Gone Girl
Oh, what a relief after the dross of the summer blockbusters to come across a movie that invites you to take your mind to the cinema. I’ve not read Gillian Flynn’s novel but I have nothing but admiration for her screenplay of it or for David Fincher’s direction. This is a deviously intricate tale that insists you pay attention and rewards you for doing so. On his fifth wedding anniversary Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) returns home to find that his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) is missing. No note, nothing; she has just gone and remains gone while the police, led by Detective Kim Dickens, investigate and suspect that Affleck has murdered her. What hardens this suspicion is Pike’s diary in which she claims to be terrorised by her husband and fears that he might kill her.
But soon a very different picture emerges [warning: spoiler alert] as it becomes clear that Amy – a brilliant university student and somewhat famous as the inspiration for her mother’s bestselling children’s books about Amazing Amy – has faked her own death/disappearance in the hope that her husband might be executed for murdering her.
And so we learn that what had apparently begun as an idyllic marriage had fallen apart because both participants had pretended to be something other than they really were. Amy had impressed Nick by seeming to be the idealised Amy of the books; he had impressed her with intellectual pretensions.
As Amy hides under an assumed name and Nick’s arrest becomes ever more likely, the film has interesting things to say about the present-day media culture. Nick, a journalist and part-time teacher, is openly accused of murder, without benefit of trial, by a bitchy female TV presenter because he doesn’t show enough grief. For her no grief equals guilt. But why would he grieve? We know that on the day Amy disappeared he was going to seek a divorce because he was having an affair with a student. Nevertheless he takes lessons in faking sincere grief from a lawyer, Tyler Perry, ‘the patron saint of wife killers’.
Meanwhile, the apparently innocent and victimised Amy turns out to be a liar and a psychopath’s psychopath. This becomes evident when, robbed of her money by neighbours almost as ruthless as she is, she turns for help to a wealthy admirer, Neil Patrick Harris, whom she had earlier and wrongly accused of stalking her. Indeed, the world is not at all short of men she has wrongly accused.
What happens with Harris and later is for you to discover. This is a long movie but the complexity of the story justifies its length and an ending that might not be at all what you expected. So, yes, an intelligent, serious film beautifully played throughout, especially by Pike, who switches impeccably from victim to villainess and back. Affleck, though presented with a more straightforward part, is also extremely good. Like Matthew McConaughey he started out as at best a pretty average actor and has now developed into an excellent one.