so honestly. 

I love thee for your audacity, courage, technical brilliance and unending commitment to the task.

I love thee because you are saying important things.  You are about an alien and concerned with alienization.    Alienization is a compelling, tragic and horribly topical subject.

I love thee because  you persuaded Scarlett Johansson to undertake what is surely her most demanding role, ever, and made it work, wonderfully.

I love thee because here a film-star’s glamour is discounted.   Human beauty is about truth, not artifice.

I love thee because you are your own thing.

I love thee because you approach what Alfred Hitchcock called ‘pure cinema’.  Everything you have to say to us you show to us by throwing coloured shadows on a wall.

I love thee because your score is entirely uncommercial.   It is organically essential to the film.

I love thee because you are a humane movie.    You move me deeply. 

And this is not just an intellectual or emotional effect, it offers the possibility of my moving on, myself, of becoming more human. 

Let me be more explicit. 

This movie is made of images, not words.   Most science fiction movies demand exposition.    Long long ago in a Galaxy far away…..even The Man Who Fell to Earth,  the film I was most immediately reminded of, explains where and why ‘Thomas Newman’ came from.   Under The Skin  tells us nothing about its protagonist’s origins or motivation.   All we know is that  she is alien.    But even the alien’s gender  is only a persona.  We have no idea about ‘its’ real gender, if it has any.   We observe what ‘she’ does, but are given no explanations as to why. ‘She’ appears to be preying on young men, but we do not know their actual eventual fate.

This film is beautiful and terrible,  evoking curiosity, horror and pity.   It never use clichéd cinematic devices to confound or enlighten us, or tricks to shock us.   The horror is implicit.  It never plays for our sympathy, or colludes and flatters us with irony,  and yet I was deeply moved.  

A lot of the film takes place as ‘Laura’ (she does use this name at least once) cruises Glasgow in a van, stopping to talk to young men.    Many of these encounters were ‘for real’.  The van was unmarked and stuffed with hidden mini-cameras that kept recording.    A lot of these men had no idea they were being chatted up by a Hollywood Superstar.    At times there were 9 mini-cameras running simultaneously,  giving the cinematographer Daniel Landin,  the Editor Paul Watts and the Director hundreds of hours of material to work with, and on.     They  used much of this  cinema verity material, but also  sometimes overlaid and montaged it in ways that are beautiful and  truly – and here’s a too often misused word – iconic.   This is technically innovative and brilliant.

This is a movie about alienation.   At one point a TV clip of Tommy Cooper is used  wittily, letting us glimpse how alien we must be to an alien.   The broad Glaswegian accents used by the males do the same for most English speakers.   But this film goes much deeper than that, and this is where its horror and power lie.   Outside the cinema we do not have to be aliens to dehumanize and even demonize human beings.     How can anyone behead another human being unless they have first discounted their humanity?    We might also ask how can anyone target an explosive drone or drop a bomb from 30,000 feet without doing the same thing.     It is a truism that modern warfare is too often conducted like a video-game.  

But alienation can be countered with empathy.  During the film  'Laura'  picks up a man suffering from neurofibromatosis,  the facial disfigurement often called Elephant Man disease.    The actor playing this role is Adam Pearson, a sufferer of this affliction, so no prosthesis was needed.   It may be that to alien eyes he looked much like everybody else, but this encounter is pivotal to the plot.   Empathy may be essential for our humanity, but it also dangerous – especially to those who feel it.

I wonder what film maker’s  pitch was to Ms Johansson.  

We’re making this movie, and we want you to  play an alien in human disguise, cruising Glasgow, picking up unsuspecting members of the public,  whose accents will probably be impenetrable to you, and  improvising your responses to them.  You will take some of your ‘pick-ups’  home and strip in front of them.  You will be naked for a lot of the movie, but your nakedness will not be glamorized or flattering.  In fact you may be the most un-erotic femme fatal of all time.  You will have hardly any other dialogue.   In fact you will say nothing that tells us anything about what you are or why you here.  There will be changes within you, but nothing will be said or happen to illustrate them explicitly.   Oh, and we do not expect to make a lot of money.   In fact we will probably divide audiences and  critics sharply.

But maybe Ms Johansson remembered Jonathan Glazer’s previous film Birth, which pivots on a scene where Nicole Kidman’s character is in the audience at a concert.   The  camera rests on her face for three or four minutes,  during which time there is  neither action nor words, but as we watch we see her heart and mind change.    There is a similar subtle transformation in this movie and Scarlett, like Nicole, rises to the challenge.   Her performance is understated, subtle and effective as never before, not even in Lost in Translation.    And yet for much of the film we see nothing behind her eyes.   When there is a change within her it is minutely signaled, yet has the impact of a Diva’s aria.

In this film a Hollywood actress’s glamour is discounted.   She is literally stripped bare and  shown exactly as she is.   She is transformed by being revealed as a woman, not a star.   Not just as a woman, but as the woman she is.   What courage this must have taken, fully aware  that these images would no doubt be later misused and abused by others in ways over which she has no control.   At a time when naked or sexually explicit selfies are embarrassing many celebrities there is a strong message here.

This film reminds me of many other great movies, including of course The Man Who Fell to Earth, but also Repulsion,   2001 and The Tree of Life,  and Vertigo, yet it is utterly unique.    

That said,  in many ways this is a contemporary Hitchcock movie.  The psychological use of colour matches Hitch’s, and it comes close to what he called ‘pure cinema’,  with images and actions telling the story, rather than dialogue.   Hitch first worked in silent movies first, and  Glazer has worked in advertising, creating the arresting images of the white horses melding with the surf for Guinness and irrupting paint fountains for Sony Bravia.   I am sure this film would work just as well with no dialogue, just its images and soundtrack.    The opening credits echo Saul Bass’s for Vertigo, and there are other links to that movie, in which  Kim Novak played two women, one of whom appeared to be dead, the other being a fake.   Scarlett also plays two women here, one of whom we presume to be dead, the other we know to be a fake.    Two women, one body.  Both films are about duplicity.    Under the Skin even used (temporary) duplicity in its making, as it invited men to talk to a woman they never suspected was an actress, never mind her being Scarlett Johansson.   I don’t know if or what they were paid, but what a story they have to tell now!   

The soundtrack for Under the Skin  also reminded me of Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo,  as it accompanied the psychological state of the characters.    This similarity is  not in its orchestration, but in the ways Mica Levi’s score uses acoustic,  electronic and electronically distorted natural sounds  that act directly on our nervous system and echo the intuitive, almost subconscious, ways in which the images also invade us.   

Making Under the Skin relied on Scarlett Johansson’s ability to improvise in real conversations.   Hitch did not allow improvisation, he already had the script and movie completed in his head before he began to shoot it, but he did give the actors he trusted room to play their characters according to their instincts.  He told Kim Novak  I will tell you what to wear, where to stand and what to say, but how you do these things is up to you.  That is why I contracted you.

Under The Skin is Hitchcockian in many ways, but Hitchcock never approached the seriousness or courage of this movie, and never showed such compassion.  Do not be misled by the word compassion.  It does not mean sentimentality.  This is a very hard movie to watch.    I have often said that movies can help humanize us by allowing us to step into another person’s shoes for a mile or an hour.  Sometimes those shoes hurt.  

As Matt  Zoller Seitz has written of this film,  on the site that still bears Roger Ebert’s name and seeks to continue his critical tradition, saying

"Here is an experience that's nothing like yours, and here are some images and sounds and situations that capture the essence of what the experience felt like; watch the movie for a couple of hours, and when it's over, go home and think about what you saw and what it did to you."  

That is what I  have done, and been doing, and I think I will continue to do for some time.    Sometimes a movie inhabits us, gets truly under our skin.   In this case I think that is a good thing.