Gone Girl(2014)

****

In the late eighties and nighties, Michael Douglas was the go-to star for portraying the victimised man.  Both Fatal Attraction(1987) and Disclosure(1994) explored a subversion of traditional gender roles – the central male characters at the mercy of powerful, intelligent and manipulative women; masculine impulses, both sexual and professional, are punished by the cunning femme-fatal antagonists.  

David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is a thriller of mind games and manipulation. Drawing interestingly from his own canon of work, there are echoes of the procedural style of Zodiac(2007) and the twisted game-playing narrative of Se7en(1995), but his trademark acuity and attention to detail seems more precise and glacial than ever before. Rosmand Pike plays Amy, the inspiration for “Amazing Amy” – the central character in her parent’s successful line of children’s books; married to Nick Dunne,(Ben Affleck) a generic, if sleazy, American husband who runs a bar with significant financial support from his wife. Then Amy goes missing from the family home under strange circumstances – furniture knocked over, traces of blood in the kitchen – police speculation points to homicide. At the same time another narrative thread plays out involving Amy’s diary entries which run parallel with the central story.

The film proceeds to set up an investigation plot into what actually happened to “Amazing Amy” but what initially appears to be a dark, hard-edged thriller becomes increasingly bizarre and satirical.

Gone Girl explores the distinction between fiction and reality, but more importantly, the fear of marriage; the pressure of expectation and the pursuit for the appearance of perfection.  Flynn’s screenplay meticulously presents these ideas but the significant focus is upon the roles played in married life - it is this idea which is most interesting. Amy is initially perceived as the victim and Nick the perpetrator but these roles are constantly reversed and transformed throughout the drama, and running through it, is an intelligent satire on TV news that sets up Nick as a symbol for man-hate and abusive husbands. Rosmand Pike gives her strongest performance to date; capturing Amy’s complexly mercurial, calculating, deranged character with an icy execution. 

The film then takes an unusual generic shift from serious crime thriller into overcooked, erotic thriller-cum-exploitation potboiler. In one scene Fincher not only nods towards Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas and recreates an explosively violent moment that could have been drawn almost directly from Basic Instinct(1992). In the end Gone Girl becomes less of an intense thematic exploration into marital dysfunction and dishonesty and instead lurches into the realms of enjoyable exploitation film-making – it is an intensely riveting and atmospheric drama.