Gone Girl
Directed by: David Fincher
Written by: Gillian Flynn
Starring: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry, Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens, Patrick Fugit, David Clennon, Lisa Banes, Missi Pyle, Emily Ratajkowski, Casey Wilson, Lola Kirke, Boyd Holbrook, Sela Ward
Drama/Mystery/Thriller - 149 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 3 Oct 2014
Written by: Gillian Flynn
Starring: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry, Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens, Patrick Fugit, David Clennon, Lisa Banes, Missi Pyle, Emily Ratajkowski, Casey Wilson, Lola Kirke, Boyd Holbrook, Sela Ward
Drama/Mystery/Thriller - 149 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 3 Oct 2014
Courtship and marriage are jobs for sales people. Men and women sell a version of themselves to their prospective partners. Everyone understands we all adopt personas during the early romance phases and relationship building; we show the ‘super’ us. Gone Girl, on the book jacket, is about a missing woman and the suspicion surrounding her husband’s guilt or innocence. Dig a little deeper and Gone Girl is really about marriage and what happens to the ‘super’ us five years in. A spoiler warning – I will divulge no surprising plot twists, but Gone Girl is a film best enjoyed with no advance knowledge of the plot.
Gillian Flynn wrote one of those best-selling novel phenomena which come around every few years. It seems most of the country read Gone Girl based on the urgent recommendations of friends and family. Flynn also wrote her own screenplay which is why I heard a lot remarks walking out the theater that, “They filmed the entire book!” Themes include the perfect marriage façade, the Great Recession’s ripple effects in suburban Middle America, and the insatiable media frenzy demand for grotesque and dark revelations to keep their reality TV obsessed viewers angry and upset.
Gillian Flynn wrote one of those best-selling novel phenomena which come around every few years. It seems most of the country read Gone Girl based on the urgent recommendations of friends and family. Flynn also wrote her own screenplay which is why I heard a lot remarks walking out the theater that, “They filmed the entire book!” Themes include the perfect marriage façade, the Great Recession’s ripple effects in suburban Middle America, and the insatiable media frenzy demand for grotesque and dark revelations to keep their reality TV obsessed viewers angry and upset.
Transcending boiler plate crime fiction, Gone Girl is the study of a marriage gone wrong. Five years into a marriage, when spouses contend their partner has changed from who they used to be, is perhaps when it is their partner lowering their guard and dropping the guise which wrapped them in a brighter light. The ‘change’ is the person revealing who they were all along, behind the peppier exterior. Husband Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck, 2012’s Argo) lost his job and moved his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike, 2014’s A Long Way Down), from her comfortable New York City brownstone to an isolated Missouri McMansion. Along the way, Nick lost his drive and ambition or at least those qualities he displayed to Amy during the early days of their time together.
Nick and Amy are growing apart. He spends his days and nights at his bar and she remains aloof buried in books and expressing passive aggressive skepticism at some of his new lifestyle choices. When Nick comes home one day and finds an open front door and a shattered glass table, he fears the worst and so begins the national feeding frenzy on the gossip scandal shows. At first, the community rallies around Nick, who blames the local homeless population for her disappearance, as tip lines and search parties form to help find the gorgeous, innocent, and brilliant feminine ideal. As days stretch on and more circumstantial evidence turns up showing Nick in an unfavorable light, opinions change and Nick becomes the most hated man in America. Everyone is certain Nick killed his wife, but there is no proof, let alone body and murder weapon to seal his fate.
We do not know what is going on in Nick’s head, but Amy is an open book, literally a journal. Rosamund Pike is outstanding as Amy and should be remembered come award season. She gets the juicy narrated monologues. Her face is frequently stoic. The audience and Nick have no idea what bubbles beneath the surface until the audience gets the pleasure of her inner voice. Pike, known for a Bond girl stint and various supporting roles, hides her British accent well enough and speaks in a believable upper class Manhattan superior dialect.
Neil Patrick Harris’s (2014’s A Million Ways to Die in the West) Desi Collings is an integral, but more peripheral being. We skip his backstory but gain enough information to know he may carry around a psychological disorder or two. None of us ever forget our first loves but Desi never let go. Harris, with a slight smirk, channels a Barney Stinson homage when he drolly spouts the film’s best line concerning what he would do on vacation in Greece, “Octopus and Scrabble?”
Director David Fincher creates an effective sense of space subscribing to the less is more school of thought. The Dunne’s house is as barren as the childless couple and has all the charm of a vacant model home. Desi’s lake house is top-of-the-line and feels far more lived in even though nobody routinely lives there. The strongest location is one we are only in for a very short time, the vacant mall. There may be no shops in the mall but it is full of transient, down on their luck, aftershocks of folks with no place else to go. Fincher gives us a glimpse of how hard the recession slapped the suburban flyover states. The score, by Fincher regulars Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, is strong but not as memorable as their impactful Social Network music.
Put it all together and Gone Girl is a cut above the average whodunit and is even a very powerful examination of one couple’s marriage. The police procedural bit is effective and Amy in particular is by far the most impressive quality of the entire film. The ending drags on with short scene after short scene tying up loose ends which apparently do no tie everything perfectly together because I can sit here and think of a few plot holes requiring explanations. See Gone Girl for suspenseful, edge of your seat mystery but really see Gone Girl for Rosamund Pike.
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