Review of Gone Girl (2014) by Mike_M — 05 Oct 2014

This is a difficult movie to rate because its strengths and weaknesses are tangled together. I have not read the book, and I'm reviewing the film as its own entity.

The movie’s worth seeing, if only because of the twists, the character of Amy, and the post-movie talking points that are meant to provoke a battle of the sexes debate.

I did enjoy Fincher branching out in a new direction, and I wouldn't say that it's the wrong direction for him as much as it was a difficult tone to hit for anyone. The movie sets out to mix melodrama, realistic satire and absurdism. Though I love weird tones and shifting tones, to me the tones in Gone Girl don't always land well or mix well.

Worse still, there’s inconsistent acting, and wobbly story logic. The movie isn’t deliberately unreal enough (whether absurd or dreamlike or mythic or farcical etc) to get away with the wobbly story logic.

I'm not sure the actors are always successful at staying in the same movie together, as mentioned by user-reviewer benutty. And Affleck (as A-lister personality actors often do) seems to be so intent on 'playing a character with a backbone' that it's basically frigid, unflinching acting where his 'character' doesn't really change or have an interior. We're left watching Affleck bring the role to himself so entirely that he's not really doing anything. It's just flat acting that has about the same tone all the way through. (And it's not unlike the frigidity that Casey Affleck has in Gone Baby Gone, directed by Ben Affleck) I think this is partly dismissible by the character's degree of narcissism and shallowness, but not entirely.

But… I have toyed around with the idea that Fincher and Flynn are jazzing around metafictionally here. I’m not convinced that they are, or that they did it well if intended. But at some point, two intelligent artists may have discussed how a man is to direct a woman’s novel/screenplay of this sort.

IF they baked a metafiction joke into it, the setup clearly runs through Affleck’s under-emoting, under-engaged acting that undermines the story, and through the way that nearly every story logic problem serves to make Amy more amazing. And the meta-joke, if there is one, only plays if you see the characters as puppets, more or less: The psychopathically overengaged, self-justified modern wife who gets to always be right, and the self-centered, resentful boy-husband who takes her just barely seriously enough to subtly manipulate back and stay alive.

Yet... I'm not sure I want to give Affleck the benefit of the doubt that his practically unchanging tone and lack of interior were all just a brilliant meta-joke.