Reviews by JxSxPx

Before winding up in the hands of Ava DuVernay, Selma had passed through the hands of numerous directors including Lee Daniels and Stephen Frears. Thank god it took so long to finally get made, as DuVernay has steered away from bland “Great Man” territory (think of The Theory of Everything, The Imitation Game, or American Sniper) into thornier, more panoramic territory. Part of the reason for this was a lack of access to Dr. King’s famous speeches, demanding that the filmmakers instead find ways to show his taciturn mind and ability to galvanize.

Selma is the kind of film that we should be showering and celebrating with Oscar nominations. Somehow, it would up with only two nominations, and one win in a minor category. The best of these types of film faithful recreate a past struggle but frame it in a way that feels fresh to a modern audience. Far too much of Selma feels like it could be contemporary news footage if you merely updated the clothing and hairstyles. This film is having a conversation with the past, yet still manages to find hope for the future.

Perhaps it’s that spark of hope which animates Selma so brightly. It certainly colors in the central performance from David Oyelowo. Oyelowo finds a way to bring King down from the vaulted space of history and make him a living person. Too often films about “Great Men” feature central performances that feel less like a real person than a series of famous moments and tics cobbled together (yes, I’m looking at you Benedict Cumberbatch), but not here. And if Selma ever stumbles, and it sometimes occasionally wobbles, it’s in the villainous performance by Tim Roth as George Wallace. Roth is not bad, but sometimes gets a little too broad and plays a character instead of making it feel real.

This never detracts enough to keep Selma from being anything other than essential viewing. From the top down it’s a stacked cast doing commendable work, making each moment feel as real and accurate as possible, so one occasionally too broadly played scene is easily forgiven. And if there was any justice in the world both David Oyelowo and Carmen Ejogo would have been blessed with Oscar nominations. A scene that seemed like a lock to at least get them some recognition is one in which Coretta confronts her husband about his infidelity. It’s played with minimal emotional outburst, building in slow burning intensity, and hits all the harder for it.

This is a retelling of an important historical moment that finds the meeting ground between intimacy, epic scope, large ambitions, brutality, and hope. Selma may have a few moments of budgetary restraints and obvious compromises between director and studio, but Selma is still a profoundly moving experience. Although it does make one wonder why a man like King has been given such a small budget, while Chris Kyle’s questionable sniper gets a huge budget, A-list director, and a big studio push. The answer is probably obvious, and too depressing to really think about.

In a year filled with mediocre movies about white dudes gathering up the lion’s share of nominations from more daring and interesting movies, American Sniper may have been the blandest. A faintly sketched bit of legend printing upon which anything can be projected or read from it, American Sniper was also a film that galvanized the box office with its tasteful blandness and refusal to engage with the reality of the story. The true story is infinitely more interesting, but Eastwood has decided that the legend deserved to be printed.

Shame, as the true story of man proven to have lied in his memoirs, bragged about killing innocent people (which also turned out to be a lie), and teetered on ugly racism as the fuel for his numerous tours of duty (his social media accounts were not…well, it was pretty ugly to read) does not deserve the hero treatment. Bradley Cooper’s central performance flirts with that simmering rage and fractured mental state, but Eastwood’s story choices consistently pull away from more challenging subject matter.

American Sniper pays lip service to any moral quandary or qualms our lead has about his various horrific killings, and glosses over the lasting ramifications and emotional trauma of post-traumatic stress. PTSD is a serious issue with our veterans, they and their disorder deserve more than just meager lip service to be paid. The only scenes that really hit home are the ones in which Eastwood actually engages in the darkness. A birthday party comes to a screaming halt when Cooper’s traumatized vet misinterprets a simple scenario as something incendiary. Or the moments in which Cooper is allowed to gradually reveal the drift he feels as he tries to reengage with civilian life, a life that now feels more foreign and distant to him than the Iraqi battlefield.

A scene during a combat struggle in which Cooper is talking with his wife on a satellite phone before being interrupted by gunfire leaves her powerless and helpless as she hears the gunshots and insanity of the situation but remains powerless to help. In these all too brief moments, Eastwood manages to awaken the sleepy, blank tedium of the film with shots of real emotions and adrenaline. Maybe a better filmmaker would have found a way to make these quiet scenes of domesticity feel less like filler until the next tour of duty, the next big action scene, but not Eastwood who has a habit of taking the first draft, doing a few takes, and shooting that.

These seams show, no more so than the infamous newborn baby scene. I refuse to believe a film with this budget, and this much A-list talent involved couldn’t have found a more realistic looking doll, an animatronics, or a real baby to use for such a quick and simple scene. It’s lazy filmmaking, and it takes over the film as a whole. There was the chance to tell a more meaningful and deeper story, one that was bypassed in favor of audience pleasing go-get-‘em-kid heroics. But I suppose if I wanted a more challenging film about the Iraq War, I should turn toward the work of Kathryn Bigelow.

Remember when I said that when it comes to the Oscars the most daring nominations tend to come from the screenplay categories? Well, that certainly holds true for Nightcrawler, the story of a man who becomes an amateur crime scene recorder who begin to blur the lines between observing these horrific crimes and participating in, possible even engineering, them.

This is a film for which words like deranged or dark fail to truly grasp just how demented this thing is. Does the film judge him? I don’t know, it borrows from and feels a lot like Network, a film in which bad people don’t exactly lose out in the end. His schemes to become the top dog in his field, which is already populated with questionable people, and his actions are frequently dirty, we feel no remorse or sympathy with him, yet we still watch in a curious, transfixed state wondering what this terrible person will do next.

After questionable choices in films like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Love & Other Drugs, it’s nice to see Jake Gyllenhaal back in his element, namely playing dark, twisted characters. He doesn’t have the looks or energy to believably play a romantic comedy’s leading man or wholesomeness to lead a mega-blockbuster, no, he’s much better at strange character parts. His work in films like The Good Girl, Donnie Darko, and Zodiac have always shown that he has a knack for inhabiting obsessive characters veering toward un-likability. It’s a similar thing that happened with a young Johnny Depp, they seem to be much happy subverting their good looks and playing as far away from bland matinee idol as they possibly can.

Here Gyllenhaal is a gaunt wrath stalking the Los Angeles streets at the darkest hours of the night. A creature like this couldn’t exist in the daytime where his soulless nature would be too jarring. Gyllenhaal’s large eyes can express deep love and devotion like in Brokeback Mountain, or they can appear like the hollow pits of a sociopath like they are here, seemingly using the same muscles. This is another performance that demanded at spot at this year’s Oscars, but the disturbing and gross aftertaste of the character and performance, a testament to what Gyllenhaal achieves here, probably scared away too many voters.

A similar thing probably happened with Rene Russo’s solid work here. Maybe they thought she was too similar to Faye Dunaway in Network, and her character does feel like the prodigal daughter, but that didn’t stop them from rewarding Sandra Bullock for a performance similar to Julia Roberts’ winning role. Russo’s character is just as desperate as Gyllenhaal’s for success, but Russo’s still has some semblance of her humanity intact. She makes a deal with the devil to keep her job, and the film’s flirtations with American greed and succeeding in the modern era are hammered home.

Granted, parts of Nightcrawler work a little better than the rest, namely the two central performances, and the cinematography from Robert Elswit are operating at a more consistent level than some of the story’s twists and turns. This didn’t detract from me. Nightcrawler has a lot of ideas buzzing around in its skull, and if it stumbles a few times trying to reach its great climax, so be it. It’s a promising debut from Dan Gilroy as a director. I hope he re-teams with Gyllenhaal and gives us another surprising and rich piece of work.

You know, I never had anything less than absolute faith that Paul Thomas Anderson would manage to create a perfectly fine adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s work, but what I couldn’t even begin to imagine was just so immaculately he would manage to transfer the swirling, labyrinthine nature of the author’s work to the screen. Typically narrative structure has never been a strong concern with Pynchon, and the more I think about the complete work of Anderson, the more that seems true for him as well. Here is a marriage between an original work and adaptor that captures the essence of the work while standing strong as its own piece.

There’s a plot to Inherent Vice, filled with strangely named characters, bizarre intersections of various sub-plots, and a central shadowy conspiracy uniting the entire thing. Yet what made Inherent Vice such an enjoyable and strange head trip for me was the sustained tone and vibe of the entire film. Vice manages to strike notes of melancholy and uproarious laughter, weaving them in and out as needed, while never breaking away from the hazy, druggy hang-out vibe.

Instead of trying to figure out the logistics and coherent narrative steps, one should come to this film knowing that this is not the primary concern. One should instead sit back, and just let the film’s oddball tendencies and dynamic actors charm and enchant you. Yes, there’s a story being told in the more conventional sense, but Vice feels like an elegy to a time that was, and one can see the main character’s former life eroding away piece by piece.

Praise be to the continued glorious weirdness of Joaquin Phoenix’s choices as an actor lately. I’m still miffed he lost out Best Actor for The Master, even if Daniel Day-Lewis was highly deserving, and my annoyance with his lack of a heavily loaded awards mantle continues with this film. There’s no way in hell he stood a chance of getting traction, the film and performance are too shaggy, idiosyncratic, divisive even, to truly call attention, but he deserves it. His central performance is the prism through which we put together this cockamamie story, and his permanently stoned brain only adds to the merry puzzlement of trying to accomplish that. Phoenix has a long history of obsessive, damaged, highly serious portraits in his filmography, and nothing really braced me for the comedic, giddy, light-hearted hippie private detective he essays here. If Anderson can get two such great performances out of him, I can only hope that he becomes a permanent fixture in Anderson’s stock company of actors.

Just as good as the litany of supporting roles, each offering a strange new color or texture to the film’s exceedingly strange nature. Josh Brolin was robbed of a supporting actor slot, and if not for J.K. Simmons’ great work in Whiplash, maybe even the win. Loads of actors appear in brief walk-on roles and are given a chance to go broad and grotesque as possible in their readings of these characters, Pynchon’s work is one that can easily handle a more obtuse rendering. Martin Short, Benicio Del Toro, Eric Roberts, Serena Scott Williams, Jena Malone, Maya Rudolph, Reese Witherspoon, Belladonna, Hong Chau, Katherine Waterston, and Joanna Newsom barely scratch the surface on the familiar faces of well-known and long-time character actors doing commendable work in this film.

It is well documented that I did not particularly care for Birdman, and while I love the work of Emmanuel Lubezki, I feel like it should have lost the cinematography Oscar to this. It’s a gloriously bleached out film, effortlessly capturing and reconstructing the look of the New Hollywood 70s. And it definitely should have won the Adapted Screenplay category. How it lost to middling and aggressively generic The Imitation Game is up for debate, although in typing that sentence I think I may have figured out why it lost and that piece of Oscar-bait clap-trap won out. The screenplay categories are a haven for more adventurous nomination choices, but that doesn’t consistently translate into actual wins. It becomes a case of the nomination being the victory.

Anderson mentioned that Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye was a major influence on this, and with that film’s complicated plotting, contrast between sunny Los Angeles scenery and descent into the darkest of conspiracies, and man-out-of-time lead, a road map is provided for this one. It would be interesting to see both of these films back-to-back and see how they work synchronously, like watching a disciple trying to execute the teachings of his master, and how they differ, Altman and Anderson have a lot of similar tricks and obsessions but they’re very different artists.

For a few years after her Oscar win in 2006, Reese Witherspoon seemed to have gotten lost in easy paycheck romantic comedies and dramatic roles that seemed aimed at recapturing prestige. 2014 may just be the course-correct year for her, producing a mixed bag in Gone Girl, turning in solid supporting work in Inherent Vice and Mud, and in Wild delivering an emotionally stripped down and raw performance. It’s a great return to form, and I’m happy to see her back in fighting form. (Election has given her a lifetime pass of goodwill for me.)

Wild, adapted by Nick Hornby from Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, tells the story of one person’s emotional and spiritual rebirth after overcoming a series of debilitating personal issues and addictions. Haunting over the film is the spectre of Strayed’s mother, played in minimal screen time with maximum honest and impact by Laura Dern, and the memories that flood back to her at random moments of her heroin addiction, sex addiction, and broken marriage.

At times Jean-Marc Vallée makes overly artistic choices that feel tonally at odds with the material, much like his previous effort Dallas Buyers Club. But Wild is an infinitely better movie than that offensive bit of white savior cinema. The symbols of the fox and diseased horse are on the nose, but he wisely taps into Hornby’s obsession with how music and literature influence our personal lives. Various songs and pieces of literature weave in and out of Strayed’s memories, bringing about images of her joys and sorrows.

Dern and Witherspoon turn in some very fine work. Dern in particular only has about ten minutes worth of screen time, but she lingers in your mind. An actress who is capable of both great restraint and the ability to go manically broad, Dern here appears to emotional strip down to the very basics, effectively becoming the bruised soul of the entire film. Witherspoon must carry the entire film on her shoulders, and she makes it look effortless. She easily reveals deep pools of fury, rage, and self-destruction before flipping the script and witnessing this woman’s healing journey. Witherspoon never shows all of her cards, preferring to lay them down slowly and with deliberate, methodical purpose. At the very end, Wild reveals a hopeful spirit trying valiantly to fight against the endless hurt that has taken residence in her soul. It’s a moving piece of work.

An incredibly ambitious film about the most simplistic of things: growing up. Twelve long years in the making, Boyhood contains many scenes of universal truth, and while it’s not perfect, it is something special.

Boyhood’s major problem is one of too many stories going on at once, a trimming of the fat would have tightened up some of the narrative flab. Namely a completely needless subplot involving a Mexican gardener who returns later on in the film to thank his white lady savior. It’s an awkward moment, and I’m not sure what it’s supposed to inspire in the audience aside from making me cringe.

But I found this to be Boyhood’s lone major stumbling block. What is so attractive about Boyhood is how it finds the meaningful and sublime moments in the mire of the everydayness. Growing up is something everyone does, and everyone does it a little differently, but there’s certain universal truths to be found here. First love, divorce, trying to form your own identity, gaining more observance of the outside world – we’ve all been there, and Boyhood documents these transitions.

The most poetic moments, and the ones I felt the most emotional attachment towards, were the ones involving the mother, played with honesty and soulful integrity by Patricia Arquette. Many of these quiet scenes between a single mother and her young son reminded me of my own childhood. Arquette is an actress I’ve never really warmed up towards much in the past, but here she absolutely knocked me flat on my feet. Her deep reservoirs of inner strength run dry in a scene late in the film in which she wonders what will come next for her now that her children are grown and on their own. She doesn’t get the splashy parental role like Ethan Hawke’s amiable slack father, but she is the film’s consistently beating heart, the sturdy rock around which her kids mature and develop.

Yes, Boyhood is a series of vignettes without a central narrative, and the closest the film comes to conventional narrative is when an alcoholic step-father is introduced. Besides this midsection, the film peaks in at random moments between 2002 to 2013. The other family members play more major roles in the earlier sequences, but as our boy grows up and gets more agency, they fall into the background. So in real life, so it goes in the cinema. It’s a strange experiment, and I suppose I could see why some would respond negatively towards it, but it touched me very deeply and I got a lot out of the experience.

The term “prestige film” isn’t inherently a bad thing. The concept of a film made to appeal to a broad adult audience – not the worst thing imaginable. It’s just when those films condescend to the audience, downplay the realities, and present the material in as ham-fisted a manner as possible that it becomes an issue.

Behold, The Imitation Game, a film that gives the impression of having been rolled out of the Weinstein assembly line to achieve maximum Oscar impact. This doesn’t feel like a truly thought-out story, but like cherry-picked themes and moments cobbled together to give the impression that they’re saying something important.

This is the kind that gives the term “prestige film” a bad reputation. An awkward mixture of repressed homosexuality, brilliant man does good deed, spy film, and sensitive portrait of a misfit, The Imitation Game tries to hit as many boxes as possible without focusing in on the more interesting or historically accurate ones.

Alan Turing’s homosexuality was a major factor in his life, and the film merely plays lip service towards. He is but another in a long line of gay characters in film or television who is gay in name only, heaven forbid we ever see him engage in his sexuality. If you know even the slightest bit of truth about Turing and his life, you will see why this is offensive. This is truly a poorly handled major bit of historical fact and character development that is white-washed over.

Even more troublesome is the way that Turing’s brilliance and homosexuality are treated as symptoms of his being slightly autistic. The real Turing was not, nor was he treated so poorly by his real-life contemporaries. These story telling choices are just plain odd. The real man was fascinating enough, so why did they feel the need to change him so completely?

The lone saving grace of this film are the two main performances from Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley. However, neither one of them deserved award season consideration, as both of these performances have a general sense of being seen and done before by both actors. Cumberbatch in particular appears to be resting on a variation of Sherlock here, resting on a series of blinks and vocal tics instead of digging deeper into the truth. Knightley is solid, but her part is so underwritten, essentially playing Robin to Cumberbatch’s Batman.

Handsome looking, but unbelievably dull, The Imitation Game also traffics in moments that read as pure fiction. A long series of scenes in which these code breakers are deciding which groups of people get to live or die to try and hide information from the Germans reeks of Hollywood artifice. And no amount of lovely production design or period-accurate costumes can mask this. So here we have a film that infantilizes the main character’s homosexuality, commits obvious historical inaccuracies, and is an exercise in mass tedium (which is incidentally what I nicknamed the somehow Oscar nominated director, Morten Tyldum). Of course it got nominated a bunch during awards season, but thank god it (mostly) lost all of its races. Maybe even the Academy is getting tired of this particular strain of BBC-lite prestige bullshit.

Dear god, was this year’s Oscar theme the year of incredibly dull films about white dudes? Granted, The Theory of Everything is one of the better films to come out of that particular genre this past year, but it’s still only merely adequate. It’s a good film about an interesting subject, and like many of the others released in the 2014 awards season, it tackles that interesting subject in as easily digestible a way as possible.

Based on the book by his ex-wife, Jane, The Theory of Everything tells of Stephen Hawking’s college education, long-suffering marriage, intellectual pursuits, and eventual celebrity. Ironically, despite being based upon her book, Jane is often cast to the side of the inner emotional turmoil going on in the story, and frequently reduced to the long-suffering wife role.

The film’s treatment of massively complicated mathematical and scientific formulas in a simplistic manner doesn’t bother me. It would be hard to gain interest if they were talked about as they truly are, so simplifying them are audience participation isn’t one of the major problems I have with the film. No, it’s the too often on-the-nose symbolism that irks me. Hawking’s obsession with spherical shapes and rotund images liter the film, like he can’t go a few minutes without noticing a swirling galaxy in his tea cup.

I suppose I should be thankful that a biopic is trying valiantly to even indulge in a stylistic flourish when the genre so often adheres to risk aversion as a matter of principal. But whereas similar films like The Imitation Game contort their stories into grossly misrepresentative and artless shapes, The Theory of Everything at least manages to acknowledge the complicated emotions at play, even if they do sometimes feel more fully developed from Stephen Hawking’s perspective.

Biopics are also a typical excuse for an actor to demonstrate their stuff. Think of how Charlize Theron forever shed the pretty, vapid girlfriend/wife roles she was stuck playing by going full-tilt as a serial killer in Monster, or the way that Forest Whittaker finally got some overdue recognition by smothering his innate likability with crazed despotic rule in The Last King of Scotland. Similarly, Eddie Redmayne finally gets a role that shows what he is made of as an actor. I’ve found him to be solid and dependable in other things, even if the material was beneath him like My Week with Marilyn, but he truly exhudes extraordinary depths of characterization and emotive acting in this. Frequently he can only capture the rascally spirit that still burns within the broken body with just a twinkle in his eyes. While my preference would have been for the comeback kid Michael Keaton (I have an eternal soft-spot in my heart for him as my childhood Batman and Beetlejuice), Redmayne is a worthy Best Actor winner.

Given less to do is Felicity Jones. I thought she was fabulous in Like Crazy, but she occasionally seems out of her element here. In later scenes where her character has to age, she lacks the gravitas (and age make-up) to believably play a middle-aged woman. Jones is undone by looking eternally like the fresh-faced and perky college student we first meet her as in the film. An odd choice on someone’s part, and while she’s never less-than-good, she’s also never truly soaring to the same heights as Redmayne. This might have something to do with the fact that she’s shuffled off to the sidelines for long stretches, and when she is given a chance to emote it becomes distracting to notice that she has not been aged up like her co-stars who have been aged at least somewhat.

Perhaps the biggest sin of The Theory of Everything is how it dances around so many of the topics, ripe for emotional plundering, hanging in the air. Jane’s emotional frustrations? Merely given lip-service. Extramarital affairs? Treated far too chastely. It’s a very safe, sanded-down variation of the events as widely known. It didn’t need to be. Somewhere lurking in The Theory of Everything’s lovely amber glow is a much better film about the realities of living and loving someone with an incurable illness, of falling out of love with each other, and a story that captures more complicated emotions in fullness. It’s not a bad film, it’s just the blandest one that could have been made out of these parts.

Ever since rightfully winning the Best Actress Oscar over front-runner Julie Christie in 2008, Marion Cotillard has continually delivered a series of strong post-Oscar performances without getting a second nomination. Her lack of another nomination was becoming questionable, how could they ignore so talented and dynamic an actress as Cotillard? Her lack of a nomination for Rust & Bone was particularly egregious.

So thank god for the Dardenne brothers and their film Two Days, One Night, a portrait of hope overcoming desperation and depression. The film is a winner, telling the story of a factory worker (Cotillard) who must beg her former co-workers for her job back. The catch is that they can either vote to have a big bonus, or they can give up that bonus and give her back her job. Knowing that she has a few votes for herself already lined up, she must go out and try to win over more of them.

Cotillard’s character has fallen hard into her depressive state, and this mission is as much about convincing them she can do it as it is about convincing herself. Resigned to popping anti-depressants and napping away most of the day, Cotillard’s Sandra is working mother and wife struggling to regain her sense of normalcy. As she continues on with her quest, gaining some ground and losing out for a variety of reasons that are no less valid than her desperate situation, a sense of urgency and emergency arises. We become deeply involved and concerned about whether Sandra is truly capable of returning to work, gaining the necessary number of votes, of being able to function once again.

As Two Days, One Night heads towards its conclusion, with a 50/50 chance of her goal happening, we also see a change in her. By performing this task, which seems so easy to someone who has never struggled with depression but it’s a herculean effort to her, Sandra begins to regain some of her hope and confidence. The final moments register a personal victory. We can see the exact moment in which her will to live, her wanting to fight again for another day is reignited. Cotillard’s face and the grace with which Dardenne’s get us there is a joyful note to end the film on. To borrow a phrase from Roberta Flack, it’s a moment that kills us softly with its song.

While pithy, the description of Gone Girl as the best Lifetime movie ever made is not without its merits. This to indulges in the worst, shrillest, most salacious moments of a narrative that frequently feels all too ridiculous. Moments of satire are painfully obvious, the black humor frequently falls limp in front of David Fincher’s meticulous, cold, but unbelievably glossy direction.

On paper, this reads as an unequivocal success, but something got lost along the way. Perhaps it’s that third act which takes a hard turn into territory that if played better by Ben Affleck would have sold it, but his performance never quite sells the sense that these two awful characters deserve the hell hole of their own making. It’s not that he’s too likable for the role, it’s just that he doesn’t seem comfortable delving into the darker, hateful aspects of the character required to really make it work.

In stark contrast, Rosamund Pike is the only thing worth seeing in this movie. The movie might be handsomely made trash, but Pike’s poisonous leading lady is an immaculately crafted piece of work. Completely unafraid of the ugliness at the heart of her character, Pike reveals levels of commitment and dramatic depths that are frightening to behold. Her ice queen is a deceiving, cunning, but not nearly as smart as she thinks she is sociopath of the highest order. Pike single-handedly saves Gone Girl from being pure tedium to get through.

Although, to be fair, the first two-thirds of Gone Girl aren’t without their merits, but a sudden act of violence shatters the narrative and it never properly recovers. Once this act occurs, the story takes a hard turn into wildly unbelievable and poorly thought-out scenes which stretch out for far too long. The film’s climax seems to never end, and the final ending it gives us is wildly unsatisfying. Somewhere along the way, Gone Girl lost the plot.

Gone Girl’s supporting players are the only other highlight. Neil Patrick Harris and Tyler Perry (yes, THAT Tyler Perry) turn in the best work. Harris is carving out a nice little niche for himself as disturbed, obsessive characters between this and his minor role in American Horror Story: Freak Show. Perry is a major surprise, he really goes for it with his character’s questionable ethics and behavior as Affleck’s defense attorney. Carrie Coon and Kim Dickens are the only other supporting players who make an impression, as Affleck’s twin sister and the major police officer investigating the case. Sela Ward is offered a minor role as a major player in the TV news business, I wanted to see more of her.

But not every supporting player is playing in the same key, and tone is never the strongest point in Gone Girl. Missi Pyle’s Nancy Grace-like character feels too broadly drawn, more like something you would see on SNL. A strange complaint to make about a character clearly inspired by Nancy Grace, but every time she’s onscreen the entirety of her performance feels too smirking, too winking at the audience to ask if they get the joke. We get it. A similar thing happens with Casey Wilson’s eternally pregnant nosey neighbor, Patrick Fugit’s dimwitted police officer, Lola Kirke and Boyd Holbrook as pair of country bumpkins. However committed to the material these various players may be, and Fugit, Kirke and Holbrook are fine, the film doesn’t know what tone to strike with these various voices. This leaves their work in some grey zone, the actors are fine, but the scenes are clearly meant to be satirical, yet they don’t land on their feet.

Perhaps Fincher was just the wrong hand to guide this material. His films are dark, engrossing, moody, but they aren’t exactly known for humor. And he falters in the face of the more satirical elements of the tale. Gone Girl is all scorched earth, but Fincher is a wintery flame, and the two different tones and styles end up snuffing each other out.