Gone Girl (2014)

Content by Tony Macklin. Originally published on September 30, 2014 @ tonymacklin.net.

Something is amiss in Gone Girl.

And it's not just the title character.

Based on Gillian Flynn's tremendously successful, best-selling novel, the transfer to film offered challenges.

In 2014, Gone Girl has to try to be a blockbuster. [See Kenneth Turan's great piece in the LA Times Sunday Calendar section September 21, on the decline of the industry.]

Not much room for nuance or even intelligence in today's films. It's not the 1970s. Depth and subtlety are liabilities.

Casting Ben Affleck in Gone Girl is an easy solution. He's a successful movie star. Talented but limited. His image serves his character, but it also restricts him.

Affleck plays the role of Nick Dunne, whose wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) disappears on their fifth anniversary.

Rosamund Pike is an actress who is not well-known. How many of the mainstream audience saw Jack Reacher (2012) or The World's End (2013)? She is pretty much a blank slate, that anything could be written on.

Both Affleck and Pike are capable. They aren't superficial, but neither are they evocative. Affleck and Pike are like hermetically-sealed actors, unable to break out.

I kept thinking of William Hurt and Kathleen Turner in Body Heat (1981). They broke through their characters and created a palpable, unforgettable chemistry. There is nothing about Affleck or Pike that is unforgettable.

Some viewers will say Pike outdoes Affleck, and others will say Pike dominates as an actress. Basically, they're on the same level.

In Gone Girl, after Amy goes missing, eventually Nick becomes the main suspect and the target of public scorn, furiously promoted to a frenzy by the media. He tries to prove his innocence - is he innocent? - against mounting evidence and cruel, relentless forces.

David Fincher is a director whose movies always draw great anticipation, since the powerful Se7en (1995). Fincher learned a lesson from the industry when the studio released Se7en with a tacked-on ending. Commerciality rules. Box office puts creativity into a box.

At times the anticipation is not fully rewarded, e.g., The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), which was a strange choice for him. As was the American version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), which had been made into a superior Swedish film (2009), directed by Niels Arden Oplev.

Zodiac (2007) may be Fincher's finest film - subtle, evocative, and quietly relentless. His low boil really works in that film.

Some of Fincher's staples are evident in Gone Girl. His symbolic use of color. At times, blue dominates - a sofa, a shirt, walls. The camera angles. And the music and sound.

But Gone Girl lacks the somber edge that sharpened Zodiac. When you cast Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, you aren't going to get much edge.

Surprisingly the satire in Gone Girl is conventional, not fresh. Nancy Grace has become a cliche, but her type doesn't have to be portrayed as a schlocky cliche. Been there, done that.

The portrait of a Nancy Grace-type figure works better in the book. As does the fatuous, gullible, mean-spirited populace.

The movie Gone Girl is cloaked in a dubious sugar storm. [Yes, the book has a sugar storm.] Or is it a snow job?

Fincher loves games - in fact, one of his movies is a clever, mysterious romp titled The Game (1997).

Obviously Flynn's novel, that used the concept of games throughout, appealed to him. But how to adapt it? Get Flynn to write the screenplay.

Unfortunately, it's the Gillian Flynn, who had a lengthy job writing for Entertainment Weekly, who showed up. As a former scribbler for EW, Flynn knows how to be slick and how to simplify. Depth in the book becomes gaps in the film. It's not the novelist.

Gillian Flynn, the novelist, is wise, clever, inventive, and creative. Her book is steeped in intelligence. Both Amy and Nick have an abundance of knowledge. They read. Nick has read the Lake poets, Mark Twain, and War and Peace.

Even minor characters read. One calls Ray Bradbury by the name of Ray Bradburrow. Bury becomes burrow. [What a clever girl Ms. Flynn is.]

Perhaps what is most telling is that Fincher had Flynn drop the allusions to movies. Hey, if they're not my movie, get rid of them. You'd think Fincher would love paying homage to movies.

Gillian Flynn wrote about movies and tv for EW. Her father taught film. It's obvious from her novel that Flynn loves movies.

The novel is replete with allusions to movies. In the book, she uses the word "movie" more than 20 times. The characters make allusions to Benjamin Braddock, James Bond, two Godfather films, Hitchcock, Daniel Day-Lewis, Annie Hall, Psycho, and the two Hepburns - Audrey and Katherine (a delicious duality).

Dualities in the book are rampant - beginning with the fact that Nick is a twin. The piquant dualities obviously appealed to Fincher, because he keeps many of them. They're catnip to a filmmaker.

There are lots of allusions to cats in the book, but not in the film.

But it's not surprising that the movie Gone Girl is dumbed down. The intelligence and knowledge that are in the book are absent in the film. The wit is gone.

Of course, a film should be judged on cinematic terms - a novel on literary terms. They're not the same. Each form has its strengths - and limitations.

The novel Gone Girl is brilliant; the film is sporadically effective. The book is special. It's disturbing and relentless.

I didn't read the book until after I saw the movie, and I was surprised how much better the book is. There's a boldness and power that doesn't exist in the movie. There's an unblinking view of human nature.

Some changes are fine and make sense - the dropping of the mother of Desi Collings (Neil Patrick Harris) and Tanner's wife.

In the book, Detective Rhonda Boney is "ugly." Obviously that has to go. In the movie, Detective Boney (Kim Dickens, who was wonderful in HBO's Treme) is fetching. She's one of the few actors in Gone Girl who bring humanity to their roles. Tyler Perry, as the amiably competent defense attorney, is another.

Detective Gilpin, who in the book was an older man with white in the whiskers of his mustache, who was genial and at times sympathetic to Nick is turned into a nondescript frowner (Almost Famous' Patrick Fugit). He is against Nick from the beginning without motivation. He's a stick figure who now is instant antipathy. Guess Flynn forgot what she wrote in the book.

The game Mastermind is one of the few nice additions. That the storybook now plays the cello instead of the violin is a sly change. But the changes for the better are rare.

Gone Girl is a movie that stays with you. Maybe, like Zodiac, it will grow with time and rewatching.

Maybe not.

Maybe readers will be kind to Fincher, because he didn't ruin their favorite. He just truncated it.

But forget literature.

Gone Girl brings Reality TV to the big screen.

© 2000-2023 Tony Macklin