The long-awaited film adaptation of author Gillian Flynn’s best-selling mystery thriller Gone Girl could very well serve in the years to come as a model of sorts for how an author should approach adapting their own material for the screen. Flynn’s screenplay, as brought to life on screen by director David Fincher and a strong cast led by Rosamund Pike in what should be a star-making turn, captures all the most critical elements that made the novel so captivating and maddeningly frustrating at the same time. Fans of the novel will be pleased, and folks who haven’t read the novel may just want to after seeing the film, just to see for themselves how it all played out on the page.
For those who don’t already know the story in broad strokes, it begins with former New York writer Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) spending the early morning hours of his 5th wedding anniversary at the bar he owns drinking bourbon with his twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon) and dreading how the rest of the day will most certainly go once he goes home. A cleverly composed and constructed scavenger hunt meant to celebrate how well husband and wife know and love one another. Clues he’ll fail to figure out, prompting the irritation or outright anger of his wife, Amy (Pike). More reminders of what an boorish, oblivious failure of a husband he must surely be for not being able to keep up with her after all this time. It wasn’t always this way — he thought Amy was his soul mate once, not long ago — but it’s how it went last year, and the year before that, and Nick no longer has hope that things can be different with Amy again.
But when he eventually goes home to get things over with, Amy’s gone, and there are signs of a struggle in their living room. He calls the police, and soon he has local police detectives Boney (Kim Dickens) and Gilpin (Patrick Fugit) asking questions both welcome and unwelcome as they comb through his and Amy’s home and lives together in search of clues to what happened to her. What was their marriage like? Why can’t Nick answer questions like who Amy’s closest friends were, or what her blood type is? Nick’s evasive answers and non-answers just seem to prompt more and more questions.
As the search for answers moves forward, the story of Amy Elliot-Dunne’s disappearance becomes a national preoccupation that dominates America’s 24-hour news cycle, and evidence pointing to Nick being guilty of something relating to the case begins to mount. Years worth of secrets, betrayals, and emotional manipulation are laid bare, and Nick finds himself and the life he’s lived being scrutinized and judged not just by the police, but also by an image-obsessed America that’s all too willing to be steered in its verdict on him by media pundits and TV rabble-rousers hungry for ratings. With the paparazzi and TV camera trucks camped outside his door, the detectives eyeing him with more and more suspicion, the public turning on him and even those closest to him beginning to question his version of what’s occurred, Nick feels the walls closing in, and his behavior both in front of the cameras and away from them just makes him look worse. But is he really a killer, or just a bad husband and a schlub? And just who was Amy Dunne, really, before she vanished that morning? The truth is, of course, nothing that should be disclosed in any amount of detail here.
Without a doubt, a tremendous amount of credit is due to Gillian Flynn for effectively adapting her own novel into screenplay form. With its multiple viewpoints and perspectives, its sly and unflinching observations on modern courtship, relationships, and marriage, and its scathing indictment of America’s obsession with image and the media complicity in enabling that obsession, Gone Girl the novel has a lot within its pages that needs to find its way to the screen in order for the film to feel true to the written work. Flynn’s screenplay not only succeeds in retaining a majority of these signature elements, but keeps them all in balance — the implications and the message in the satire are clear as day without beating audiences over the head or intruding on the mystery that audiences are there to see and enjoy. It’s a remarkable achievement, one that should earn Flynn at least some consideration for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar next year.
Similarly, a lot of credit must go to director David Fincher and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, who previously collaborated on some of Fincher’s most memorable films, including Fight Club, The Social Network, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In those films a signature visual aesthetic was established, and fans of those films will certainly see that aesthetic at work in this film as well in a setting the filmmakers have never before applied it to: American Midwestern suburbia. Manicured lawns, well-appointed houses, neighborhoods where fellow moms chat and trade gossip while they walk strollers down the street with their older kids in tow, the very vision of the American dream in America’s heartland are all cast in Fincher and Cronenweth’s creeping shadows, darkened interior spaces and pale, yellowish light. He creates discomfort in the spaces audiences might most readily associate with comfort, affluence, and happiness — the intimate spaces in the film all feel wrong, which is the perfect complimentary effect to the scenes playing out in them.
But it’s this film’s pitch perfect cast and their chemistry together that should make both audiences and critics sit up in their seats and take notice, that make this film as engrossing as it is. Rosamund Pike, who first made a splash more than a decade ago as a Bond girl in 2002’s Die Another Day and has since done memorable turns in everything from Pride and Prejudice to Doom to Jack Reacher, is at all times compelling and convincing as the brilliant and complex Amy Elliot-Dunne. It’s a nuanced and controlled performance that should have the same effect on her career that Basic Instinct had on Sharon Stone’s career over two decades ago. Similarly, Tony Award-winning actress Carrie Coon, making her feature film debut here, should get lots of love from critics for her turn as Margo, the sister whose fierce loyalty to her twin Nick forces her onto an emotional roller coaster as Nick’s innocence and later even her own in the disappearance comes into question.
For his part, Affleck is a great choice to play Nick, mainly because the role calls for a performer who can play both charming and deeply flawed, and he’s had lots of practice playing guys like that going all the way back to 1997’s Chasing Amy. He portrays Nick with just enough edge, just enough capacity for dishonesty, that even if you didn’t have blink-and-you’ll-miss-them visual cues that he’s not telling the whole truth, as an audience member you’d most likely be wondering about his shadiness, anyway. Also, Tyler Perry brings great energy and charisma to the role of Tanner Bolt, the high-profile attorney and master of PR spin that Nick is forced to reach out to once things start getting ugly in the media and his need for legal representation becomes clear.
Now for those wondering if there’s any need to see the film at all if you’ve read the book and you know its secrets and twists, rest assured that you should. Flynn has made just enough changes in the screenplay to keep fans of the novel on their toes and have them talking about the differences between the page and the screen. But no doubt it will be those who don’t know the whole story going into Gone Girl that will enjoy it the most. It’s so compelling that you’ll wish it was a book — that way, you could skip to the end to see how it all plays out.
Score: 4.5 out of 5
Gone Girl
Starring Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry. Directed by David Fincher.
Running Time: 149 minutes
Rated R for a scene of bloody violence, some strong sexual content/nudity, and language.
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