criterionforum.org

krnash wrote:...this isn't a crime thriller, it's a satire on the American marriage. It's an exaggeration of the idea many people live their life by, which is to stick through anything to avoid a separation, which is sometimes seen as the ultimate possible disgrace...and which often takes more work and self analysis than just sticking together, believing that eventually two people have to click happily.

I disagree. There's a strong satirical current in the work (and even then it's almost more interested in the media) but there's no way in which this film isn't also very much trying to be a thriller. And I have no clue what you mean by this idea that "to stick through anything to avoid a separation" in any way reflects contemporary American attitudes about the sanctity of marriage. It really sounds like you're talking about 50-100 years ago -- unless the main characters were conservative evangelicals, which they certainly aren't.

The satire was best when the net was cast wider and it skewered the likes of Nancy Grace, who is already so over the top in real life that Gone Girl's version was more or less playing her straight. It was less funny and less effective when it mocked the willingness of the authorities to believe any line of bullshit a pretty young white woman was feeding them, regardless of how poorly it fit the facts of their case. Which brings me to the biggest problem with Gone Girl.

I agree with mfunk that Nick's final turn of grudging acceptance only plays as metaphor. It's simply not earned dramatically or justified psychologically. But I'd go further and say that Amy's not really a fully formed character either, so much as a reverse engineered plot device. This is one of those thrillers that's just too quick to sacrifice credible human psychology and dramatic motivation on the altar of one more twist than the audience sees coming (and this here audience saw the major one a mile away).

And there's a huge crucial difference between a plot twist and a character cheat, one that Gone Girl seems to be confusing pretty disastrously. The more outrageous any given character's choice, the more explanation is owed the audience. In the right circumstances, most people could do things they normally wouldn't do. But that's not what I'm talking about. The sort of character cheats Gone Girl relies on are a dishonest attempt to move the story forward in a surprising new direction by manipulating one of the central characters into suddenly acting in such a way that s/he never would (because, in this case, there are no right circumstances) or that retroactively negates the character we've come to know up to that moment. I'm thinking particularly of some more recent failed thrillers I've discussed in other threads, such as Trance and Stranger by the Lake, both of which suffer from this confusion and, in my estimation, stumble irrecoverably by forcing their lead characters to want and do things they wouldn't just for the sake of a twistier narrative. To be sure, Gone Girl has plenty of gaping plot holes, but its bigger problem are the character holes.

There is no squaring the Amy who frames her ex for rape, cuts Desi's throat and explains that she's come home to Nick because she's in love with his fake TV image (the one she knows he was faking more for himself than for her even)... There's no squaring that Amy with the one who wanted to date and then marry Nick in the first place, the one who was wounded by his infidelity, the one who moved to the middle of nowhere with him, for him (even if she resented the way that he'd seemed to decide they were going to do it without discussing it with her). If she's the sort of malignant narcissist who only cares about images, the cold blooded psychopath who'd scheme and kill to get the perfect looking life, why the hell did she ever want to talk about books with Nick (or even bang him behind the bookshelves?)? Couldn't she have manipulated her way into a loveless marriage with a well-read Wall Street tycoon (or Desi)? Or, assuming that the psycho/narcissist Amy would ever willingly spend more than a few minutes with Nick (which I still wouldn't buy), couldn't she have figured out an easier way to end things with him earlier, once she'd realized she made a mistake? Why not just frame him for rape too? Or do, I don't know, any one of a thousand other less complicated -- though, admittedly, less story worthy/fun to watch -- things.

In his Film Comment interview, Fincher at one point wonders aloud if it all doesn't sort of boil down thematically to "men are stupid, women are nuts." But his interviewer Amy Taubin won't let him off the hook. For her, by the end, Gone Girl is ultimately and only a film about one truly crazy woman.

There are still lots of details worth discussing. Like Amy's almost eating disorder, how when she's on the lam -- especially when she thinks she still might kill herself -- she's free to binge on all the terrible junkfood that perfect wife size 2 Amy would never have allowed herself. Hell, at the lakehouse she'll even horn in on other people's ice cream! As soon as she returns to her house at the end, though, we don't ever see her eat again -- she's making crepes but they all appear to be for her bulked-up hubby.

There's an overriding aspect of bourgeois wish fulfillment/fantasy in the construction of both leads, but in particular in certain traits of Amy's character, that seems to go all the way back to the book and feels almost cynically tailored for an imagined target audience of hardcore book clubbers. Amy's beautiful and smart, and a writer -- but one who doesn't really have to write. She sure seems pretty darn perfect yet doesn't feel that way on the inside (awww), because of her neglectful parents who nevertheless got rich turning her life into a series of adorable children's books. She's almost universally adored, even by men she's ignored for years. She gets to have dangerous quickies in the back of the sort of bookstore that doesn't actually exist anywhere in Manhattan anymore (psst, don't let the book club ladies know!).

And there's something to the fact that, of all the drama she causes, the worst moment of Amy's life -- at least as the film plays it -- seems to be when she finds herself suddenly and unexpectedly broke, surely also the worst nightmare of many of Flynn's readers. Which is also why, I think, her narrative so smartly (or cynically) hints/teases at the couple's longer term money issues without actually making either one of them suffer serious consequences. (Hey, they may own a bar, but it's not really all that profitable and they've been "reduced" to merely renting their McMansion).

Amy also gets to be both the faithful jilted wife and the psycho revenger, simultaneously playing the most sympathetic and most powerful roles in the sort of standard upscale 90s thriller this one almost seems to be referencing (Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct).

It's weird, but I feel like Fincher used to be more interested in character than he has been lately. The functional, shit-starting, game-playing, twist-making, motives-be-damned-just-add-one-more kind of antihero/antagonist that Amy is isn't all that far away from House of Cards' Frank Underwood (Wait, why does he want that thing again? Oh, yeah, because "power."). It's weird but I feel like Fincher cared more about his characters in less superficially realistic films like Fight Club and The Game. And that he even managed to find more to work with in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Anyway, a question for those who've read the book: At one point Margo mentions Amy's reputation for starting drama. But I feel like we see little evidence of what that actually means for her relationship with Nick prior to the main events of the film. What sorts of things would Margo have seen or known Amy to have done to Nick that would make her say this?

A few more assorted plot questions:

--Jokey hospital non-explanation "explanation" scene aside, even assuming for a second like the movie tells us the FBI drops the probe of her story (why would they?), aren't there dozens of other players out there who'd very likely go about unraveling this eventually? For starters, say, the media itself (who want to see drama period, an endless parade of details from their favorite obsessions, even more than they are inclined to accept/believe everything a pretty white woman says), citizen journalists & bloggers (wouldn't there be a whole subreddit just about what happened at the Collings lakehouse?), Desi Collings' own people (surely his family will want to know why he died? if not also any of all of his business partners? what motivation do any of them have to accept Amy's story); Tanner Bolt's ex-Secret Service agents, who surely must have detective skills comparable to Nick's (he found his way to Collings' house).

--The woodshed: So let me get this straight, according to Amy's frame-up fiction Nick supposedly bought himself all those man cave items on a secret credit card he knew they couldn't afford to pay off but then didn't unbox let alone use them because why exactly? And how does her discovering this and making it part of her anniversary game play out if the cops find it all first, as they were supposed to, with her Punch and Judy dolls on top?

--Computers. None of the detectives seem to do anything meaningfully forensic with anybody's computers. I find it hard to believe that Amy would have managed to mask every single move she made on-line. She'd have needed computers to do just about everything that was part of her plan. And deleting one's search history at home (which isn't always really deleting it) is completely different from hiding the logs of that activity that might remain with an ISP.

...Amy's announcement that she's pregnant is what convinces Nick he needs to try and keep the marriage together if only to protect the child from his psychopathic wife. This might come a little late in the proceedings, but the film clearly wants the final kiss-off to be that this ugliness/deceit will extend to the next generation.

While this obviously doesn't square away all of the issues that you mentioned with the film, I do think that it bears reminding that the only Amy we see is Diary Amy. We know that she writes the pre-escape (for lack of a better word) as a way to frame Nick. She says that she includes the truth from the Good Old Days, but how much of that we can trust is up for grabs.

She's an unreliable narrator telling her own story and trying to make the situation look a certain way. Frankly, we can't even be sure that Nick was abusive. Truly, the only thing that we know about Nick and Amy's relationship before she leaves is that it was going down and that he was cheating on her. Everything else that we get is suspect since it comes from Amy.

I'm not sure the claim about this being a satire on marriage is very apt, there's some minor cynical elements there, but the film doesn't seem to be satirizing marriage. There is a critique in there in terms of the role marriage plays for society, and the performative aspects of marriage, but that is tied up in the larger themes of the film that engage in the performative aspects of identity and personality.

The film seems far more concerned with inverting the typical domestic violence scenario, in this case the battered husband stays with his abusive wife for material reasons and out of fear of the abuser. My take on the ending was that by the end Nick had been neatly trapped and outmaneuvered by Amy, he can't leave without fearing that she'll hunt him down and kill him and if he stays he's constantly at risk of being killed (with the expectation that she'll get away with it as easily as she did with the murder of Neil Patrick Harris, by engineering an elaborate frame that justifies her behavior). That also plays into the inversion of domestic violence, which has a long history of being ignored or dismissed by the system, the male abusers are always 'free-to-go' with no charges and free to return to those they were abusing to exact more damage. An orgy of evidence wouldn't matter because you can always sweep it away under the justification that the perpetrator was 'such a nice guy.' Amy getting away with everything and keeping Affleck under her thumb is very explicitly conjuring that context for me.

Amy secretly abuses Nick physically and psychologically for years, he tries to escape but only ends up looking like the abuser instead until he ultimately slinks back inside their house at the end, completely broken.

serial killer origin story. When Amy kills NPH and then flips over his body and continues fucking him after he's bled out all over her and died she's as ecstatic as we ever see her. That makes me think that Amy has been going through a progression, the guy she frames for rape, Nick being framed for murder, and then finally she herself commits a murder rape of her own. Like Dexter she's going to need a fix again sometime in the future. She is certainly an anti-hero in a way, and the ending ominously suggests that Nick will definitely be the next victim when she feels the itch--the need--that was only scratched by killing. Se7en gave us a serial killer that was unknowable, with no way of understanding how he got that way (other than that he was "crazy,"), Gone Girl goes the opposite direction and gives us the beginnings of serial killer who we can know how they got there each step of the way.

And if not full serial killer, there's a plausible streak to take it to a softer S&M side. the film seems to suggests Amy gets off on structure and obedience and being in control and inflicting pain within boundaries she defines and control. they fuck in the bookstore when Nick follows her clues, doing exactly what she wants. she fucks NPH only after she has mastered the camera angles (the bonds) of her confinement. In a way, I wonder if being "trapped" by NPH was something of a turn on for her?

I proffer that Nick returns because he truly wants to, that his justification of blackmail and terror slowly becomes another facade, and that, as Amy suggests, he loves the man she once brought out of him... and the man her return has made him to the outside world. Ultimately isn't her offer to allow him to make that facade the actual, not just as far as the world is concerned, but also as far as they see and treat themselves? I think one of the most telling moments of the film is after his big interview. The celebratory nature afterwards quickly goes from glee in outmaneuvering Amy, to glee in winning over the public. In fact, I sense much unremarked pettiness and point-scoring as Nick's media campaign starts to turn into a proxy marital war, domestic bickering turned cat-and-mouse lethal. "Just let her show her face now."

is intended to be an inverted absuive relationship, and Nick returns because he loves the person that Amy/this relationship has brings out of him,

Nick staying because he want's to, rather than feeling he has to. I saw this as the films darkly comic core. He actually falls in love again with the returning Amy- she's happy and satisfied, she's not giving him shit, she's going to have a baby with him, their money problems have gone and most importantly, they know and understand each other now in a way they never did before.

The big character twist for Rosamund Pike feels fake because the character she's revealed to be is literally a person who does not exist, a character type that has no analogue in reality. The thing is, she is a character that abusers pretend exist all the time, the mysterious woman whom they totally never touched but mysteriously gets beaten anyway, the rape victim where it was totally consensual and she's just a lying sociopath. It is, to say the least, extremely upsetting to have this phantom given form- like, as though this movie was written as self justification by a gestalt of a number of serial abusers.

I get the satirical elements, that it's as much about the media as it is about our characters, and the way it inverts abusive relationships has a neat symmetry to it, but in a world in which people pretend that false rape accusations happen hundreds of times more often than they do, it's difficult to sit through False Rape Accusation: the Movie.

Great points, Warren and matrix. I enjoyed the slickness of the filmmaking here (that murder scene made me gasp out loud) but I found very little depth to these characters or the plot. Any potential complexity or ambiguity to Amy's character in the first half of the movie (when we're led to see her as a woman whose actual self is in conflict with her perfect trophy-wife persona) is eventually negated by her "craziness," so that in the end "because she's crazy" becomes a convenient way of explaining all of her nonsensical behavior. As such, I found little reason to care about anything that she did in the film, because her actions were revealed to be the whims of a "crazy" person.

I did think the film was quietly funny throughout--but as a satire its targets are cheap ones (the 24-hour-news media is hysterical and phony! Married couples put on false faces for the public! etc.) I kept getting the sense that Gillian Flynn thought these were really deep and profound insights when in fact they're pretty facile. Under other circumstances they might have been better deployed but the "character holes" (as Warren puts it) shred the film of any nuance it might otherwise have had.

In response to matrix's point, I also found the rape- and abuse-accusation stuff to be pretty cringe-worthy, especially the scene between Affleck and the ex-boyfriend. While other scenes encourage us to sympathize with Amy as a woman who has been treated like a sexual object by her husband (even if she admits to us that he never actually hit her), this sympathy gets muddied by the revelation that she has a history of destroying the lives of her romantic partners in ways that are disproportionate to their "crimes." (I still don't understand why, even as unhappy as she was in that marriage to Affleck, she couldn't have just, I dunno, filed for a divorce or walked out on him like any sane person would have done. She needed to frame him for murder and get him executed because he was a run-of-the-mill cheating asshole? And yet her vitriolic, murderous hatred for him is not so strong that it can be neatly reversed by his behavior during a TV interview?) It's true that the tables turn at the end, and Affleck ends up the one trapped in an "abusive" relationship, but it's hard to say whether this effectively creates sympathy for women who are actually in such situations or whether it simply reinscribes Amy as the castrating psycho-bitch. I'm thinking more the latter.

It's true that in the end they're both horrible and they "deserve" each other, but by that point everything has been so canceled-out that there are no stakes left. I no longer cared whether this relatively-sane-but-obnoxious person was either happily or unhappily married to this sociopathic-and-equally-obnoxious person, or whether anyone else outside of their marriage knew just how fucked-up they really were.

Roger Ryan wrote:I can't disagree with the plot holes or questionable character motivation, but the impression I got was Amy's announcement that she's pregnant is what convinces Nick he needs to try and keep the marriage together if only to protect the child from his psychopathic wife. This might come a little late in the proceedings, but the film clearly wants the final kiss-off to be that this ugliness/deceit will extend to the next generation.

That's my impression too. "Staying in it for the kids" is basically a short-cut to fuck with said kid's life. Divorce is no picnic either, but in my experience there is a kind of honesty to it that while not easy to live through, with the right parents, it's easier to manage and still have an okay life.

That said, the heightened reality did feel a touch too clever at times, but often (for me anyway) it was undercut by either more grounded scenarios (Amy getting robbed of her money) or stuff so over the top you can't help but admire it (the whole NPH murder scene, maybe something that will be remembered one of Fincher's better examples of his visualist style).

Once Affleck's character discovered the woodshed full of boxed goodies, I immediately thought he should go to the police with this find because it would basically exonerate him. And yet, the inept cops somehow saw it as reinforcing their theories. A poorly written plot point in a movie full of them (I found myself in agreement with much of your post) and yet, a movie that I still found thoroughly entertaining.

…when she douses herself with red wine and it becomes obvious that she was going to set-up Desi and likely kill him…

The comparisons to Vertigo - which the novel reportedly references - seem insulting. Not an actual reference, but during their last meeting, Tanner laughs and tells Nick that he and Amy have the most fucked-up relationship on the planet. I remember using those exact same words once to describe Scottie and Madeleine but their relationship was profoundly fucked-up, driven by torturous pain and desire (for each other) on both sides. I feel like some people here are rationalizing that something similar is happening with Nick and Amy - I can think of a few moments that suggest this, but I can't possibly call these defining moments for the characters as they're buried by so much more that suggests otherwise.

Turning her into a crazy sociopath works for me, in the dynamic of the film here.

Ultimately, I'd love to see this film again. Like Zodiac, the ambiguity at the end, and not having a true feeling that the film has wrapped up isn't something I mind. I think it works. But the film is perhaps trying to do too much. A satire on marriage. A satire on media. A detective story. A black comedy. It doesn't always do them all well, and perhaps the media satire is the only one that works the whole way through for me.

Plot-holes-wise, though, will this hold up? I re-watch Se7en every so often and find it holds up so well, and appreciate it more and more every time. This film? You're telling me the cops didn't even look at Desi's cameras to actually ensure she was there the whole time? There is no evidence whatsoever Desi came to the house on the day she was allegedly kidnapped. No witness. No toll roads passed. Nothing. Lastly, Desi was obviously wealthy beyond all logic, which is oddly never explained (and is it explained how Amy knows he's rich?)...rich people don't just disappear like that (see: Amy's disappearance). She couldn't have gotten away with it as easily as she does, in other words).

In fact, NPH feels like a pretty lazy plot-device. The other boyfriend accused of rape had his life ruined by Amy. It's a great scene that opens Nick's and the audiences eyes in a very effective way. NPH is somehow an incredibly rich and successful man who somehow secretly always harbored a love for his first girlfriend who was mean to him and kept him on a leash during their relationship?

Maybe it's in the book, but thinking about it now, it bugs me.

she was hiding out in a cabin on table rock lake near branson, it's about a three to four hour drive to north st Louis with no toll roads and it's definitely possible to make without Gasing up.

I also thought that desi's family was rich enough to make any Amy generated problems go away if she had fucked with him like she did the ex boyfriend, but my wife said she didn't think Amy had done anything to Desi because he had more value to her as a backup/bailout. Using him to satisfy her fetish for wrecking lives wasn't a move she'd make.

But then she got the utility she wanted out of him, he crossed her and she graduated up the snuff ladder to murder.