Gone Girl

Where to begin when talking about Gillian Flynn’s movie version of Gone Girl? Almost anything I could say would be a spoiler, so I’ll keep it really general. My wife didn’t care for it, and most of the audience with whom we saw it apparently didn’t care for it either. There was almost no reaction when it ended, just a silent trudge to the exit. I think, because most of the audience were seniors, they and my wife objected to the several really explicit sex scenes. They were also confused by it. Almost without exception, every movie made of a book I’ve already read comes up short (one exception being Gone with the Wind). This one didn’t. It was a very faithful rendition of the novel. Well, since Gillian Flynn wrote the screenplay, I guess it should have been faithful. I had wondered how she would duplicate the time shifts in the first half, with Nick, in the present, finding that his wife Amy had either been killed in their home or kidnapped, and the flashbacks through Amy’s diary entries. In the book, we had only those entries to learn about the past when she and Nick first met and the progress (or lack of progress) of their five years of marriage. But in the movie, we flash back to the visual scenes themselves and only learn later that what we saw may not have been true. She had written the diary just before their fifth year anniversary, the point at which the movie begins. Nearly everything she does before her death or abduction is meant to set Nick up as a wife killer, and oh my does she ever do a good job. If I hadn’t read the book before seeing the movie, I too would have been hopelessly confused. And since there have been millions and millions of us who have read the book (a leading best-seller for the two and a half years since she wrote it) most of the audience would have received the movie as I did, a five-star flick. And you might see both Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike red-carpeting it to Oscar wins, especially Pike as the “psychotic bitch” Amy.

If you like suspense movies with twists and turns, you’ll love this one, because it will bend you into a pretzel before it ends.