Ah, yes. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. The book that has been read, dissected, and discussed by every book group in America. It stole sleep from people who just wanted to race through to the end. It ruined vacations. It was the topic of water-cooler chatter in offices.
Now that David Fincher’s movie adaptation is out (with a screenplay by Flynn), there’s even more to discuss. Shall we?
Obviously, there are many severe Gone Girl spoilers beyond this point.
Some points of discussion:
–I generally enjoyed it a lot, but my biggest gripe is that the movie seems a little soft on Nick Dunne. Since Amy’s diary entries are truncated in the beginning, you lose a lot of her point of view before the big reveal happens and it’s clear that she’s crazy. Also, the book gives you the sense that Nick is hiding or withholding information from you, which makes him more suspect. In the movie, you think it was shitty that he cheated, but you’re basically on his side the whole time. The book version of Nick makes him seem like more of an active jerk. I would’ve liked to have seen that more in the movie, especially since it’d be so easy to coax out of Affleck.
–Speaking of, what do you think of casting? Affleck and Pike were both aces, in my opinion. I was a little less sold on NPH, who seemed to me to be cartoonier than the rest of the movie, like he was a fustier Barney Stinson. I was also surprised by how much I liked Tyler Perry, considering I have no interest in his movies since I’m not really into melodrama. Perry is not a melodramatic actor.
–Where does Gone Girl fall in the David Fincher oevre? I found the central mystery more compelling than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The story was tighter, too, and I found it more interesting than The Social Network in the way it deals with flawed or unlikable characters. It didn’t put knots in my stomach the way Zodiac did, though, and it wasn’t as stylish or as crazy as Fight Club or The Game. I guess that’s a long way of saying I’d put it somewhere in the middle.
–Holy shit, Patrick Fugit is an adult?
–Was there humor in the book? I don’t really remember. But Amy’s brush-off of the detective — “Can I get back to the part where I was being held captive?” — made me laugh. So did, “Should I know my wife’s blood type?”
–So many little visual jokes, too! My favorite was the first shot of Nick, carrying the “Mastermind” board game. Amazing. I also thought it was funny that Amy was brushing her teeth with Aim toothpaste, since that’s what Nick called her. And did anyone else notice that they had a lot of framed pressed flowers in their house, a la Dragon Tattoo?
–The surprise appearance by Scoot McNairy is, as always, very welcome.
Also, she is totally not a dude!
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Here is my Fincher ranking:
1. Zodiac (if I could give this spots 1-3, I would)
2. Fight Club
3. The Game (a man with a watch like that doesn’t have passport problems getting out of Mexico)
4. Gone Girl
5. Alien3
6. Social Network
7. Seven (I kinda did that on purpose)
8. Dragon Tattoo
9. Benjamin Button
10. Panic Room
I did this on Twitter but:
1. Zodiac (yes, an unimpeachable masterpiece that I don’t expect he’ll ever top)
2. Fight Club
3. The Social Network
4. Seven
5. Gone Girl
6. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
7. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
8. Alien 3
9. The Game
10. Panic Room
If I’m being honest, though, 6-9 are all pretty close together for me.
So what I’m hearing is you want me to make you watch The Game again.
I mentioned on Twitter too, but for me it’s something like:
Zodiac (his best by a mile)
Fight Club
Seven
Gone Girl
The Social Network
And the rest. I think of The Game and Panic Room pretty similarly. They’re excellent thrillers, and I think of Girl With The Dragon Tattoo as being on that order but I don’t like it as much as the other two. Alien 3 is a mixed-bag curiosity, but might rank over those thrillers in my preference because of its Alien-ness. And I’ve only seen Benjamin Button once. I liked it at the time, but was sort of unmoved. But I also have the suspicion that one day I’ll revisit it and find something else.
By “one day, I’ll revisit it” I’m assuming you mean The Game, because it definitely belongs above Social Network!
Ha, you know what I mean! But I’d totally like to see The Game again.
SCOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT!
As someone who delights in character-actor-spotting, not only was I DELIGHTED when I realized I was looking at my man Scoot, I really appreciate Fincher’s use of Kim Dickens as the main cop; I know her mainly as the girl from Zero Effect and she’s great!
The book definitely has funny moments but — and this probably has to do with my fussiness about prose as much as anything — a lot of it plays cuter/banter/faux-sardonic funny, rather than the sharper jabs of the movie. The book, if I recall correctly, gets its funny moments from stuff characters say, and that’s certainly here, but you can also wring a lot of humor out of line readings and reaction shots in a movie. Fincher, for all of his rainy brown-green bleakness, gets some pretty wicked laughs in a lot of his movies. There’s also something about a key murder scene in the movie that I found delightful, in a sick sort of way — horrific, yes, but pleasing in a kind of fucked up genre-y way that I don’t think was there in the book (which I did like a lot).
I do wish Nick had been a little more visibly fucked up. I kind of wanted that slightly ghoulish dark comic tone to permeate the ending of the movie a bit more, and I think you get there if Nick is slightly more likable. A little more early-aughts Affleck, a little less contrite-and-classy director Affleck.
I don’t know why, but I was expecting more of an Election vibe, where Tracy Flick is proactive-organized awful and Mr. McAllister is selfish-ineffectual awful. The Tracy Flick expectation was mostly met with Amy, but Nick mostly comes of as bumbling but much more the injured party. I wish Fincher hit it a little harder that Nick forced Amy to move to Missouri, then froze her out and cheated on her. I think you get more of a sense of how he was mean to her in the book, even the parts that are his narration.
Slightly less likable, is what I meant to say here.
Okay, I finally saw this last night and I agree with everything Marisa said, right down to being surprised by loving Tyler Perry and not loving NPH. Tyler Perry breathed some great comic relief into the film. He was the only really happy, loving-life person and it was refreshing. (“You two are the most fucked up people I’ve ever met.”) NPH couldn’t really be creepy enough for the role.* Loved Carrie Coon and Kim Dickens, the latter of whom conjured up a Frances McDormand-in-Fargo-but-stern kind of thing.
It really is a shame that the movie doesn’t play up more how thoroughly Nick and Amy deserve each other and what horrible people they both are (though obviously murderous psychopath beats narcissistic asshole any day).
Also wish they had emphasized a little more that Desi was holding Amy captive because he was obsessed with her (in the book it’s implied more clearly that he had that lake house specifically set up against the day Amy came back to him), and that Amy made the first sexual advance with more or less the expectation that he would rape her eventually, however little violence was involved.
Re: Comedy? The whole theater laughed when Amy stumbled into Nick’s arms and he whispered, “You. Fucking. Bitch.”
Till I read your rankings below, I didn’t realize how many Fincher films I’d seen and enjoyed. I haven’t analyzed any of them from a filmmaking point of view, so my rankings would be based on pure like. In that case, I think this, Fight Club, and Zodiac would be first (only saw Zodiac once and in the theater, so hard to say whether it would be #1). Then The Game. I remember Seven being quite good but incredibly hard to watch and I honestly don’t think I could bear to ever watch it again. Ditto Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, except I like the plot and acting in Seven more. Haven’t seen Benjamin Button or Alien3. I would put Social Network before Panic Room artistically, but for me Panic Room has more rewatchability (NEW WORD). Because it has a slight, unintentional hilarity to it that I loved.
*Actually, think the movie could have benefited from playing up the darker qualities of nearly EVERYONE in the novel except Go and Boney, who are pretty sane. One of the clever things about the book was how it (sort of like in Seinfeld, only not funny?) made Amy sympathetic by casting her as merely the smartest, most ruthless wacko in a circle of morally compromised people. Like, damn, at least somebody’s getting shit done. Her parents: parasites. Nick: penis. Various stalkers: yuck.
ETA: Octopus and Scrabble!
“It really is a shame that the movie doesn’t play up more how thoroughly
Nick and Amy deserve each other and what horrible people they both are
(though obviously murderous psychopath beats narcissistic asshole any
day).”
Yes!!! I feel like I said this after the movie, and the people I were with (dudes, if it matters) were all “Um…” But I did think after reading the book that they deserved each other!
Also, at a work lunch, my officemates were split 50/50 on whether or not they liked the book. The people who didn’t like it, though, all didn’t like it because they were disturbed by the ending.
Desi’s plot definitely suffers the most from movie time-limit constraints.
Don’t listen to people who tell you Alien3 isn’t good!
Yeah, I actually felt like the movie retained some of that weird admiration or sympathy for Amy. Or at least I still felt it. Part of that was Pike’s performance, and part of it is that moviegoer thrill of rooting for somebody who is pulling something off really competently AND THEN rooting for somebody to worm their way out of a sticky situation (as horrifying as it is, there’s a perverse thrill in seeing her use the situation at Desi’s and then direct her own interrogation/interview after she returns). Sure she’s villainous, but she’s such a great character!
I agree that Amy remains sympathetic in the film for all the reasons you mention. Just meant to say that the villainy was less… democratically distributed… in the film than it was in the book.
I liked the movie a lot, and I think I read some more ambiguity in it’s portrayal of Nick (and Affleck’s performance) than you guys did. But I agree that there a few reasons that film-Nick comes off as more sympathetic than book-Nick. To me, probably the biggest difference was the reduced role of his father (particularly his father’s misogyny). It makes a world of sense to cut down that stuff for the movie, when you’re looking for ways to hone the pace and focus. But without it, and without Nick’s internal voice in the book that echoes his father’s misogyny the more distressed he gets, there’s less to mitigate the natural inclination as a movie audience to identify with the guy being framed for a crime.
And what a great cast (Scooooot!). Carrie Coon and Kim Dickens were terrific, I thought Rosamund Pike killed it, and I was hugely delighted every moment Tyler Perry was on screen.
I don’t know how much my mom has read about the story, but I hope she managed to avoid finding out any of the reveals, because I’d love to watch this one with her cold.