Gone Girl (2014) - Film Review
Starring: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris & Tyler Perry
Screenplay: Gillian Flynn
Directed By: David Fincher
Certificate: 18
As
I think I made clear in my review of Fight Club, David
Fincher can sometimes be a hit-and-miss director to me. For many
cinephiles, he's an absolute dream and even I'll admit that the one
consistent feature of his films is his superb visual style and
efficiency behind the camera. However, it can often be the story and
narrative content that lets his lesser films down, as is the case
with Fight Club and Alien 3 (although the
latter of these has been disowned and was more the result of studio
interference). Other times, both story and visuals can combine and
knock it out of the park, as films like Se7en have
proved. With that being said, what can we make of his latest and most
financially successful film, Gone Girl, and have we got
ourselves a hit or a miss?
On
her fifth wedding anniversary, Amy Dunne, author of the popular
Amazing Amy children's books, disappears from her home in
Missouri. Her disappearance is met with widespread media coverage,
and a police investigation of her home indicates that she has been
murdered. The seeming lack of concern shown by her husband, Nick,
soon puts him as the prime suspect. With more and more evidence
emerging of their deteriorating marriage, the net starts to close in
on Nick, but the truth behind Amy's disappearance is far more complex
than it first appears.
Like
any Fincher film, there's two things that you can guarantee you'll
find in Gone Girl, and that's a critique of various
aspects of contemporary society, together with a sense of nihilism.
Within minutes of starting, you've got a scene of Nick casually
playing the board game, the Game of Life, saying “Life, I don't
remember the point”, and it marvellously helps set up the tone of
the film. As for the social commentary, many people have rightly
picked up on the film's presentation of the news and media, which has
a particular focus on the “guilty before innocent” approach that
many media outlets take. In this respect, it feels highly appropriate
that the main news station we see throughout the film is Fox News –
a notoriously terrible and unreliable source of right-wing
journalism. Nick's reaction to Amy's disappearance and his subsequent
behaviour can come across as abnormal and uncaring, and Gone
Girl does a brilliant job at showing how the media can twist
and distort this to make him the prime suspect. Gone Girl shows
us the influence the media has on situations like this, how easily
they can make someone like Nick, who doesn't fit the narrative
everyone wants, into a scapegoat, yet the scariest thing of all is
the lack of exaggeration and how close this scenario feels to real
life. This closely relates to the film's further critique of corrupt
suburban relationships, and the pantomime of pretending to be happily
married. This is a blanket theme that's seen throughout the film,
and as many people have said, this is probably not a film to watch on
a first date.
However
Gone Girl is more than just ideas and social themes, as
it functions equally well as a compelling mystery thriller too.
Gillian Flynn's screenplay, adapted from her own novel of the same
name, is one of the three big components that make Gone Girl
such a fantastic film. The narrative is full of twists, turns
and mysteries that are constantly going in unexpected directions.
(Spoiler Warning!) You've got the simple things like the
literal clues left behind by Amy in her and Nick's anniversary game,
to the reveal of Amy's true plan and how she successfully faked her
death and staged a crime scene to frame Nick (incidentally, that
particular scene from the film has one of the best uses of montage
I've seen in a while). The pay-off to roughly an hour's worth of
mystery is satisfying too, as we begin to piece together and
understand the complex scheme that Amy has concocted. In fact the
lengths that Amy goes to during the film, are perhaps my only slight
criticism. There's a tiny, niggling voice in the back of my head when
watching Gone Girl that keeps drawing my attention to
the immense trouble and effort Amy puts into a plan that feels like
it could easily have gone wrong, and although she justifies why she
goes to such effort, that tiny part of me still can't help but doubt
it.
The
second secret behind Gone Girl's success lies with Ben
Affleck and Rosamund Pike as our two lead characters. Rosamund Pike
in particular utterly steals the show, giving what is perhaps her
career-best work as Amy. Her performance even got her nominated for
Best Actress at the Academy Awards, and deservedly so. I'd always
known Rosamund Pike was a brilliant actress, yet I never would've
guessed she could play a character like Amy to such an astonishing
degree. Like many of her roles, she comes across as cool, calm and
collected, but here she's also manipulative and ruthless – a cold,
calculated psychopath. Interestingly, Amy has sparked quite a debate
online as to whether Gone Girl is a feminist or a
misogynistic film. There's arguments to be made for both sides, as on
the one hand you have a film that portrays its female characters as
crazy and threatening. On the other hand, you have the argument that
I'm more inclined to support – that Gone Girl empowers
its female characters, as Amy is more than a match for Nick and she
spends the majority of the film in control of everything going on
around her. Gone Girl dispels the myth of all women
being naturally good and shows that women can be ruthless too, thus
putting them on the same level as men. Even though it's Rosamund Pike
and Amy that have the spotlight in Gone Girl, it would
be remiss to underestimate Ben Affleck's performance as Nick. Casting
Ben Affleck in this role feels very appropriate given the
similarities between the actor and the character. Just as Nick faces
media persecution for events that have taken place in his personal
life, so has Ben Affleck over the past fifteen years, and you can
definitely see him bringing his experience to the film.
Gone
Girl can boast a solid supporting cast too, with several
standout and memorable roles. Neil Patrick Harris gets to turn in a
more serious role as one of Amy's ex-boyfriends, and meets a very
grisly end which feels like it was almost lifted from a horror film.
However, perhaps the biggest surprise among the supporting cast is
just how good Tyler Perry is as Nick's lawyer. His role isn't
particularly large, but whenever he is on screen, he grounds the film
and helps keep it from venturing too far into the absurd. With one or
two moments of humour as well, I wouldn't have complained if he'd
been given more screen time. Other notable characters include Nick's
sister, the detective leading the investigation into Amy's
disappearance, and Missi Pyle who gives a wonderfully nasty yet
accurate rendition of the kind of news anchors you often see on
stations like Fox News.