Certainty gone

Rating: Null/10 (28 December 2014)

The ironically selfaware aspect of this is not its charm, that we have for example ironically selfaware characters courting each other in a party by making fun of how others around them are that. Faced with an envelope that reads "clue" and of course contains one, the detective of a Missouri small town no less quips "oh nice, very meta".
It's all of course a way of pointing out the very same selfawareness that is the engine of the story, rival storytellers caught in a fiction they spin that reveals who they really have come to be behind the storytelling guise, scheming spouses instead of the quirky in love New york couple the diary initially narrates to us (itself a fabrication), but there's a thinness to this.
Its real charm, real power, and real study worth contemplating, is of course that we don't know if he really didn't do it and come to mull over our own projections and prejudices, our own narrative, next to everyone else's in that smalltown community.
Affleck's casting is thus vindicated, a wise one; a somewhat glib looking guy who doesn't fully convince in either of the two dramatic roles, anxious husband or calculating murderer, who inappropriately smiles next to a photo of the missing wife for no other reason than a photographer yells for him to, who inhabits that bland stretch inbetween that has kept him from being a worthwhile actor, his own lack of commitment to a role becoming the character's and that as a tentative real life of uncommitment that we know all too well.
So this is potent stuff for a while , all about how we inhabit an intermediate narrative space before any concrete right and wrong, in trying to know one person getting to see how difficult it is to know another, with an ambiguous tension everywhere he goes, say chilling with a beer in his loving sister's home but he may have just committed the heinous crime a few days ago. The clamor around him to be the center of the narrative of finding her again as his guilt that takes life around him; a girl insisting on a selfie.
And then we twist and twist again, a Fincher staple, so that we go from softer edges of truth and as a consequence richer lives to a simpler right and wrong, from how we handle truth to merely waiting to see how he will. People may celebrate this like they did Hitchcock, I miss the richer Antonioni potential; different schools of handling uncertainty these, one aims for thrills, the other meditation.
It comes out on the other end with in-sight again, the unhappy marriage with spouses who have come to mistrust each other under the same roof, the original one that creates the fiction, but lives have been reduced by all the prior scheming, it's schematic metaphor.
Fincher meanwhile triumphs in his quest to be the most classic Hollywood filmmaker, his spatial eye having been weaned of all the quirks in the past now has transparence. He has successfully evaded the pomposity of Kubrick where Anderson will not. It's only a short step to Antonioni now, one that will require less story, but one he is going to take?