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GONE GIRL
David Fincher, a director with a gift for epic storytelling onscreen with work like Fight Club, Zodiac, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button under his belt, found a slightly more intimate story but employed his accustomed gloss to the material and knocked it out of the park with Gone Girl, a stomach-turning and disturbing tale of questionable moral barometers that become part of a media circus that all parties found far from their control and the irreparable damage left in its wake.
This 2014 shocker stars Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne, a guy who comes home one day to find the glass coffee table in a million pieces and his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike)nowhere to be found. As this story slowly unfolds over a thirty day period, we learn that Amy is a famous writer and that everything she and Nick shared was in her name and that Amy paid for the bar that he and his twin sister, Margo (Carrie Coon) run together. Needless to say, as the case comes together, the lead detective (Kim Dickens) becomes convinced that Nick has murdered his wife. Once again, I have another fascinating piece of film making here that is extremely difficult to review without spoilers.
After Amy's disappearance, we are given two separate looks into Nick and Amy's marriage that are completely different...one is in Ben's mind and the other is in a journal written by Amy which make us think we know exactly what's going on, but we're not even close.
Gillian Flynn, who adapted the screenplay from her own novel, has crafted a story that creates doubt from all directions from which the story materializes and I'm pretty sure that is the intention. This viewer never for a single minute believed that Nick murdered his wife; however, also allowed certain red herrings in the story to get past me so that once it came into focus exactly what was going on here, I felt like I had walked into the story about half way through and had missed something but I really didn't. There is some satisfaction provided at the conclusion, but there's just as much left unexplained and up in the air, which definitely made me wonder about what's going to happen to these people after the credits roll.
Fincher's direction is crisp and focused and he has gotten superb performances from his well-chosen cast. Affleck offers his best performance since Hollywoodland as Nick and Rosamund Pike is a revelation as Amy, a richly complex performance that earned her an Oscar nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress. Dickens and Coon provide effective support along with Neil Patrick Harris, surprisingly solid as a victim of Amy's web of deception. It's not an easy watch and despite an ending that is a bit on the ambiguous side, the story provides some semblance of justice but leaves all kinds of doors open to the viewer's imagination for the future of the players involved here.
David Fincher, a director with a gift for epic storytelling onscreen with work like Fight Club, Zodiac, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button under his belt, found a slightly more intimate story but employed his accustomed gloss to the material and knocked it out of the park with Gone Girl, a stomach-turning and disturbing tale of questionable moral barometers that become part of a media circus that all parties found far from their control and the irreparable damage left in its wake.
This 2014 shocker stars Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne, a guy who comes home one day to find the glass coffee table in a million pieces and his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike)nowhere to be found. As this story slowly unfolds over a thirty day period, we learn that Amy is a famous writer and that everything she and Nick shared was in her name and that Amy paid for the bar that he and his twin sister, Margo (Carrie Coon) run together. Needless to say, as the case comes together, the lead detective (Kim Dickens) becomes convinced that Nick has murdered his wife. Once again, I have another fascinating piece of film making here that is extremely difficult to review without spoilers.
After Amy's disappearance, we are given two separate looks into Nick and Amy's marriage that are completely different...one is in Ben's mind and the other is in a journal written by Amy which make us think we know exactly what's going on, but we're not even close.
Gillian Flynn, who adapted the screenplay from her own novel, has crafted a story that creates doubt from all directions from which the story materializes and I'm pretty sure that is the intention. This viewer never for a single minute believed that Nick murdered his wife; however, also allowed certain red herrings in the story to get past me so that once it came into focus exactly what was going on here, I felt like I had walked into the story about half way through and had missed something but I really didn't. There is some satisfaction provided at the conclusion, but there's just as much left unexplained and up in the air, which definitely made me wonder about what's going to happen to these people after the credits roll.
Fincher's direction is crisp and focused and he has gotten superb performances from his well-chosen cast. Affleck offers his best performance since Hollywoodland as Nick and Rosamund Pike is a revelation as Amy, a richly complex performance that earned her an Oscar nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress. Dickens and Coon provide effective support along with Neil Patrick Harris, surprisingly solid as a victim of Amy's web of deception. It's not an easy watch and despite an ending that is a bit on the ambiguous side, the story provides some semblance of justice but leaves all kinds of doors open to the viewer's imagination for the future of the players involved here.