Stories, Roles, Identity

Rating: 9/10 (4 October 2014)

Fincher is a competent director capable of committing himself to a script and executing it in ways that breathe craftsmanship. Cronenwerth as his cinematographer is known for delivering constant quality (Fight Club). Pike was until now an interesting, but somewhat bland actress. We have a relatively inexperienced writer (married to a lawyer). But what these and other people did here is far more than the sum of the parts; Gone Girl with its cheesy trailer will probably some years from now be considered as a classic, that type of movie where initial reception was average. To fully understand what has been done here might require multiple viewings.
The first main theme of the movie is the battle between word and image. Both are writers, producing stories and words. The female "writer" tells her story in voice-over, recreating a supposed past. She uses the spoken word, but imagines using the written word and being a successful writer with illustrated (!) books. She is the archetypical untrusted narrator, weaving stories that might or might not be true. The male writer is more and more overpowered by the image: Being constant on TV having people talk about him, photo shots with supposed fans, observation cameras, etc. This dualism between word and image is mirrored in the detectives: The female acts on words; the male one on images. Note for example that the female detective sometimes wears sunglasses to protect her from the bombardment of images. The whole movie is drained with the male-female dichotomy: marriage as lies, as projections, sex as weapon, power asymmetry.
Once the story is revealed the lawyer is introduced: He knows how to combine words and images in weaving a coherent story, not necessarily the truth as Nick would like to put out. The next level is about a battle for storytelling and stories: role-playing, acting and reality starts to intertwine more and more until the resolution comes. Mirroring current trends in (especially but not exclusively US) society that storytelling and misuse of rhetoric has substituted rational analysis, all enhanced by media-images being communicated: See how astounded Nick and the female detective are when in the end the truth can't be accepted as the stories are accepted as facts.
The female writer creates her own models and starts enacting and staging them; the robbery a piece of reality sipping through. Note also the overuse of shots with bridges, bridging the gap between image and word, between reality and story, between role and personality. It ends with questions about identity, how it is formed and what it means to develop, have or act out one.
There comes another layer as not only the characters in the movie, but also the audience seeing this movie fall victim to this, as also they are lured into the movie and its stories and cannot help but feel almost misused about this. It is an unnerving experience.
There is a trap in this kind of movies: That structure stands in the way of emotions (see for example Medem's Sex and Lucia). Not so here; Fincher is extremely competent in balancing the two. It even starts and ends with this debate (duality of the same shots): Reasoning vs. Emotion, another main theme in the movie.
The effects of all this are astonishing. Please see it twice.