Saturday, November 9, 2024

Classic Review: ‘Gone Girl’ Keeps You Guessing


Director: David Fincher
Writer: Gillian Flynn
Stars: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Carrie Coon

Synopsis: With his wife’s disappearance having become the focus of an intense media circus, a man sees the spotlight turned on him when it’s suspected that he may not be innocent.


The first hour of Gone Girl plays like a true crime show. We see the husband, the prime suspect, going through the motions of his wife’s disappearance. We see the detective’s skepticism about the case. We hear narration from the victim’s private diary. Search parties, new information, infidelity, marital problems, and news media coverage make us feel confident this is something we’ve seen before. And then there’s a switch that gets flipped.

Reframe: Gone Girl – Awardsdaily

The sly genius of Gillian Flynn’s script, based on her novel, is how easily she lulls us into the security of solving a mystery that doesn’t need solving. Our brains are hardwired to see Gone Girl as another story of an “innocent” man claiming he didn’t kill his wife. We have to put this into context and we want to believe Nick (Ben Affleck) is a liar because we see his infidelity and we know that he’s fallen out of love with his wife. That turn in the story when it’s revealed Amy (Rosamund Pike) is alive is like a bully who pushes us over the back of their toady so we have no way to catch ourselves. We see the bully, but the toady is inescapable.

That Amy reveal accompanies one of the most talked about sequences and speeches in literary or cinematic history. As Amy pontificates on what it means to be a “cool girl,” we see her on the first leg of her journey out of Nick’s orbit. Director David Fincher and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth rebuild who we knew Amy to be. Gone is the glamor and the taste. Here is the snacking and the comfort over couture. In that “cool girl” sequence there’s a brilliant show don’t tell as Amy drives to her destination and her narration describes the types of women who could be described as “cool girls.” First she passes a hipster with coke bottle frames and a pompadour. Then she passes two women in a compact with the windows down, hair flying in the breeze, arms and lips flapping along to a pop song. We see these women’s high effort in their facade contrasted with the layers peeled away from Amy and as she passes them leaving them and Nick behind for her new life.

Movie Review: Ben Affleck in David Fincher's 'Gone Girl' - The New York  Times

As much as the first act of the film would suggest that we are meant to be in Amy’s camp because of how, admittedly, bad a husband Nick has been, the story, like life, is so much more complicated. We’ve often been fed stories where it’s so obvious who we should be on the side of. With Gone Girl we’re left with two deeply flawed people, neither of whom are worth rooting for. Even in a back and forth in which more and more is revealed, the prospect of liking or being on one side or the other is distasteful.

That’s where Rosamund Pike’s brilliant performance shines. She is so conventionally beautiful that it’s hard, even when she does despicable things, not to sort of melt at the thought of her. She balances our disgust with our darkest desires to see her succeed. Pike makes us want Amy to live her best life somewhere else. She gets to be the anti-hero so many men have played before. Pike is so good at Amy’s manipulative moves, her conniving plans, and her narcissistic tendencies that she completely disappears and it’s only Amy we see. It’s haunting and muted in an unsettling way.

Though, because the film is so unsettling it is hard to completely revere. There are excellent set pieces and a beautiful Fincher moodiness to it, but the resolution is very stark. The film stays true to the source material in that way. There’s also something to be said for films with terrifically unsatisfactory endings, but Gone Girl needed something. There needed to be a way out for one character or the other, a coda that could see us through to a potential redemption, but there isn’t. The film ends where it ends. There are no consequences for anyone and that makes you resent what you’ve just seen even if you wanted neither focal character to really get the upper hand.

Movie Review] Tricky Narratives — Gone Girl – HYPERGEEKY

Gone Girl is a superbly scripted thriller. In David Fincher’s capable hands it keeps you guessing and builds a palpable tension with every new bit of information. It’s not like most crime procedurals and lives up to the excellent source material. Some of it is slow and some scenes make you wonder if they are entirely necessary to the plot, but as a whole it is a film that is revisitable because of the terrific performances and clues you couldn’t have caught the first time.

Grade: B

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