Gone Girl Review
By David Kempler
Long "Gone"
I hope for plot twists when I see a drama. Another thing I admire is things not going as one would expect. David Fincher's "Gone Girl" accomplishes both, yet somehow it left me unfulfilled and almost cheated. Considering Fincher's other outstanding directing credits, in particular "Seven" and "
Fight Club", I was surprised to be let down this time.
Based on a 2012 novel by Gillian Flynn, who also wrote the screenplay, "Gone Girl" leads us through a path of lurid behaviors that take place both within the confines of a marriage and, eventually, out in the community, so much so that it draws the interest of the police and the media.
Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike) is the girl that is gone. Nick (Ben Affleck) is her husband. When he comes home and finds their house a mess and his wife gone, he suspects foul play, but inexplicably he is only minimally agitated by it. Oh, he contacts the police, but they are skeptical about all of it because of his lack of emotion. Everything points to the likelihood that Nick played a role in his wife's disappearance.
Without giving away the big plot twist, I can tell you that everything is not as straightforward as we are led to believe. That said, the truth is that the audience pretty much knows that nothing is quite as it seems, and that is one of the bigger problems of "Gone Girl". We are being set up, but it's not exactly shocking when the truth is revealed.
Since the story is about relationships and murder and sex, and the media is on the case like bloodhounds, are you surprised that a television reporter who is a Nancy Grace clone is all over it? It seems like I have now seen three or four Nancy Grace clones in recent films and it has already gotten pretty old. Here, it twists the drama into a bit of comic relief. Whether this is on purpose or not is unclear, but I found it distracting.
One of the biggest strengths of "Gone Girl" is also one of its biggest weaknesses. At the end we are slapped in the face by one of the leads doing something that makes little sense. The credits roll immediately after. While I loved it for taking us in an unusual cinematic direction, precisely because similar things do happen in real-life, by that time I was already as gone from the story as the girl was physically gone.
Yet, since seeing it, it has remained in my head, so at least it triggered some reaction in me, even if it's not a totally positive one. In baseball, when a batter hits a long drive that appears to be a home run, a common statement from an announcer is "that ball is going, going, gone". Sometimes the announcer is wrong and the ball falls short of its anticipated landing spot. "Gone Girl" falls similarly short.
