Gone Girl eh? I was told to find out nothing about this film before seeing it in order to get the most out of it. My views on spoilers and such like are a matter of public record amongst my friends, but this time I decided to heed the advice and learn nothing more about the film than what the trailers had told me. I.e. Rosamond Pike (Amy) and Ben Afleck (Nick) are a couple, she goes missing, he is suspected by some of having something to do with it. An excellent place to start any thriller, I'm sure you'll agree.
Since I want to try to avoid spoilers here, that's as much as I'm going to say about the plot. The story of Amy and Nick meeting, their marriage and the happenstance that brings them to rural Missouri is told in flashback both from Nick's point of view and from Amy's diary. The tone of the film twists and turns as details are revealed (or are they?) that challenge what you might be thinking is going on. Nick is a guy who's loveable and caring though goofy, Amy is a woman ill at ease with her minor celebrity status and determined not to be the archetypal nagging girlfriend. Or is that merely the impression their flashbacks would have us believe? As the story progresses, we get a view inside a marriage that's initially stereotypical, but soon becomes more murky as the flashbacks dig deeper.
I think that Gone Girl is a criticism and commentary on the institution of marriage in the modern age. What is marriage if not a compromise? But how much of a compromise is too much? It's about the personas that people in the public eye end up adopting in front of a critical media, a media that waits for any misstep as an excuse to paint a person as the devil. Did that man smile too much at a press conference about his disappeared wife? Well he must have killed her then. The world of instant comment and twitter leaves no space for nuance, everyone is either a paragon to be worshipped or a sinner to be condemned. Yet when you look deeply into anyone's life - or the private life of a married couple - the reality could hardly be further from the truth. People are constantly wearing fake smiles to pander to a gentrified world, and the world doesn't like it when the mask slips.
The film focusses heavily on gender roles and the way that the world is reacting to changing gender stereotypes. A man who behaves differently to how society expects is castigated by a gossip-hungry media. A woman who cries rape is believed immediately despite circumstantial evidence that might indicate she's lying. There will be some who might accuse this portrayal of gender roles of misogyny, since on the surface it appears retrograde to the cause of women's rights in society. I think that's a simplistic viewpoint though. The book and screenplay for Gone Girl were written by the same woman, and the film has a lot of female characters, some of whom embody stereotypes and others that very much don't. Rather the film is a thriller that exists in the modern age, plays on the fears and possibilities of a changing world and says 'what if...'.
Aside from all this, Gone Girl is a film that looks amazing, with a lot of care put into individual shots and sets. Everything is particularly well-lit; not something I would normally bother to comment on, but the opening scenes really look like a morning. Great performances from everyone involved, especially Rosamond Pike who has been deserving of a central role in a film for some time now. The film has an 18 rating for one moment of horribly bloody sexualised violence, aside from that there's little else to warrant it. I fully recommend Gone Girl to anyway who wants to see a clever, witty thriller that challenges the way the modern world has conditioned you to think. In time I may come to judge it differently, but at the moment I would say this is Fincher's best film since Fight Club.
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