It's safe to say that if you're planning on seeing 10 movies this year, Gone Girl should be near the top of the list.

Rating: 7/10 (29 September 2014)

Adapting novels into screenplays is tough: not only does the writer have to pack 400+ pages of backstory, characterization and plot into 100-120 pages of script, but the director is forced to make important choices about where within those pages to point his or her camera. They have to decide what the story is actually about and discriminatingly pluck snippets from the source material to tell it effectively, all while staying true to the author's intent. Luckily for David Fincher and his latest film, Gone Girl, he had Gillian Flynn—the author of the New York Times bestseller of the same name—manning the typewriter. While many will still prefer Flynn's original hardcover to its adaptation (myself included), the Fincher/Flynn tandem spawned a darkly intoxicating film riddled with its fair share of surprises and hilarity, even for those familiar with the story. It's safe to say that if you're planning on seeing 10 movies this year, Gone Girl should be near the top of the list.
The film is about Nick and Amy Dunne, a married New York couple in their mid-thirties who lose their print magazine jobs at the height of the recent recession and are forced to move back to Nick's hometown of North Carthage, Missouri after his mother is diagnosed with breast cancer. Through a series of rosy flashbacks, we catch glimpses of what used to be Nick and Amy's life together in New York: the night they met at a party in Brooklyn, the night Nick proposed at the release party for Amy's parents' most recent children's book (Amazing Amy and the Big Day—based on their daughter), and the first few years of their blissful marriage. Subtract two jobs and one Manhattan loft, add a substantial loan to Amy's parents from her trust fund and multiply it all by Amy's reluctance to leave the East coast and shack up in a McMansion along the Mississippi River, and it becomes quite clear that the Dunne union has seen better days. Then on their fifth wedding anniversary Amy disappears. The local police scour Nick's house where there are clear signs of a struggle, as well as a letter from Amy: the first clue for the treasure hunt she plans for Nick every year on their anniversary. Gradually, the national media spotlight descends on the small Missouri town and the public turns on Nick when he's suspected for having something to do with his wife's disappearance. As the police investigation develops and the noose continues to tighten around Nick, everyone is left wondering one question: where is Amy Dunne?
However, the question Fincher would rather the audience ask themselves is "Who is Amy Dunne?" To be sure, there is a reason Flynn's novel has sold over 8.5 million copies. It's a thrilling murder mystery that tantalizes us with many of the familiar concepts we've come to expect from both Hollywood and the serial dramas of the small screen, which seem to be more and more concerned about killing than the people doing the killing or trying to stop it (there is even a show called The Killing that ironically, as Grantland's Andy Greenwald laments, just won't die). But Gone Girl avoids the missteps of its peers and provides the audience with considerably more existential questions than what happened to its title character. Fincher, working off of Flynn's themes, crafts his film around the most salient elements of the story that leaves the audience feeling at once shocked by its absurdity and terrified by its implications. At its core, Gone Girl is about serious relationships and the importunate questions that almost always hover above them. Who Amy and Nick are—as individuals and as a couple—prior to the former's disappearance is just as important to Fincher as what happens to Amy (Rosamund Pike) and Nick (Ben Affleck) in the film. Affleck turns in his finest performance to date as the people-pleasing, unintentionally smug Nick Dunne, opting for downplayed, restrained acting choices much like Christian Bale's subtly scintillating role in last year's American Hustle. Surely a number of other actors could have shined in Gone Girl, but Affleck's dopey charm and topsy-turvy career arc truly resonate with the character.
While staying true to the general ethos of the novel is admirable, actually augmenting the material in some respects is downright impressive, and not many directors can do it. One of Fincher's greatest gifts is his mastery of light and shadow, so much so that there is something definitively and obviously congruent about all of his work, and specific minutia stand out: the perpetually-stormy, decaying city streets of Seven; the organic, filthiness of Tyler Durden's house in Fight Club; the moody, gloomy halls of Harvard in The Social Network. In Gone Girl, it happens to be from a scene in the trailer where Nick Dunne is standing in the gazebo with the spotlight all over him at a vigil for Amy, explaining to the hundreds of skeptical mourners and reporters that he's innocent. It's a scene that recapitulates Flynn's prose regarding the proliferation of mass media celebrity culture and the gotcha journalism that promotes the sexiest story over the legitimate one. And while chastising the news media is nothing new in film (e.g. Natural Born Killers (1994), Network (1976), and the upcoming Nightcrawler it would appear to a certain extent), there is something simultaneously intimate and surreal about watching Nick and Amy's story unfold, as if we're watching a realty TV show about people we know personally.
There are at least another dozen scenes that gracefully sew the story together, which is no small task given the manner in which Flynn wrote the book, vacillating between Nick's account of the investigation and Amy's old diary entries, which serve as a flashback mechanism. One scene as reimagined by Fincher evoked literal gasps from the entire theater, while Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' haunting soundtrack had people squirming in their seats. It's why we pay to go to the movies.