Gone Girl Review

Gone Girl Review

As always the good people over at Ster-Kinekor always hook us up to make sure we bring you these movie reviews and today’s review is the David Fincher directed Gone Girl, which stars Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike.
What may surprise some fans of Fincher’s work is just how straightforward the film is, narratively. Like “Girl With The Dragon Tattoo,” this feels like Fincher making what he sees as a completely mainstream down-the-middle movie. It’s not, of course, because I don’t think he’s capable of really doing that, but Flynn’s novel is a potboiler, a thriller. Just because Fincher’s ladled all the craft in the world on top of it, that doesn’t change the basic nature of what the story is.

Casting Affleck as Nick is a master stroke, and Affleck gives one of his smartest, most nuanced performances in the role. Nick is basically an amiable dummy, a guy who was drifting through his marriage just as he’d drifted through life, and at first, he thought he’d hit the jackpot with Amy. Watching Nick get fed into the meat grinder that is the daily television news cycle, Affleck does a great job of showing how Nick curdles, that charming grin of his masking a growing horror at the thought of what fate might await him if people decide he actually killed his wife.

Rosamund Pike is flat-out great as Amy, and she has the harder of the two roles, it seems to me. Amy is an enigma, and even when we’re allowed access to her inner life, we have to question it. How deep does Amy’s damage really run? She is a terrifying creation, and if this were a book by a male writer, I’d question his motivations because of just how much she embodies every worst fear that men have as they consider a lifelong commitment. Amy isn’t meant to be a universal blank, though, a placeholder for all woman, any more than the shark in “Jaws” is meant to represent every single shark. Amy is a singular monster, and Pike plays her without any attempts at softening her. There is an image near the end of the film that would be beautiful under normal circumstances, but that is horrifying in context, and Fincher uses Pike’s stunning beauty to reveal just how rancid she is, rather than conceal it.

The film is dense with great performances. Carrie Coon plays Nick’s protective twin sister Go, and she takes what could easily have been the wise-cracking supporting part and turns it into something richer. The depth of feeling she has for Nick is evident, and when things start to go badly for him, she’s a ferocious sidekick for him. Kim Dickens and Patrick Fugit have a lovely low-key chemistry as the lead detective on the case and the primary officer serving under her. Fugit’s got a great face for silent reactions, something Cameron Crowe leaned on heavily in “Almost Famous,” and something that Fincher utilizes expertly here as well. Casey Wilson is perfect as Noelle Hawthorne, making her slightly ridiculous without tipping it over into flat out comedy, and Missi Pyle walks that same line as Ellen Abbott, an obvious riff on Nancy Grace. Neil Patrick Harris makes a strong impression with a very small amount of screen time, and you can almost see this as the sociopathic endgame of the character he played on “How I Met Your Mother,” the worst instincts and behaviors all cranked up as loud as they’ll go.Watch the trailer below and visit www.ster-kinekor.com and book your tickets.