The goodbye girl

The title character in director David Fincher’s Gone Girl is actually a woman, Amy Elliott Dunne (Rosamund Pike), but calling her a “girl” is more than a simple reversion to pre-feminist terminology. Before she met and married Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), Amy was the inspiration for Amazing Amy, the protagonist of a popular series of children’s books by her parents Rand (David Clennon) and Marybeth (Lisa Banes) Elliott. Like A.A. Milne’s son Christopher Robin, Amy has remained a child in the minds of millions of strangers. Nick and his twin sister, Margo (Carrie Coon), may see Amy as a woman, but much of America doesn’t—and that’s why a media circus springs up when Amy suddenly disappears from her and Nick’s suburban Missouri home on the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary.

Investigating Amy’s disappearance are Detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) and Officer Jim Gilpin (Patrick Fugit)—officially. Unofficially, there’s Ellen Abbott (Missi Pyle), a tabloid-TV-news star whose sensational coverage stops just short of slander in saying that Nick is hiding something. Officer Gilpin agrees with Abbott; Det. Boney remains agnostic. “Y’ever hear that expression ’The simplest answer is often the correct one?’” Gilpin asks. “Actually,” Boney says, “I’ve never found that to be true.”

It certainly isn’t here. Fincher and writer Gillian Flynn (adapting her own novel) flip back and forth between following Nick in the days and weeks after Amy’s disappearance and scenes of Amy writing in a diary, flashing back to their courtship, their marriage, their move from New York to Missouri to be near Nick’s dying mother, the strains in their relationship, and Amy’s growing fear of what her husband might do. In both present time and flashback, questions arise. As Fincher and Flynn peel away layers of their story, a feeling of dread grows; it’s like pulling moldy leaves from an artichoke that is rotting from the inside out.

So far, I haven’t disclosed anything that can’t be gleaned from seeing Gone Girl’s preview trailer, and in reviewing a movie like this it’s important to know when to shut up. Suffice it to say much that we see is not what it seems. The simplest answer is not the correct one, and even the trailer has its share of misdirection.

Gone Girl is the movie equivalent of a compulsive summer read (which the book was). However, one difference between novels and movies in general, and the two versions of Gone Girl in particular, is this: while Gillian Flynn could never have hoped to win a Pulitzer Prize for the book, the movie is blatant, and pretty credible Oscar bait.

First, there’s Pike. Amy Dunne is the kind of role that makes stars and, with luck, gets Oscar nominations, and Pike is getting a remarkable stroke of luck: She has two movies going into wide release on the same day—this one and Hector and the Search for Happiness—that showcase her versatility beyond simply going from her native British to an American accent. In Hector, she plays Simon Pegg’s simple (though hardly simple-minded) girlfriend. But there’s nothing simple about Amy. Even screened through flashback diary entries, we can see the chasm that separates the public and private personae, and Pike becomes more fascinating with every minute of screen time. (Movie buffs may find themselves reminded of Gene Tierney in Laura.)

Affleck hasn’t always been lucky, or smart, in his choice of roles, and too many movies like Pearl Harbor, Daredevil and Reindeer Games gave him an image of callow triviality that didn’t dissipate until he started directing movies like Gone Baby Gone and Argo. This background plays into his performance as Nick Dunne; not everything to Nick meets the eye, either.

Let’s nod, too, to good work from Tyler Perry as Dunne’s lawyer (yes, it gets to the point where Nick needs one) and Sela Ward as a TV journalist more serious than Ellen Abbott, and Neil Patrick Harris, third-billed in a small but key cameo.