A story about one thing, but also (or really) about something else

Rating: 10/10 (11 November 2014)

Gone Girl would appear to be, from the book by Gillian Flynn (also the writer), about marriage, and love and trust, and what happens in a marriage after that trust is broken and people can't be together the same way again. One has seen this before - one of Fincher's influences, Kubrick, certainly had that with Eyes Wide Shut in a way - and will again in movies and fiction. But what's startling and makes Gone Girl much more impactive is that Flynn and David Fincher are out to look at something else (and something Fincher has in small part before): the media and perception.
But both sides are compelling, and the merging of the two topics on display in the film, of the twisting of relationships and twists of the media screws, make for a helluva movie experience The film is split in two parts really, and the divider has to do with what happens when (SPOILER) Amy Dunn explains what her whole plan is to the audience. Before this, we only hear her thoughts from her diary. This is chronicling her relationship with Nick (Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck respectively), who first meet in one of those clever meet-cutes that isn't super cute and shows how each is quick-witted and good at talk, almost like Fincher doing a bit of 30's screwball (which he's done, in his cool-quirky manner in Fight Club). And they do love each other, and each other's bodies, as Amy even says "We are so cute together", and then... things happen, jobs are lost, money goes, they have to move back to Nick's hometown in Missouri, and little by little, what's the line: love fades.
Or does it? Amy basically decides to take revenge against Nick, who in her diary she claims abused her (if only briefly) and neglected her. Clearly, neither side is all peaches and cream in the marriage - by plotting an entire narrative, which we see unfold via traps set and stages set in the first act, for Nick to be framed for murder. It's one of those turns of the plot that had me lean forward and get far more engaged than I even was before, and the first act is entertaining and dramatic and well-acted and all-that-and-a-bag-of-Fincher-Chips enough. In a way it turns into a "movie" arguably, along the lines of a trashy De Palma thriller where the woman is an iceberg-cold femme fatale who will get her 'Average Joe' any way she can.... only here's the catch: she is plotting everything for the cops, but it's the media that she never really thinks of, at least in much depth.
Really, it's in the TV shows, especially the likes that we see with the Nancy Grace clone who plots every step of the Nick/Amy marriage and all of the little beats - i.e. the 'best friend' Amy makes so cheekily (and hilariously in a dark way) because she's 'dumb' and doesn't know any better - and can speculate up the ass and... create perception. Gone Girl explores what happens in rather chilling, pitch-black comic detail what happens when people have to bend to what all those cameras, all those vans and reporters and interviews and the "public" face do to people. And, most interesting of all, how it even twists the one pulling the 'strings' as it were.
It's interesting to note that Amy's previous messed-up relationships - one involving a simple heartbreak (but not quite so as we find out, Neil Patrick Harris!) and another with a testing-ground for what happened with Nick - don't get interviewed by the press. Why not? Story hole? Perhaps more was in the book and left out the film. Or, you know, it doesn't work for this story.
This all may not be quite as deep or meaningful as some of Fincher's other great films, Fight Club and Zodiac especially and maybe Social Network to an extent, but there is still a lot to chew on just by what characters do, how they react, how they're trying to think and move steps ahead, or back, or forward. It's a devilish chess-game of a story, and the actors are completely game - even Tyler Perry, who for me was a super wild card given his past films - with Ben Affleck totally convincing as a man who we aren't totally sure about (is he true to himself, or us, or to anyone, or is he just totally exasperated like any number of husbands out there), and Pike just about perfect as this calculating woman who changes before our eyes.
And this all may be totally manipulative for us too, not simply how the characters become manipulated and twisted by the narratives spun and perceptions made. But for me, I couldn't tell where this story would go from scene to scene, and the mistakes the characters make are very human, stupid errors that make them more... is endearing the word? Just entertaining I guess. Fincher's made a long, occasionally VERY violent and sexy, and maybe dangerous movie. And it does what a lot of movies that last can do: be about more than one thing, and keep the quality to a top level.