Director David Fincher and stars Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike have made a film adaptation that feels nastier and less balanced than Gillian Flynn’s novel. Warning: Minor spoilers ahead!
Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck in Gone Girl
Merrick Morton, Twentieth Century Fox/Regency Enterprises
Gone Girl is a story about marriage and how every union requires its share of communication and compromise. That this is like calling Psycho a movie about a man with a conflicted relationship with his mother doesn't make it any less true.
Entertainment Weekly journalist turned novelist Gillian Flynn's compulsively readable 2012 bestseller is known for its corrosive wit and dark twists, including the doozy that will be left unspoiled here, but it's the way that its lurid developments have their roots in recognizable wedded dramas that makes the novel so much more than your typical airport thriller. The book makes the reader play marital ref between thirtysomething couple Nick and Amy Dunne, as the two take turns telling the story of their five-year-long marriage, each presenting him- or herself as the more sympathetic character, and each turning out to be awful in different ways.
And now Gone Girl is a movie opening in theaters Oct. 3, directed by David Fincher (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Social Network) and adapted for the screen by Flynn herself. Starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, with buttery cinematography by Jeff Cronenweth and a score from the Oscar-winning combo of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, it's the kind of adaptation that signals in a thousand ways how it's determined to get things right. And when there are so many smaller details, including its casting, its submerged but scathing sense of humor, and its dead-on portrayal of the economically devastated Missouri town of North Carthage in which it's set, that are perfect, it can feel grouchy to complain. But on screen, Gone Girl differs in a fundamental and worrisome way from the text. It no longer feels like a narrative duel between Nick and Amy — it feels like a story about the crazy thing that happens to Nick.
Merrick Morton, Twentieth Century Fox/Regency Enterprises
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