Starring Ben Affleck as glum, frustrated Nick Dunne—an out-of-work magazine writer who’s bailed on New York to try life as a saloon-keeper back in his Missouri hometown—and Rosamund Pike as the discontented wife he’s quickly fingered for doing in once she goes missing, _Gone Girl _starts out as a biting portrait of a modern-day Everymarriage. Then it turns into an ultra-gimmicky thriller: false identifies, mayhem both imagined and bloodily real, the works. If you’re into black-hearted kicks, you won’t be dissatisfied.
The damn thing’s almost over before you catch on that its colliding pieces add up to, well, a bitingly ultra-gimmicky portrait of a modern-day Everymarriage—the kind where either joint or competitive role-playing for the outside world’s benefit comes with the territory. Is this a David Fincher film, you ask? Christ, were you _born _suspicious?
We first meet Nick as he sidles into the bar he co-owns with his twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon) on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary—July 5, 2012—to morosely down a shot of bourbon and grouse about his lot. So we know the marriage isn’t all peaches even before he heads back home to find his Amy vanished and furniture upended by an apparent tussle. A bit too ostentatiously so, in fact.
Soon, local police detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) and her partner Jim (Patrick Fugit) are nosing around, increasingly convinced that this yuppie-schmuck prodigal son staged the kidnapping but not yet ready to arrest Nick for murder. And since Amy, it turns out, isn’t exactly a nobody—she spent her childhood as the real-life model for the popular _Amazing Amy _books her parents co-wrote—her disappearance starts drawing national attention as soon as Mom and Dad (Lisa Banes and David Clennon), no strangers to greasing publicity’s wheels, hog the limelight at a press conference calling for help in finding their daughter.
Meantime, we’re also watching the story—preserved in Amy’s diary—of her and Nick’s courtship and marriage, which starts out as fairy-tale as they come. "We’re so cute I want to punch us in the face," she tells him, and audiences may be tempted more than once to agree. Their romantic banter is too glibly on-the-nose to be quite believable, but it’s also possible that Amy’s account—she’s the daughter of writers, after all—is gilding the lily.
In any case, she and Nick are the sort of people who define intimacy as the other partner’s complicity in endorsing their image of themselves. In her case, that involves an ongoing grudge match with the fictional alter ego her parents foisted on the world at large—and in his, it’s all about striving to evade mediocrity. Reminding each other of the kind of couple they don’t want to be is their idea of how to clinch an argument.
Then, of course, they start turning into the kind of couple they don’t want to be. Reality starts crashing in when downsizing costs both of them the swank jobs so vital to their endlessly fussed-over identifies. (It’s rare for a thriller to be so keyed to topical economic uh-ohs, but go figure: Gillian Flynn, author of the original novel, got laid off from her job as Entertainment Weekly’s TV critic in 2009.) Then Nick insists on relocating to Missouri, first to care for his dying mother and then to partner with Sis in opening a bar called The Bar—"very meta," Detective Boney tells him, reminding us that hinterland scorn for putting on airs doesn’t always derive from ignorance—with money from Amy’s much-abused trust fund.
They debate having a baby to save their marriage, and naturally, they’re instantly horrified by recognizing that that’s yet another cliche. As they grow more estranged, Nick’s behavior—at least as Amy’s diary reports it—turns more truculent, even menacing.
The back story is cross-cut with Nick’s increasingly dire straits as clues he might have killed his better half pile up and he finds himself cast as the most hated man in America, thanks largely to Sela Ward as cable-TV host Sharon Schieber. She’s someone for whom inflammatory innuendo tops facts anytime, yet the movie is too sophisticated to turn Schieber into a Network-style harpy. She’s just got the brains to know how the world works these days, and Nick’s hardly the dude to judge her: He’s too desperate to turn the game to his advantage, eventually with the help of a powerhouse lawyer who specializes in high-profile media scapegoats—played, in an inspired piece of casting, by Tyler Perry.
But readers of Flynn’s novel know the big plot twist that’s coming, and when it does, it briefly throws us right out of the movie we think we’ve been watching. We aren’t prepared for Gone Girl’s transformation from superficial verisimilitude into the kind of farrago where a character can impersonate somebody else as if acting has been how these folks make their living all along.
Then again, it _has _been. The shift from relative plausibility to ratcheted-up contrivance is a reminder that Fincher is an old hand at shell games. He’s been gulling us to accept Nick and Amy as people we can recognize from life. Now what they each turn out to be capable of tells you what he thinks of the underlying values they—and no doubt any number of chicsters out there, too—unconsciously or even guilefully live by. Partly because he brings things around to the point that, however reluctantly, we end up identifying with them all over again, this may be his harshest movie, at least so far as venting his opinions of human nature goes. Is it any surprise that it’s also his most unconscionably entertaining one?
I’m not sure any other director has used Affleck this well. He’s never been the total lummox people used to think he was, but peeling back a character’s layers isn’t exactly his specialty. How many of them have had any to peel? This time out, though, he’s putting his own likability under a microscope even as he uses his physique to keep us guessing whether Nick is just a put-upon lug—a basically shallow guy whose dim moral compass is bound to put him in compromised situations he’s ineffectual at handling—or a potential killer.
Partly because she’s made up and costumed to look like the mail-order version of the perfect bride, Rosamund Pike is less vivid at first. Yet that’s not accidental, and Pike more than makes up for it later on.
Probably no less deliberately, Nick and Amy’s protestations of how much they turn each other on don’t conceal their all but nonexistent chemistry. That’s something that registers even more when you see all the undercurrents of sublimated attraction and wariness Affleck and Kim Dickens get going in their scenes together. If his phony streak fascinates her, she’s clearly authentic in a way he’s unused to or maybe has just left behind. Even in a movie packed with good supporting performances—including Neil Patrick Harris’s as a rich ex of Amy’s, though the role may be a bit too much of a Patricia Highsmith hand-me-down—Dickens’s beautifully tempered, quietly flavorful work stands out.
Even by Fincher’s standards, _Gone Girl is sumptuously crafted. The editing—by Kirk Baxter, who also did The Social Network — _is uncommonly fluid and lucid, and Fincher and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth augment their marvelously unease-inducing visual scheme with a phenomenal attention to detail. (I never thought I’d single out a cutaway to a family pet for praise, but a shot of the Dunnes’ cat reacting to the media frenzy in the front yard pretty much encapsulates the movie’s whole theme in miniature.) At times, Fincher’s work with the actors and atmosphere is so fine that you catch yourself wondering if he’s actually gotten too good for this kind of intrinsically hyperbolic material, but you soon realize how wrongheaded that is. He works in the genres he does because they let him say more, not less, about contemporary life as we don’t want to know we know it. This movie is the best evidence yet.
Related: See How Gone Girl Extends David Fincher’s Murder Obsession