If you haven’t heard of the film adaptation of the best-selling novel Gone Girl, consider yourself a dying breed.
This thing has blown up, and for good reason. Not only did author Gillian Flynn create a complex yet captivating thriller, she seamlessly wove in a narrative that is all too relatable. Who better to take this literary golden egg and transition it to the silver screen than David Fincher, Hollywood’s directorial darling of quiet suspense? The pair seemed slated for success, and they did not disappoint.
Watching a good book’s metamorphosis to the cinematic stage can be a painful experience (the semi-recent Great Gatsby debacle comes to mind). Gone Girl, the story of a fairy-tale marriage that takes a turn for the much worse, was no such torture. Can we talk about the casting for a minute?
Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne, a Midwest man with a host of character flaws, was so fitting that I swear Flynn wrote the part with him in mind. Rosamund Pike, who some may recognize from the 2005 Pride & Prejudice reboot, owns her role as Amy Dunn; wife, missing person and mastermind extraordinaire. Both are characters that you can’t quite trust, but definitely don’t hate, and they are played perfectly.
The movie is a beacon in the foggy world of genre filmmaking, a precise depiction of its origin story, constructed with all the intensity and macabre beauty you’ve come to expect from David Fincher. The cinematography is dark, mesmerizing; a visual tour through the emotional rollercoaster of marital decomposition.
The book is told in a twofold first person format, shifting from Nick’s point of view in the present to Amy’s past journal entries. The movie was able to adopt this essential storytelling style, employing flashbacks dictated with Amy’s diary entries that strengthen her presence in the film.
Many have noted the obvious Hitchcockian influences, but Gone Girl goes one step further and stakes itself firmly in this generation, complete with select scenes of sexually explicit material and a less processed vocabulary. It’s perfectly timed and viscerally stimulating, though not in a way that rests on cheap tricks to peak your anxiety. The sparse score is a perfect compliment to the subtlety of its plot.
Perhaps my biggest critique of the Gone Girl film is that there wasn’t enough of it. The 149-minute run time sails by with incredible ease, and by the end of it I found myself thinking, “It’s over already?” Maybe it’s because I found the book filled with spot-on social observations that are so applicable to this time we live in, and it just wasn’t feasible for Fincher to delve into them completely.
Flynn created an undercurrent to this story, a commentary on the interactions between men and women and the unrealistic expectations that so often plague relationships. This idea that she artfully develops in the book didn’t quite get the same attention in the movie, an unfortunate necessity it seems. What we do see in the film is the recurring presence of the media and the impact it has on the investigation.
Again, this is expanded on more in the book, but the concept of how fickle yet intrusive the media can be is certainly translated to viewers. They go from hating Nick to loving him to hating him again, a series of seismic shifts that imitates the real-life tabloid culture in America.
Gone Girl is, at its core, a psychological thriller, but one with such a multitude of layers that it graduates to a higher playing field. It’s a fearless reflection of love and marriage, two such sought-after elements of the “American Dream”, presented without flinching and at times with an unexpected levity. It is technically pristine yet hauntingly genuine, a marvelous experience that will force you to question the nuance of human interaction.
