Sardonic Black Comedy

Rating: 7/10 (13 October 2014)

This is definitely value for the money. It's a black comedy of American manners, and the ending gets increasingly funny as it gets increasingly ghastly. Evelyn Waugh would have loved it. So, perhaps, would Jane Austen (who gets a shout out that is also an allusion to one of Pike's early roles), who had a sharp eye and sharper tongue for bad behavior.
Of the two protagonists, Nick Dunne is all surface. What you see is what you get – a guy who tried to make a career in New York, failed, and is settling himself back into his old home town' where his shiny New York wife doesn't fit his new life, and auditioning a replacement who might. Human, but perfectly familiar.
Amy Elliott Dunne is much more complicated and interesting, not simply the psycho bitch that some critics have made her out to be. The key to Amy is her parents. From their brief appearances, we can see that Amy's mother was definitely the dominant one in that marriage. She's a classic frustrated stage mother, or in modern terms a thwarted tiger mom, who – in the manner of upper middle class parents – desperately wants her child to be exceptional. Frustrated by her real daughter, she had poured her perfectionism into a fictional counterpart, Amazing Amy. It turns out that Nick Dunne is not the only character with a twin sibling. Amy Elliott is Amazing Amy's mediocre twin sister, and she has spent her whole life failing to measure up to that image of perfection. She dropped out of childhood pursuits and, we learn, misbehaved in prep school. To be sure, she got into Harvard. But, as the saying goes, everybody at Harvard got into Harvard. Real Amy didn't distinguish herself there, and she wound up in a glib and trivial New York job for superficially bright liberal arts graduates, writing personality quizzes for checkout counter magazines. She is still unmarried when her parents are about to give her perfect twin the perfect wedding.
At first, it looks like she has finally matched, if not surpassed, her fictional sister by marrying Nick. When she tells him, "We're so cute, I could punch us in the face," she is saying that he and she look like the ideal young bourgeois bohemian married couple in what they don't know is pre-Crash Brooklyn. When they both lose their media jobs and Nick takes them to small town Missouri, Amy is enraged to find that without the trust fund Amazing Amy gave her, she is, in fact, perfectly ordinary and, though intelligent, not at all exceptional. Her plot against Nick isn't just the culmination of her rage at her downward mobility. It is her last chance to excel the Amazing Amy by pulling off a perfectly executed scheme, and she throws herself into it completely. But she fails once again, when she runs up against the kind of people she has never known, didn't plan for and has no idea how to deal with. In desperation she improvises one last, horrifying attempt at salvage. She pulls it off because of her total devotion to creating the necessary appearances and, most importantly, because of the credulous sentimental idiocy of her audience.
At the end, we're looking at the opening chapter of Amazing Amy Becomes The Perfect Mom. God help the child.