Gone Girl by David Fincher - Movie Review Example

1 Gone Girl by David Fincher Critics came to the conclusion that it is almost impossible towrite the review about Gone Girl by David Fincher, because any information on the movie or its analysis will inevitably turn into a spoiler. It is really so, because the secret is very important for the plot. Thus, if someone is afraid to learn any details, it is important to watch the movie first and then read the criticism and reviews. Nevertheless, the given work will try to provide some information about this movie, which became one of the gloomiest impressions of the last time. A spoiler is an extremely dangerous thing, but in the context of this movie it is really fatal. It is related not only to the ending, but to any turn of the plot. The only thing the viewer needs to know, it is the fact of the loss and the doubtful alibi of the spouse. Any other details will spoil the feeling of surprise, and sometimes even shock, which is a business card of Fincher. The real headache for the press is how to analyze the movie not opening any secrets. It is not an easy task. But it is not very easy to create a screen version of the Flynns best-seller. The movie is the screen version of the best-seller by the former television critic Gillian Flynn. The critic Scott Smith wrote about it: “I cannot say this urgently enough: you have to read Gone Girl. It’s as if Gillian Flynn has mixed us a martini using battery acid instead of vermouth and somehow managed to make it taste really, really good. Gone Girl is delicious and intoxicating and delightfully poisonous. It’s smart (brilliant, actually). It’s funny (in the darkest possible way). The writing is jarringly good, and the story is, well…amazing. Read the book and youll discover—among many other treasures—just how much freight (and fright) that last adjective can bear” (Smith). Flynn wrote the script for a movie herself. She says that her main goal was to keep the spirit of the novel. This spirit is gloomy and depressive. Therefore, it is no wonder that the author of movies Seven, The Game, Fight club, Panic Room, Zodiac, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo David Fincher decided to make the screen version. For now his only optimistic picture is "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button". In all the other works Fincher tells us about maniacs, mental pathologies, etc. Certainly, we shouldnt forget about his "Social network", but it also cant be called optimistic. Chris Nashawaty wrote the following in his review: “conducting it all like a true-crime Toscanini is Fincher—a mischievious maestro who turns the film into the puzzle-box workout that his 1997 brainteaser The Game wanted to be. I cant guarantee that the films ending will work for everyone (it was always my one nit to pick with Flynns novel). But I will say this: Anyone who loved Gone Girl the book will walk out of Gone Girl the movie with a sick grin on their face. You can stop being nervous” (Nashawaty, 2014). Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike (the British actress, famous for the movies "Pride and Prejudice" and "An Education") in Gone Girl perform the spouses Nick and Amy Dunne. Once they were very happy together, but by the fifth wedding anniversary their marriage stopped being pleasant. The literary primary source is a game with a reader for whom it is very thoughtlessly take somebodys part. Everything appears different than it seemed. The tangle of passions isnt untangled and only becomes bigger. Eventually, it is necessary to put up with the fact that it is not possible to resolve this puzzle individually. The writer worked on the script for the screen version herself and the plot was not changed. Fincher just provided the plot with a look and put the accents. Fincher never was an innovator. He didnt created scripts himself, didnt make experiments with genres. It was not necessary for him. Five minutes are enough to unmistakably define the style of the director. Only he can immerse day scenes in the twilight. Only he can take fascinating and artless literature and turn it into visual lyrics. It seemed that it was impossible to turn mocking at the reader Gone Girl of Gillian Flynn into mathematically exact and amazingly prudent movie. Hiding modestly behind the camera, Fincher shows that there is no limit for perfection. In any possible description of an initial plot disposition each detail is not fully disclosed. Why do Nick and Amy, excellent journalists, live so far from megalopolises? Where did Nick get money to buy bar? Why doesnt Amy work? Why did Nick go away from home on an important and joyful holiday? Why do they have such a smart cottage with a room for a cat? Wonderfully the most difficult detective plot with mass media, police and considerable number of secondary role characters after 160 minutes of watching easily fit together in spectators mind dispelling all the questions. Marriage, a process in which two people cook their love and indifference, ambitions and self-assessment in one copper, for Nick and Amy turns into the destruction of their own inner worlds. At the beginning and at the end of the movie the husband repeats in his head the questions to the wife asking her about her own thoughts, the reasons of their suffering and their uncertain and frightening future. It is a rather simple, but perfectly applied technique. Gone Girl begins with an extremely mysterious and not less minimalist scene where the viewer watches the blondes nape, and the off-screen voice tells how the man would like to open this fine skull and to learn what the brain is occupied with. Only having watched the movie to the end, the viewer at last learns what women and not only women, but the entire modern world of moral decay want. This movie is a mirror, which reflects us in our most terrible manifestations, but nobody is ready to look in it. Having returned from bar where Nick went to see his sister on the day of the anniversary (they own the bar together), Nick didnt find Amy in the house. She was kidnapped, and the offenders left proofs, among which there was a badly wiped blood (only one spot was found, but the examination reveals that there was much more blood). Nick was questioned in the police and he finally became suspected in the murder of his own wife. Everything is very suspicious: Nick is not acquainted with Amys friends, knows nothing about her habits and occupations. He even smiles in the camera against her portrait at the press conference devoted to the loss of the wife. Yes, Amy got a press conference. Her drama is watched by the entire America, after all she is a girl from a rich family, a celebrity. Her parents wrote the books about her alter ego: "Super- Amy" is known all over the country. Split personality always was a part of her life. The police found her diary, which contained a lot of interesting information about her life with Nick. Actually, Nick is not good enough for Amy. She is the citizen of New York with several higher educations, Nick is a plain guy from Missouri. They get acquainted working as journalists, and their statuses seemed equal. Then both lose work, moreover, Nicks mother gets sick. With her husband Amy goes to his native small city. The problems start there. Gone Girl is, actually, not a detective and not a thriller, but supervision over a modern person. By any means a man appears a useless creature. The aftertaste of the movie is long and bitter. According to Flynn and Fincher, most of people are hiding under masks, which make them look better. Maybe, it is not bad, because people always want to look better, than they are, but in Gone Girl vices, and sometimes even pure evil hides under these masks. According to famous Dr. House, all lie. And those people, who dont play roles in life, appear fools and unlucky and sometimes even dead. A man puts on a mask himself, but television and mass media helps support this thought-up image. It is one more source of evil, which is capable to manipulate masses, that is very relevant in the modern world. Certainly, the issue of love and marriage was also touched. Love in the modern world is violence over yourself and your partner. After all, it is necessary to play a role again and not the one pleasant for you, but the one pleasant for your partner. It is necessary to do what you would not do voluntarily, to conform to requirements. In order to soften the discomfort, it is necessary to change your beloved. The result is usually disappointing, and another model of relations simply doesnt exist. Justin Chang in his review points out: “It soon becomes clear that the central mystery of “Gone Girl” will hinge not on what happened to Amy, but rather on who she and Nick really are, and what brought them to this fateful point in their marriage — a question that the two leads’ initially poker-faced performances are in no hurry to answer. Whether it’s darting between past and present, or juxtaposing Amy’s cryptic diary entries with the handwritten clues she left behind as part of a fifth-anniversary “treasure hunt” for Nick, Flynn’s screenplay has an unusual ability to keep the story moving on multiple levels, commanding the viewer’s attention with nary an act of explicit violence for most of the film’s runtime” (Chang). The movie with a surgical accuracy discloses the essence of family and marriage as social institutes of the modern world. The life of two people, who live together, isnt a series of compromises and pleasures. It is a complicated mix that gets the wildest forms depending on the climate in the relations. Jealousy, pain, humiliation – all these feelings can turn the exemplary family man into the monster capable of the most terrible acts. The choice of the actors for leading roles is extremely unevident, thus it is amazingly correct. Ben Affleck seems to play himself: behind the appearance of a playboy there is uncertainty and vulnerability. Pike, who was lost among secondary roles, played the main role of all her life. The image of a Hitchcocks blonde, who doesnt like to be a victim any more, is very convincing. But it is not enough for Fincher. His perfectionism needs much. Together with ideological vision of a family the modern pillar of the society – mass media, is also broken. Humans rise against the odium of influence of the press. It seems that forbidden subjects for consideration do not exist any more. Passions boil, music is too loud, actors enjoy the opportunities, which were opened for them by their characters, and the viewer needs only to fidget nervously two and a half hours in a chair and to wait for something that is hidden behind the innocent wife’s vanishing. If to discuss the narrower meanings of Gone Girl, it is possible to reveal the following: misalliance doesnt lead to good even if it doesnt seem misalliance at first. However, the relations with a person of your social status can turn into even more serious problem. Thus, it is necessary to mention that one of the roles in the movie is performed by Neil Patrick Harris famous as Barney Stinson in the series How I Met Your Mother. In Gone Girl his role is certainly dramatic, not comical like in series. It is interesting that Gone Girl is a feminist and anti-feminist movie at the same time. For example, Finchers "The girl with the dragon tattoo" was absolutely feminist. However, as a new movie of the director is in general anti-human, it contains two opposite doctrines: the sacrifices women make for men are great and dramatic, but women also mock at men so much that it depreciates their own sacrifices. Psychological thriller is a genre that is very popular in the modern world, but the movies of this genre are usually very pessimistic. The inner world of every person is dark and frightening, thus this genre appears to be the most difficult and not every director decides to work with it Still there is a one thing that makes Gone Girl less gloomy. One of two main characters seems to be too specific, not corresponding to the ideas of an average person. Rothman states: ““Gone Girl” is a fantasy, of course, and it takes place in a dream world, not reality. Leaving the theatre, you have to ask yourself how connected these ideas are in real life. And you can’t miss the fact that, fundamentally, “Gone Girl” is a farce. There is no real crime or horror in the Dunne household. Amy and Nick hurt one another, but in unexceptional ways; Nick’s affair with a sexy student—Emily Ratajkowski, of the “Blurred Lines” music video—is played for comedy. In fact, it’s the creation of a heightened atmosphere of suspicion around those banal “crimes” that leads, eventually, to the real ones. Maybe “Gone Girl” is just playing around—making up, rather than finding, connections within our imaginative lives”. The movie is a fantasy; therefore, it is not necessary to make frightening generalizations. But they still can be made. And this really frightens. References Chang, Justin. Film Review: ‘Gone Girl’ accessed December 29, 2014 at http://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/gone-girl-really Rothman, Joshua What “Gone Girl” accessed December 29, 2014 at Is Really About http://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/gone-girl-really. Gone Girl accessed December 29, 2014 at http://gillian-flynn.com/gone-girl/ Nashawaty, Chris. Gone Girl (2014) accessed December 29, 2014 at http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20483133_20843746,00.html Read More