Gone Girl, currently sitting at 8.8 on IMDB and 93% on Rotten Tomato is a big hit with critics. Directed by David Fincher, whose resume includes Fight Club and House of Cards, this is a long and laborious, carefully crafted story with one foot in the noir world (it somewhat reminds me of Double Indemnity) and another in that more contemporary genre of media insanity, while also being a police procedural.
Ben Affleck is Nick, a guy whose career isn’t going all that well, comes home and finds that his lovely wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) is gone, apparently kidnapped. There’s no ransom demand, but deliberately constructed clues start turning up. The town turns out to search for the lost wife, and when there is no success, media jackals jump on the story, turning the story into a Jonbenet Ramsey-like media circus with Nick as the villain. Videos are broadcast with Amy’s concerned parents and Nick pleading with the kidnappers. As the days go by, police start to suspect a different sort of foul play, and Nick, the concerned husband, is their focus.
As one would expect in a noir plot, things are not what they seem. Amy is alive and well, out on her own, and laying low, with an a agenda. Nick is revealed to have a secret lover that casts doubt on his credibility and he hires a celebrity lawyer (Tyler Perry) who specializes in defending celebrities in high-profile cases. Amy is revealed to have a background that defies her innocent, lovable image. The police are ready to arrest Nick and his seemingly complicit twin sister. I’d love to say how this ends but it would be a spoiler for a movie that takes its delight in the twists and turns that eventually reveal what has happened.
I liked this movie a lot, although it might be thought to be over-long at 2 1/2 hours. There is a lot of police procedure, and a complex exposition that reveals the story in two parallel time spans, Nick’s and Amy’s. It’s not an easy movie, has a lot of plot twists, has no action, and talks a lot. There’s one very serious, extended blooper that I won’t reveal since it would be a spoiler. I don’t know that I would put it at an 8.8 (in the lofty realm of Casablanca and Citizen Kane), but it’s far more interesting than a lot of what gets on the screen. Acting is excellent, pacing is tense and, if you like this sort of story, it mostly holds together and beats the heck out of another repetitive action movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym3LB0lOJ0o
