Gone Girl (2014)
Review of Gone Girl (2014), directed by David Fincher
I will shamefully admit that at the time of writing this, which was more than seven years after this film had come out, that the only thing I knew about this movie was the Cool Girl monologue by Rosamund Pike. I literally had no idea what this movie was about and had procrastinated on watching because of that monologue.
It was a very good monologue, I’m not dissing on it at all. But the monologue, when I knew nothing about the film, made it seem like that this was about some blonde accepting what she is. Which, in a way, is what this movie is about, but let’s discuss that later.
I have a big major gay crush on Rosamund Pike. It started when I watched I Care a Lot on Netflix awhile back, which I wrote a review of too, and I was absolutely in love with her conwoman look.
There was also major shock on my end when that movie suddenly turned into a lesbian romance, but you need to watch the movie to experience that in its full effect. And so, I will also shamefully admit that I watched this movie just because of this gay crush on Pike. But I was pleasantly surprised!
Let’s dive into the review.
When Nick Dunne’s wife goes missing, he finds himself falling deeper into the web of lies she’s created.
We see this story in every mode of storytelling: past, present, future. We begin in the present day, but there’s a lot of flashbacks to show us the momentum of Nick Dunne’s and Amy Dunne’s relationship.
They meet in New York City as two young writers; Amy is the daughter of wealthy writers who’ve created an entire book series on their daughter’s failures (the book protagonist is everything Amy is not, breeding some resentment there).
We see them having sex in libraries and having cute dates all over the city, setting it up to be some sort of whirlwind romance.
But the present day is everything but romantic. Nick, now a writing teacher in Missouri, had them move out to the Midwest when his mother got sick and eventually died. Amy hated him for that fact because they had to leave their lives in New York City behind, despite them losing their jobs in the 2008 recession.
The first seed of doubt about their relationship is planted during these kinds of flashbacks because Amy seems angry at how Nick just spends money on video games and computers, and this is the first hint to us that from the get-go their relationship was kind of doomed.
In Missouri Nick is actually cheating on Amy with one of his students, something that she finds out after catching them having sex in their house.
And so this is where fiction begins to blend with reality; when Amy goes missing, the cops find a bunch of journals in which she claims that she was being hit by Nick and being abused, leading to fears that he was going to kill her. This then makes the cops think that Nick killed her, especially after blood was found splashed in the kitchen.
The plot thickens here as we switch over to a very-alive Amy. After her Cool Girl monologue she had dyed her hair and is living in a cabin next to a bunch of drunks, living with a stash of money she’s keeping hidden on her.
It turns out that she’s actually the mastermind behind all of this; she got Nick drunk and had him sign-off on increasing her life insurance, she planted the fake diary entries in a place where the cops could find it (burning the journal in the process to make it seem like a botched attempt at getting rid of evidence), buys useless things on Nick’s credit card, and burns the fake murder weapon in their fireplace.
The media also plays a major role here as well. It creates this witch hunt against Nick and his innocent sister, pretty much ruining their lives if Amy didn’t come back and made her obsessive ex seem like a rapist.
But, at the end of the day, they (Nick, his sister, the lead investigator, and Nick’s attorney) all are aware that Amy is extremely out there and faked all of this. A bit unbelievable that the FBI just let the investigation slide so easily, but I’ll give the film the benefit of the doubt here.
I do think the way the media plays an antagonistic role in this film is absolutely powerful and relevant in today’s society.
When a young pretty white woman goes missing people go absolutely nuts to the point where innocent people are hurt by the fallout of another’s twisted actions. While Amy has slightly corrected the wrong
Flynn, the author of the novel version of the movie, has stated that she’s feminist and that it’s important to show that women can be villains too. And that’s the important part of this movie: Amy is our villain. We’re set up, too, to think that Nick is abusive in the beginning even when he proclaims his innocence.
We’re suspicious of him until Amy makes her grand re-appearance and tells us all about her evil plans. Was he a good husband? Probably not. This just seemed to have been a fling gone too far.
But Amy’s behavior is shown to be increasingly concerning as we talk to her ex-boyfriend, now a registered rapist because she falsely accused him, then we see the guy who straight up has worshipped her for twenty years.
Amy is very unhinged to the point where she inserts herself with Nick’s semen to get pregnant. That’s an entirely new level of messed up after almost framing him for murder and then forcing him to stay with you.
It’s fascinating to observe this as a contrast to the perfect Amy that her parents had created. It makes me wonder if she got this way as a form of extreme rebellion against this perfect image created, that once someone else goes outside of the perfect world she’s trying to create, she lashes out in extremely violent and manipulative ways.
But it’s almost as if she’s a character, too, that’s being written and rewritten. She’s a writer, that’s for sure confirmed in this, and it makes me think that she views her life as something she can simply change on a psychotic whim without any regard to another’s pain.
Overall Thoughts
This is jut a fascinating film to pick apart. You’re either Team Amy or Team Nick, but the plot sets you up to be either team because of how it unfolds. Originally you’re team Amy, but as you learn more and more about what’s actually goin on, you may defect to the other team.
It’s also an interesting look at gender in American society, especially when you break apart the Cool Girl monologue. She says she’s not going to do all of this for a man that isn’t worth a damn, but, at the end of the day, she ends up killing someone from her past in order to get back with him.
She literally contradicts the big monologue in this movie, which is the biggest irony of it all. It shows you how this American Dream and happy family created by it is an absolutely farce, a construct that goes away once eyes and cameras look away.
I think you should leave this film horrified, because I sure did.
