It's easy to see why the world has fallen so in love with Gillian Flynn's best-selling novel,
Gone Girl. Salacious and twisted, with clever jabs at our TMZ-fueled celebrity culture, it's also a pretty clever mystery full of dark corners in the human psyche ready to be explored. And if there's one director who explores those dark places better than any other it would be David Fincher, who takes Flynn's guilty pleasure of a novel and shapes it into an absorbing crime tale that works whether you know the twists or not.
It shouldn't be surprising that Fincher would take on a project like this, although some may wish he'd go back to heftier material. He's spent the last few years turning the printed works of others into movies that are uniquely his own. Nobody else could have done what he did with
The Social Network, and his take on
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo resembles the Swedish version in name only.
Gone Girl is at its core a crime procedural, a genre that doesn't typically demand the visual flourish of a filmmaker like Fincher. The care and precision, the dark and foreboding undercurrents racing through every moment, are what Fincher brings that another director may have taken for granted.
Flynn penned the screenplay herself and, for better or worse, she keeps most of it intact. Ben Affleck, delivering the kind of cagey, mature performance we haven't seen from him since
Hollywoodland, plays Nick Dunne, a bar owner stuck in a terrible marriage with Amy (Rosamund Pike). On their fifth wedding anniversary he's sitting at his bar having a drink and chatting with his sister Margo (Carrie Coon). Asked to think about the marriage's future, he returns home to discuss it only to find the door open, the living room a shambles, and Amy gone. The police are called and this is one case guaranteed to get a lot of attention. Amy is better known to the public as "Amazing Amy", the main character in a fictional book series loosely based on her childhood. Detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) is called in, the media descend on the small Missouri town, and it isn't long before Nick is suspect numero uno. He doesn't do much to help his situation, either.
And that's really all you should know going in because
Gone Girl goes to some unexpected...heck, let's just call them bizarre....places. If you've read the book you will find the film is everything you wanted it to be. Otherwise this is a film you'll want to go in to knowing as little as possible, and prepare to hold on to the armrests for the wild turns it's going to take. A lot of this stuff is just straight up trashy and totally absurd, but once those moments come it's refreshing how deeply all involved are committed to it. It can only work if the mystery is worth us investing in, and Flynn does a masterful job peeling back the layers of these characters in a controlled manner. We're never fully aware of everything that's going on, what each character is really doing, or who we should be trusting.
Flynn has said her goal with
Gone Girl was to explore the dynamics of a long-term marriage and the look she provides here is a cynical, acidic one. Marriage isn't so much about love as it is about power, and whoever holds it lords over the other, intentionally or unintentionally. Basically, men and women rarely present their true selves to the opposite sex, and marriage is basically two people struggling to maintain their facade. Over the course of years that will obviously become an impossibility, and at least in the case of
Gone Girl it turns pretty ugly. There's a lot of meat there to be chewed on, and while Flynn doesn't really dig into it the way she could have it's an intriguing idea to consider after the credits roll. She also takes time to plant a foot in the butt of Nancy Grace and our media's love of turning tragedy into a cause celebre. But she also uses that to explore our country's rather pathetic abundance of celebrity lawyers who, in the wake of the O.J. Simpson trial, are famous for defending those the public has pre-judged to be guilty.
Visually this may be one of Fincher's most impressive efforts, adding texture to what could have looked like an episode of
Law & Order. There's a shadowy pall hanging over every scene, even in some of the happier flashbacks, as if teasing the pain that is sure to come. In one beautifully haunting moment that is pure Fincher, Nick and Amy share a perfectly romantic kiss while a cloud of sugar drifts beautifully around them like snow in a light wind. Reteaming with Fincher on the score is Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor who largely stay out of the way this time. It's perfect, actually, for a film that demands its characters remain ambiguous. Overbearing musical cues would give away more than we need to know.
While some continue to pick apart Affleck as an actor he's only been doing the best work of his career over the last few years. In
Gone Girl he's brilliant in the less flashy of the two main roles, called upon to keep his emotions close to the vest except in rare occasions. Nick is a jerk, but the kind used to getting his way because of his looks and charm. Affleck fielded his share of criticism early in his career for basically being a pretty face and having him in this role adds some resonance. It's Pike who has the greater challenge because her Amy seems to be in a constant state of emotional flux. There isn't much more you can say about her without giving too much away, but let's just say that Amy is the kind of woman every man is terrified of falling for, and Pike plays that kind of character wonderfully. While Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens, Patrick Fugit, and Neil Patrick Harris all stand out in their various supporting roles, it can be overlooked the contribution of Tyler Perry as Nick's publicity-seeking defense lawyer, Tanner Bolt. Perry
may not have heardof David Fincher or Gone Girl before this, but he's pitch perfect here as a Johnny Cochran-type. Perhaps he should get away from the bad Madea flicks more often.
For Fincher, he takes a hold of our attentions right from the beginning and never lets go. It's to his credit to him as a visual guide through the story's lunacy that we never begin to question the craft behind it.
Gone Girl is a wildly tilting roller coaster of surprises, and while it often threatens to go off the rails, Fincher's direction and the cleverness of Flynn's script keep us gripped in suspense.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
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