Gone Girl

Every once in a while, Hollywood gets it exactly right.  Gone Girl is that rare cinematic miracle where everything has come together to create as perfect an adaptation of Gillian Flynn's runaway bestselling novel that one could hope for.  The casting, the direction, the screenplay, even the music score - not a single element is out of place.  This is a sensational film, easily one of the year's very best.

The many people who have embraced Flynn's book for its sinister and unraveling mystery story will be glad to know that director David Fincher is more than up to the task of bringing it to the big screen.  He chillingly recreates the story, centered on a love gone very, very bad.  And when the secrets behind the mystery start to be revealed, Fincher does not shy away - He shows us every detail and every side of the lurid characters who populate the story.  He brings a smart and sinister sense to the film.  It is cold, unflinching, and at times darkly humorous in the best possible way.  It is everything that a film adaptation of the book should be.  Pretty much everything essential to the story's success has found its way here.  A few minor characters and details have been cut out, but that's only so the film can focus solely on the twisted and captivating central plot.

In casting the two leads, the filmmakers could not have found a better pairing than Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike.  Their portrayals of Nick Dunne and Amy Elliot Dunne not only help to flesh out the characters from the page, but are nearly flawless in their portrayals.  Pike, in particular, is perfect as the beautiful yet manipulative Amy.  She can have a certain warmness to her performance, but as her character is slowly revealed, she brings so much intensity and cold concentration that it is almost terrifying.  Her Amy is a woman who has always been under the control of her opportunistic parents, who (as Nick observes at one point) plagiarized her childhood into a series of popular children's books.  Whenever Amy failed at something in real life, her literary namesake would succeed with flying colors.  She is a woman who is used to the finer things in life, and when things don't quite go right, her ability to destroy those she feels have wronged her is downright terrifying.

If Pike is passionate and intense, then Affleck is the polar opposite, though still extraordinary.  Nick Dunne is a somewhat withdrawn, indifferent man.  His marriage with Amy has become "normal", so he naturally starts looking elsewhere for pleasure.  Even though Nick is the central character of the story, he is not supposed to be likable, and Affleck excels here.  He makes Nick into a closed off, insensitive, and self-serving personality.  Even as the story unravels and we start to learn the truth, we are not supposed to fully sympathize with him, and Affleck's performance is wise not to let us.  I admire the way that the film recreates the novel's structure, and allows us to view the story through both characters' point of view.  Through diary entries, flashbacks, and personal recollections, we get to observe this complex couple, and the events that led up to where they are as the film opens.

Gone Girl opens with Amy's disappearance from the home she shares with her husband.  They were not exactly a happy couple.  We witness in flashbacks how they lost their well-to-do lifestyle in New York after they were both laid off from their jobs, and how they had to move back to Nick's hometown in Missouri.  We see Nick's interaction with the police that are called when he reports his wife missing, and something seems off.  Before long, Nick's life becomes a media circus, with prime time pundits glorifying the missing person case, as well as over-sensationalizing it.  The way that the movie parodies actual TV personalities who cover these kind of cases is both hilarious and vicious at the same time.  The entire country and popular opinion is pretty much ready to see Nick as being guilty immediately, but the lead detective on the case, Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) is smart enough not to jump to the easiest conclusion.  Nick is also aided by his twin sister, Margo (Carrie Coon), and a hotshot lawyer who specializes in these kind of cases (Tyler Perry).

Of the very talented cast, Tyler Perry is the real find here.  He has long been looking for an opportunity to break free of the kind of films he's known for making, and finds the perfect opportunity with this role.  He is excellent - fast, smart, and often very funny.  Everyone up on the screen is perfect for telling this story of love gone wrong.  With the characters coming across as both scheming and sympathetic, controlling and kind, everyone hits the right note for each side of the character.  The people who inhabit the story are complex, and so are the performances.  As the story unfolds, we're forced to ask a lot of questions about these people.  Did Nick kill his wife?  Is there more to the story than what's being told?  Whose side do we believe?  The intensity that these questions raise are marked by the subtle yet suspenseful music score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which manages to keep us on edge as much as the film itself does.

But all of this would mean nothing without the pitch-perfect screenplay by the original author.  She has not only brought her own story to the screen with few sacrifices, but she has actually improved upon it in some ways by strengthening certain details of the narrative.  She has a keen sense of knowing what would work on the screen, and what to leave behind in her book, and really has given us the best possible adaptation we could have hoped for.  Combine this with Fincher's expert direction, which brings to mind a lot of his past work like The Social Network, Seven and Zodiac, and you have a movie that has been finely tuned in just about every area.  Nothing has been left to chance here, and I can't imagine any fan of the novel being disappointed.

Even if you are already familiar with the story, Gone Girl is all but guaranteed to leave you captivated for its entire running time.  I really am just amazed at how everything came together so well.  There's always a risk when a studio grabs the rights to a hugely successful book.  There's the risk that the wrong actors will be cast, or the director isn't right for the material, or the filmmakers will try to change too much of what made the book successful in the first place.  This is not the case here.  Gone Girl is just as haunting and unforgettable as the novel, if not more so.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

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