Movie Review: "Gone Girl"

"Gone Girl": C+.  Major clues are discovered, almost in plain sight, inside a suspect's house days after the police supposedly combed the place with high tech tools looking for evidence.  (Maybe they were in a hurry to get to the doughnut shop.)  A character enters the hospital with dried blood on the skin, and emerges days later with the blood still visible.  (Maybe there was a shortage of soap and wash cloths inside the medical facility.)  No one orders a paternity test for a fetus playing a key (invisible, of course) role in the story, even though the purported father has already willingly submitted his DNA to the authorities.  (Why didn't he or his lawyer think of ordering the test, even if the police didn't?)  A missing woman's former boyfriend is identified early-on to the cops, but they don't bother to set up a stake out or put him under any kind of surveillance. (Maybe the script writers ran out of time, but this film does run two and a-half hours.)  One of the greatest mysteries surrounding Gone Girl is how a movie with so many holes can be a major hit at the box office. (The film, which was released in October, has a very good chance of becoming one of the top ten grossing movies of all time for that month.  As of November 5, ticket sales had exceeded $137 million; it must reach $164 million to crack that top ten.)  The only explanation I can come up with is that the film's success is mainly attributable to the mega-hit 2012 book by Gillian Flynn bearing the same title.  Flynn also penned the movie's screenplay.  Her adoring reading public must have flocked to the theater for multiple viewings.

Many studies have shown that three of the most common elements in troubled marriages are money, fidelity and children.  Nick and Amy Dunne (Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike) have hit that trifecta, and then some.  When the story opens, Amy is already missing.  Ben, alerted by a phone call from his neighbor that the front door to his house is wide open, rushes home from the bar he owns to discover the living room ransacked.  There is no sign of his wife, the police are called in and the usual questions are asked. From that point, the storytelling goes back and forth, with intermittent flashbacks revealing that the "perfect" couple had their behind-the-scenes problems.

The police, led by Detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens), do not initially look upon Nick as a suspect, but little by little both the police and we, the viewers, start to catch on that Nick might not be the all-American guy he outwardly seems.  Why was Amy's life insurance policy recently upgraded?  (Isn't that true in all such TV shows and movies?  The missing person or the deceased always carries an enhanced life insurance policy, naming the prime suspect as the beneficiary.)  Why did Amy secretly buy a hand gun?  And what about all those accusatory entries in her diary?

Less than half way through the film, we learn that Nick has had a little nookie nookie going on the side with Andie (Emily Ratajkowski), one of his former college students who looks more like a high school sophomore.  How dumb can Nick be?  He even invites Andie over to spend the night with him at the house of his twin sister, Margo (Carrie Coon). The scads of media members who have been camping outside Margo's house inexplicably are nowhere to be seen when Andie enters and exits; how convenient!

My two favorite aspects of Gone Girl are the performances by Tyler Perry and Missi Pyle.  Perry plays Tanner Bolt, a Johnnie Cochran type of attorney, the camera-loving kind that celebrities hire when their backs are against the wall and public opinion has already found them guilty.  Pyle is absolutely dead-on as a cable TV pseudo-journalist in the style of Nancy Grace, who immediately presumes all suspects to be guilty, especially if the alleged victim is an attractive woman.  Speaking of which…

Rosamund Pike, a former "Bond Girl" (2002's Die Another Day), is outstanding as Amy, a difficult and taxing role.  Not having read the book, I was surprised at the number of scenes in which she appears.  Not that I'm complaining.