Gone Girl - Review Thread

Going to try to see it tomorrow.

I may be seeing this tomorrow night.

There are certain filmmakers who reach a point in their career where every film they make is an event to be excited for. One of the best examples of this is the great David Fincher. With his sophomore effort Se7en, Fincher established himself as a bold talent, and subsequent efforts like Fight Club, Zodiac, and The Social Network solidified him as one of the best directors in the business. While Fincher is versatile as a director, he seems most at home when working with thrillers, particularly ones with mystery and a narcissistic streak. This is why a thriller about a man who is suspected of murdering his beautiful wife seemed right up his alley. This brings us to Gone Girl.

Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) is a former writer and teacher living in Missouri with his beautiful wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike). On the day of their fifth anniversary, Nick comes home to find Amy missing and signs of a struggle. The police are called, and Detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) and Officer Jim Gilpin (Patrick Fugit) are brought in to investigate. As new evidence comes to light, Nick becomes the prime suspect and finds the only person he can turn to is his sister Margo (Carrie Coon).


The trailers of Gone Girl suggest a certain type of film; a man facing accusations of murdering his wife trying to prove his innocence while the audience is unsure of what truly did happen. This aspect of the film is executed very well. David Fincher creates a very dreadful atmosphere and the tension is palpable. The narrative is very absorbing and very quickly one finds themselves sympathizing with Nick for what he is going through. At the same time, there is a sense of uneasiness since the exact nature of Amy’s disappearance is still unknown. While the main plot is progressing, flashbacks show how Nick and Amy met and how their relationship progressed through the years. These segments are equally interesting, providing both insight and contrast to the main storyline. Most films would have likely just played this angle through before coming to a conclusion which would either reveal Amy’s fate or end on a more ambiguous note. This is not the case with Gone Girl. Instead, the film takes a pretty sharp twist which changes the entire narrative. It doesn’t just do this once either. There are several paradigm shifts which change the dynamics of the film greatly. Watching the film, I thought I had a pretty good idea where things were going, but after things started to twist and turn, quickly realized I was in uncharted waters. Simply put, I had no idea where the film was going and I never would have guessed it to end the way it does. This is indeed one of the film’s greatest strengths. It starts out gripping, but the plot gradually reveals itself to be truly fascinating and I applaud Gillian Flynn, who wrote both the screenplay and the novel it is based on. Kudos as well to David Fincher, who is able to blend the stories very well while maintaining a consistent tone and momentum.

Due to the film’s shifting narrative, I’m somewhat limited in what I can actually say about the story. One element I do feel comfortable discussing is the prevalent theme of media perception. Through much of the film, Nick is judged considerably by the news media. His every movement, action, and statement is picked apart by everyone. His own family advise him extensively on how he should and shouldn’t act. Why is he smiling here? Is he overdressed? Underdressed? Why is he greeting everyone like this is some sort of gathering or event? Every little thing he does is scrutinized, to the point where assumptions about his character are made based on very little. This is most emphasized by a Nancy Grace-esque news program following the disappearance. While the primary focus of the satire is media perception, these also feed into the film’s larger musings on the nature of the truth, marriage, and in appearances vs. reality. This starts to veer into spoiler territory so I won’t go any further, suffice it to say this element is equally interesting.

Fincher has always had a gift for casting the right people in the right roles. Ben Affleck is used very well in the role of Nick Dunne. He makes for a sympathetic lead, but there is some enigma to him, and his smugness and good looks make it easy to see why people dislike him. Given that Affleck himself has had to deal with the media go back and forth with how they portray him, I’m sure he connected with the material. I do want to point out though the character’s success is not just a work of smart stunt casting. Affleck really does immerse himself in the role and this is probably the best performance he’s ever given. Good as he is though, Rosamund Pike is even better as Nick’s wife Amy. There are many, many shades to this woman who can be very complicated and Pike really nails it. I’ve seen Pike in a handful of movies, but I never would have imagined she had this kind of a performance in her. I wouldn’t be surprised if she scores an Oscar nomination for her work here. The rest of the supporting cast is very strong as well. Actors like Tyler Perry and Neil Patrick Harris seem a bit odd on paper, but both prove very effective in their roles. Other memorable turns come from Carrie Coon as Nick’s sister and Kim Dickens is the determined detective searching for the truth. On the whole, it’s a very strong cast which work off each other very well.

In addition to his casts, Fincher is known for his technical polish and perfectionism. As one can imagine, these traits are true of Gone Girl as well. Jeff Cronenweth’s cinematography is extremely professional. The film has a very drab colour pallet which is in keeping with Fincher’s visual aesthetic as of late. The visuals are also interesting in that they are at points very realistic, while others more dream-like. Throughout it all though is a certain sterile cleanliness, which really heightens the chilling precision of the film. Fincher also stages the action of his films as well. This goes for the bigger set-piece moments, but is also true of the smaller details. Bottomline, Fincher knows how to keep his films visually interesting. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross provide the score and while it lacks the surprise of their work on The Social Network, it is none the less an excellent score which can be beautiful in points, but extraordinarily tense and haunting in others. The music is very unique but never to the point of distraction.

Much of the reviews for Gone Girl have a sense of, “Well, Fincher’s done it again.” It’s easy to see why so many have reached that conclusion. Not only is this up to Fincher’s high standards, this is a film that feels right in Fincher’s wheelhouse, in its story, tone, execution, and themes. However that should not dismiss the accomplishment that is Gone Girl. This is an expertly crafted film with an unpredictable narrative and themes which run deep. It’s the kind of work that insidiously sticks with you and demands to be seen again. Movies have been in something of a dry spell since August, but Gone Girl is a tremendous shot of life into the medium. It’s, by far, the best thing playing in theaters now and to not see it would be to do yourself a great disservice. What more can you say; Fincher’s done it again.

A+

Am I wrong, or can we view the voters but not what they voted for?

I'm supposed to go see this tomorrow. My brother liked it, and he hates most things. That's about all I need to convince me to see it.

Sweet Jesus. I just got home from seeing this. I need time to process what I just saw

Gone Girl(10/4/2014)



Warning: I’ve tried to keep this relatively spoiler-free, but it’s pretty much impossible to talk about this movie without at least hinting at some of its revelations, so read at your own risk



One of the keys to understanding the career of David Fincher is to realize that, unlike many directors of his caliber working today, he’s not a writer. While other auteurs like Paul Thomas Anderson and Christopher Nolan have relative control over what their next projects will be, Fincher is sort of at the mercy of which scripts are floating around Hollywood at any given time and given that his style and sensibility is only going to lend itself to certain projects, that leaves him with a limited set of options. Sometimes that means he takes on questionable Oscar-bait like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, sometimes it means taking on a highly commercial thriller like Panic Room or The Game, and recently it’s meant taking on adaptations of popular “beach reads” like his last film The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. His new film is also based on a best-selling ultra-modern thriller that deals with gender issues: Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl.”


The mystery begins when a Missouri bar owner and former writer named Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) returns home to find his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike) missing and his coffee table overturned as if to suggest a break-in. He calls 911 and a detective named Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) arrives who begins a search and investigation that quickly becomes a nationwide media story. Theories of the crime start to fly around and Nick quickly becomes the prime suspect both for the media and the police and pretty much the only person who seems to entirely believe in him is his twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon). Meanwhile, the film uses entries in Amy’s diary to give us a series of flashbacks telling us the story of what Nick and Amy’s marriage has been like up to this point.


Gone Girl is, if nothing else, an effective mystery. The case of the hidden wife is intriguing in part because we aren’t strictly following if from the perspective of the detective but also from the perspective of the husband… who happens to be the prime suspect in the crime and who could well be the guilty party. The audience is never quite sure whether they’re watching an innocent man trying to clear his name or a cold blooded killer trying to cover up his crimes. The film also expertly places a red herring into the mix pretty quickly which does a good job of distracting the viewer from the correct solution. Now, the eventual revelation of what’s going on is a little… well, it takes a certain suspension of disbelief. I suppose stranger things have happened in real life but when they do and they end up being profiled on 20/20 you end up saying “If I didn’t know that was true I’d never believe it.” To enjoy Gone Girl you just sort have to accept that this is just one of those stories and go with it.


If I have any major complaint about Gone Girl it’s that the screenplay, which was written by Gillian Flynn herself, is never quite able to fit itself into the template of a film. It’s got some false-ending issues and never quite knows how to wrap itself up, and its use of flashbacks never quite seems to work perfectly. It’s strange that Fincher, who seems like such a control freak and perfectionist in every other aspect of his style, has allowed two straight movies to get a little bit out of control on a structural level. Then again, maybe that’s nitpicking and I should just view it as some kind of miracle that they managed to adapt this book as well as they did for as long as they did.


Those who’ve been following Fincher’s last couple of films probably know what to expect from Gone Girl on a stylistic level. Once again we get crisp digital cinematography, good depth of field trickery, invisible special effects, and smart framing. It works here once again but I am beginning to get the feeling that Fincher maybe needs to shake things up a bit and move beyond this post-Zodiac stage of his career. It’s maybe time for him to stop working with Trent Reznor as a composer, or maybe find some new technical trick, or find some new way to surprise us because I do feel like he’s getting a bit complacent. But, again, for the time being Fincher’s “business as usual” approach does work for the film and it doesn’t hurt that he managed to round up a pretty good cast. Ben Affleck does pretty much what you expect of him, he’s a pretty consistent movie star and whenever he finds a role that’s right for him (and this one is) he usually does what he needs to. Rosamund Pike is also really good, although I do think the voice she chooses for the character is maybe a little snottier than it needs to be. Beyond that the film rounds up some lesser known actors like Carrie Coon and Kim Dickens to great effect, and even Tyler Perry adds something to the film playing a character who acts as something of an audience surrogate and points out how crazy the story is and can’t help but giggle at it all.


Alright, so far what I’ve been describing is a well-made potboiler but Flynn’s story does have greater social and thematic ambitions than that. The film’s story (at least up until about the half-way point) strongly resembles the Scott Peterson case both in the details of the crime and in the fact that it was a media circus that surrounded what was ultimately not a criminal case that was really all that newsworthy beyond some of its gossipy elements. Similarly, the media plays a very big role in Gone Girl. Affleck’s character spends much of the film being tried in the court of public opinion and finds his every last movement and statement being picked apart as speculation begins to run wild. Missi Pyle is in the film playing a cable TV host who is almost certainly based on Nancy Grace in a handful of scenes that manage to be bitingly satirical without feeling like broad and out-of-place jokes. Like Grace, this “journalist” uses baseless intuition rather than evidence to declare people guilty and then send mobs after them. The film in many ways argues that, unlike what we see on shows like CSI, much of the legal system has less to do with forensic evidence than it does with perception and narrative.


Of course perception and narrative also play a big role in the film’s flashbacks as well which present a pretty bleak view of Nick and Amy’s marriage and perhaps of marriage as an institution. At its heart this marriage appears to have been a classic case of couple of people who put on their best faces during their courtship and then found themselves playing a game of chicken once the honeymoon was over to see who would reveal their true personality first. Nick had presented himself as a gregarious and loyal simpleton while Amy had presented herself as a chilled out “cool girl” when in fact the truth was a lot more complicated. Nick was in fact a rather controlling individual who subtly insisted on everything going his way while Amy was a demanding and elitist snob who (despite insisting to the contrary) could not stand to present anything short of storybook perfection to the world. It is in many ways the same story you see out of a lot of marriages… but with the consequences turned up to eleven. The film paints a world in which posturing and deceit make up most of our social interactions and it was only when this became too much to bear that someone finally did something extreme to break out of that cycle. The film doesn’t provide any easy answers about marriage and gender relations and isn’t interested in fitting snugly within any political narrative or telling anyone exactly what they want to hear and there’s definitely some food for thought to be mined from it.


So, what is Gone Girl? Is it a statement about the human mind’s rush to judgment? Is it an expose about the weaknesses in the American marriage? Is it a daring and modern salvo in the battle of the sexes? Or is it maybe just a schlocky mystery that’s maybe been given a little more legitimacy than it deserves? Honestly, this is one that I’m probably going to have to think about a little more. It’s definitely a very well made and entertaining movie, one that’s clearly better than most of the stuff in theaters and that everyone should see if only to be part of the discussion, but there are definitely some problems and imperfections. That being said, I had similar reservations about Fincher’s adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when I first saw it and most of those complaints seemed a lot more trivial to me when I revisited it. I suspect that repeat viewings of this one will leave me similarly more confident of the film’s greatness or lack thereof, until then it’s going to have to settle for merely being a “very solid” in my estimation rather than “amazing.”

***1/2 out of Four

Just for shits, anyone want to post their rankings of his films? Keep in mind even though I give him a lot of 8's they're all very high 8's and I'm a huge fan of his work.

The Social Network- 9/10
Fight Club- 8/10
Gone Girl- 8/10
Seven- 8/10
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo- 8/10
Zodiac- 8/10
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button- 7/10
The Game- 7/10
Panic Room- 6/10
Alien 3- 5/10

My full review:

Back in 1960, director Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller Psycho was released amidst a veil of secrecy where its plot was concerned, and now fifty-four years later, David Fincher’s Gone Girl arrives under similar circumstances. To get straight to the point, the film itself is yet another home run for one of the best directors in the business today, filled to the brim with the signature slick style and storytelling we’ve come to expect of the auteur, but talking about it in any kind of too specific detail paints myself, and many other reviewers into a corner. Not unlike Psycho, the desire to not spoil any of the surprises in the story is definitely an issue — especially for those who haven’t read the 2012 source novel — and I’ll keep to that desire and try to keep this review as spoiler-free as possible while still urging you to go see the film; something which must absolutely be done.

Author Gillian Flynn adapts her own work, which is the story of Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy (Rosamund Pike) Dunne. Nick and Amy have been married for a few short years, and as the film opens, it’s their fifth anniversary. However, Nick isn’t in the most pleasant mood about it. His melancholic feelings soon turn to ones of confusion, though, when he returns home to find an unsettling scene: an overturned ottoman, a shattered glass table and traces of blood on the floor. Detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) and Officer Jim Gilpin (Patrick Fugit) soon determine it to be a missing persons case, which forces Nick into the limelight as the investigation slowly starts up. Aided all the while by his sister Margo (Carrie Coon), Nick soon finds himself having to battle an increasingly negative public perception of himself as the case takes more than a few unexpected turns, despite his repeated assertions of innocence.

Just a few weeks before the release of this movie, I took the liberty of reading Gillian Flynn’s novel, mainly because I just couldn’t help myself. Now, even though a lot of the dark delight of this plot comes from not really knowing where it’s going next, my knowing the trajectory of the story ultimately didn’t impede my enjoyment of the film at all. In fact, I’d say it enhanced it because I could go ahead and pick up on a lot of the small nuances and clues sprinkled throughout that one would normally pick up on during a second, third or fourth viewing. More importantly, though, I could spend more time focusing on the story aspect that Fincher and Flynn clearly recognize as the overarching theme: marriage. Gone Girl isn’t simply an impeccably-executed mystery; the mystery is instead a vehicle being used to explore the implications and ideas at the heart of the story, and they’re the sort of implications that will not only make you think as you walk away from the movie, but also leave you unsettled. What are those implications, exactly? Well, I can’t get into that without ruining some of the fun, and Gone Girl is definitely a movie one should experience as freshly as they can. From the tone, the performances and especially the score, David Fincher (not for the first time) has delivered a film designed to get under your skin, something which it succeeds in doing.

Ben Affleck has been experiencing a renaissance career-wise as of late, whether it be as a director or as an actor, and he keeps that streak going with his performance here. What’s so interesting about Nick Dunne is the nature of his character. He’s the one we’re meant to be pulling for as the story progresses, but at the same time, certain things come to light about him that don’t exactly paint him in the most flattering way, and yet Affleck is able to keep a sense of sympathy alive in Nick, even in the face of such gray morals. The character has a very intriguing arc over the course of the film, and Affleck sells it every step of the way. Firing on all cylinders right alongside Affleck is Rosamund Pike, whose work in other films up until now I’ve generally found to be solid, but here she just goes to a whole ‘nother level. It’s hard — very hard — to go into any more detail about how great her performance is without getting into spoiler territory, but suffice it to say that I found Pike’s acting in this film to be Oscar-worthy; she has many scenes where she gets to shine. Fincher rounds out the rest of the cast with a pretty eclectic mix. You’ve got Kim Dickens and Patrick Fugit as the two main cops, each bringing their own sense of determination, Carrie Coon as Margo offering up a welcome dose of black humor to the proceedings, Tyler Perry as defense attorney Tanner Bolt, nicely capturing that smarmy charm inherent in a character like this, and Neil Patrick Harris as Desi Collings, a mysterious and slightly off-putting ex of Amy’s. Before seeing the movie or reading the book, I found Harris to be a curious choice for such a role, but I was pleasantly surprised, as he’s able to take the greasy, womanizing characteristics of Barney on How I Met Your Mother and put a slightly darker spin on it — to great effect. If there’s one thing to take away from the acting as a whole in Gone Girl, it’s that David Fincher never miscasts his films.

Gillian Flynn puts the same sense of uneasiness that permeates the novel into the film as well, and David Fincher enhances it through his reliably fantastic direction. Gone Girl is yet another long movie for him, but Fincher’s tight sense of pacing ensures that the length is never felt at any moment. His pale color palette also suits the tone of the story well, and as always, Fincher manages to find quite a few opportunities to get some great shots and integrate another awesome score from Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross. As if the story itself already weren’t interesting enough, David Fincher finds ways to make it even more so, and even though this isn’t his first mystery movie, there’s still such a liveliness in his direction. God, do I love this guy.

Do yourself a favor and see Gone Girl as soon as possible, because it joins the list of movies like Psycho, The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense where you need to be ahead of the “twist talk”, or otherwise risk being spoiled. And now we wait for David Fincher’s next movie.

****/****

I feel like there have been ending problems with most of Fincher's recent movies. I think Zodiac loses a lot of steam when it gets too deep into Graysmith's conspiracy theory, The Social Network has a good final scene but it still kind of awkwardly cuts itself off midway through its protagonist's life, and TGWTDT spends a half hour at the end to set up a sequel that's probably never going to be made. Here I still sort of thing they don't quite know where to end things once

Alright, before I get full into the review let me just get this out of the way.  Two of my favourite, non-mainstream board games, Dominion and Race of the Galaxy, had product placement in this movie.  And yes, as a board game fan I was extremely excited to see them in a major studio film.  This hobby's coming back baby!

Okay, as for Gone Girl... wow,  quite the murder mystery I must say.  It was full of the best of all other film mysteries: an intriguing puzzle, a genuine tone of suspense, and some real twists and turns.  Its pretty magnificent storytelling which had me engaged the whole time.  Fincher and crew really manage to take what is normally an enjoyable yet ultimately mediocre genre category and elevates it way higher than it has any right being.

Ben Affleck does a great job constructing the character of Nick who is constantly pulling at different perceptions and personas.  He is surrounded by a great performing cast, especially Carrie Coon (who I don't know from her previous work) as his twin sister.  The weakness in the cast, and in the movie itself, is Rosamund Pike.  During the flashbacks she has a very odd way of speaking and it just never feels like her performance is genuine or existing within the same world as the film at all.  I felt this about her in Jack Reacher and was disappointed to see that it wasn't corrected much here.  The performance has a bit of a sense of trying to hard.


Excellent movie. 9/10