Based on the book by Gillian Flynn (who also wrote the
screenplay), Gone Girl is directed by David Fincher, who is probably my
favorite director working today. Almost
every movie he’s directed has ended up as one of my favorite movies of the
year. Zodiac, The Social Network, The
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Game, Fight Club, and Se7en are movies I can
watch over and over again. Those movies
are so well cast, the performances are all great, the stories are interesting,
but my favorite element is hard to explain.
It’s something about the look and atmosphere of those movies. Fincher just has such a great eye for cinema,
and every shot looks great.
Anyway, enough about the director, let’s talk about this
movie. Ben Affleck stars as Nick Dunne,
and Rosamund Pike plays his wife, Amy Elliott-Dunne. As the movie begins, Nick doesn’t look
happy. He goes to the bar he owns with
his twin sister and hangs out with her for a while. When he returns home, there are signs of a
struggle and his wife Amy is missing.
As the police and volunteers start searching for Amy, we see
flashbacks of how Nick and Amy fell in love.
Their marriage seems almost too perfect for a while, then things start
to bad. See, Amy’s from New York City
but Nick is from Missouri. He’s living
in New York when they meet and get married, but two things cause them to move
back to Nick’s home town. First the
recession hits and they both lose their jobs.
Then Nick’s mother gets cancer and he wants to move home to take care of
her.
As their story progresses, we see Nick and Amy grow further
apart. She’s not happy living in this
small town and he starts changing. In
her eyes, he isn’t the same guy she married in New York. By using her diary as narration, we get a
pretty good picture of a marriage falling apart. Add to that the fact that she’s rich, owns
the bar he and his sister run, and Amy made Nick sign a prenuptial
agreement.
The movie cuts back and forth between the history of their
marriage and the current investigation into Amy’s disappearance. The movie does a great job of keeping us
guessing. Nick may have snapped and
killed his wife, or he may have had nothing to do with it. There are other surprises as the movie goes
along, but the less you know about that, the better.
This is the best work Ben Affleck has done in a long time,
but even better is the performance by Rosamund Pike. She’s been in quite a few movies, including
Die Another Day, An Education, Jack Reacher, and The World’s End. But she didn’t really stand out in any of
those. In Gone Girl, she gives a career
making performance. There’s a lot to
this character and she does a really good job.
I wouldn’t be surprised if she got an Oscar nomination for this movie.
Besides the two leads, there were a lot of other really good
performances. Carrie Coon plays Nick’s
sister Margo, and she’s kind of the conscience of the movie. Neil Patrick Harris is an ex-boyfriend of Amy’s
and he’s surprisingly creepy. Kim
Dickens is the detective investigating Amy’s disappearance, and she was a lot
of fun. I think my favorite scenes were
when she was on screen. She’s a feisty
woman with a southern accent, and she reminded me a lot of Holly Hunter’s
detective character in Copycat. She’s
always in control of a crime scene and ordering all the other cops around.
But the biggest surprise is probably Tyler Perry as Tanner
Bolt, the most famous and expensive lawyer in the country. Perry has already made a name for himself
with his Madea movies. I haven’t seen
very many of his movies, but he was really entertaining here.
This is a great movie.
It’s a really interesting who-done-it crime drama, but it’s so much more
than that. It’s satirizing the media and
our obsession with reality TV. It’s
commenting on post-recession America and how that affected people. It’s making a statement about the complexity
of marriage. And as of early October, it’s
the best movie of the year.
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