Movie Review: GONE GIRL

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The main sentiment to be taken away from Fincher’s latest outing GONE GIRL is that marriage is hard work. Our protagonist is bar owner/community college teacher Nick Dunne, who on the outside is happily married to “Amazing” Amy Dunne. On the inside, there’s bickering and abuse, all culminating in her disappearance on the day of their fifth wedding anniversary.

For a while, the film starts to take an unreliable narrator approach. We watch as Nick is put through a Scott Peterson like trial by fire with the glaring eyes of his neighbors, his twin sister, and the media. As more and more information gets out (a secret affair with a student, mysterious credit card charges, damning words from Amy’s diary), the more we start to question if Nick is telling the truth or not, and the more we wonder about whether or not we want him to get out of this scott free.

We learn of the story of the Dunne’s marriage through narrated diary entries which start with their meet cute at a party, and work their way from “fairy tale honeymoon” phase to “we’ve lost our money and jobs but we’ve still got each other phase” to “emotionally manipulative constant fighting” phase. The flashback scenes are the only scenes in the film where Fincher doesn’t shoot it like a horror film, in fact some of the early scenes set in New York, like the flashback to their first kiss, have a certain magical lighting to them to contrast the stark grimness of the rest of the film.

The film looks very Fincher to say the least. He has a way of setting the tone of his films so that every small movement by a character seems sinister. This is readily evident with Desi Collings, an old boyfriend of Amy’s that Nick has some questions for, played to creepy perfection by Neil Patrick Harris. The words his character says imply that he has no bad intentions, but under Fincher’s direction, every subtle movement that he makes gives you the feeling that he’s about to do something awful.

What surprised me the most is how darkly funny it is. Gillian Flynn’s script mines some pretty big laughs from some pretty dark places. On the surface it’s a satire on the media. A Nancy Grace stand in frequently pops up on television giving wild speculations about Nick killing his wife such as “He’s a Sociopath!” and “He and his sister are unusually close!” which draws big laughs, and Tyler Perry comes out of nowhere to deliver a fantastic performance as a “wife killer” lawyer who revitalizes Nick’s image with the public. Underneath the surface, it’s a statement about marriage, and how two people can assume familiar roles to manipulate and hurt each other. If you’re thinking about seeing this with a date, don’t. The two of you will not leave the theater in a romantic mood.

In predictable Fincher fashion, there are a number of twists and turns in the story that may leave you confused for a second. Towards the end I kept thinking it was going to fade to black and end right there, but then it kept on going, so there are a few fake out endings. I’m glad it didn’t end where I thought it did because the final moment is a doozy, and will no doubt be controversial.