David Fincher’s new film, “Gone Girl”, gives us two narrators to look forward to, and we constantly ask which story is true. Amy Elliott-Dunne (Rosamund Pike) and Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) are a married couple who are about to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary, until Amy goes missing and everyone goes on a nationwide search to find her.
We follow Ben Affleck’s character around his small Missouri town and notice his unhappiness, at first. We follow Amy’s narration through her journal entries that tell the story of her marriage, in past tense.
The movie switches from both perspectives so fluidly, and at such important moments, when we get too much of one side. “Gone Girl” finds itself in a balanced universe of cinema where I would not mind classifying it as melodrama.
Amy and Nick were two separate people, and Nick brought her to Missouri to be closer to his dying mother, in pretext.
But the viewer sees one narration say she was happy, and Nick’s version is probably incapable of caring of what his wife thinks, like a man unhappy in his marriage would say.
They were both happy in the beginning, but the author of the original book and screenwriter is so sharp with giving the viewer the wrap too soon. Gillian Flynn, author of “Sharp Objects” and “Dark Spaces” wrote the screenplay for her book, and she is so disciplined to knowing the difference between movies and novels.
Her varying narrations in the film are given depth, and not just shock value. She portrays abuse in marriage as scary, and not just as wrong, but both scary and wrong.
Characters in the film are accused of having a “God complex”, and for being “complicated” with social settings. Clearly, Amy had an unhappy marriage with her husband, Nick. What the viewer is seeing is a relationship rekindling itself because of the wife’s disappearance.
Gillian Flynn has said in her interview with Charlie Rose, that relationships in the beginning are like “con artists”, because we only show our best self. The marriage is questioned and analyzed only for the reason that Nick becomes a suspect by his town and local police. His behavior throughout is so shallow throughout, but he’s also really caring towards his family, especially his twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon).
Media’s role is also exposed in the film for their need to find the sensational in sensitive stories. When a kidnapping occurs, the viewers will also watch Nancy Grace as she rips through the case as though she knows the truth already. Cameras bombard small towns with the big story, and the nation only sees it as a TV tube and forget to see that these are people’s lives being shown.
David Fincher’s film is the best in showing the whole story, and we can see a little bit of Alfred Hitchcock in his close-ups with his actors, and that is a flattering and nice comparison for him.
But it’s this film’s screenplay that made it great. Amy’s creepy narration, and Nick’s selfish composure are all encoded by Gillian Flynn’s writing.