Gone Girl
All you really need to know about Gone Girl is that it's the story of Nick and Amy Dunne (Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike), a young married couple priced out of New York City and living in Missouri. When Amy goes missing on their fifth wedding anniversary, the media spotlight focuses on Nick, who begins acting abnormally. (But, then, how is a man in that situation supposed to act? Wouldn't acting normally be abnormal?) Because Gone Girl is directed by David Fincher, it's a beautiful film, with exquisite cinematography and a thoughtful visual language. Fincher eschews close-ups—this is a story about liars, and liars can't withstand the invasive honesty of a camera lens in their faces—and the palette falls heavily on the cerulean glow of dawn and the warm earth tones of boring suburbia. Critics who choose to pick apart Gone Girl for its lack of realism or its unbelievable plot twists are either stupid or willfully missing the point. This is a portrait of a marriage in modern America, where the middle class is being choked out by financial forces beyond its understanding, where the suburbs are haunted by the fear of a growing number of visible homeless people and a zombie army of prescription-drug-addled dropouts finding shelter in the abandoned husk of consumer society. The media is a shimmering cloud of guppies brainlessly chasing a flashlight around. Everyone is cocooning in their homes and distracting themselves with technology as they wait for the bad times to blow over. They slowly realize, by the early light of day, that the bad times are here to stay.
by Paul Constant