Wednesday, October 01, 2014

Gone Girl

Gone Girl is one of the best movies ever made about marriage by Todd VanDerWerff
Affleck leans into his inner lunk to make Nick a bit of a doofus who only realizes how everybody else in the world sees him far too late. He's good here, as good as he's been on screen. But it's Pike whom audiences will be talking about and arguing about and discussing long after they've screened the film. She seizes hold of Flynn's conception of a woman slowly losing control over her own narrative with gusto, and Fincher reacts splendidly. There's a sequence around the midpoint — a monologue where Amy lays out everything that Nick has made her become over the course of their marriage — that might be the best thing the director has ever done. It's exhilarating and terrifying and nauseating, the roller coaster of that big fight at 3 a.m. that nearly ended everything, then somehow ended back in safe harbor, encapsulated in one woman's words.
....
"What have we done to each other?" Nick asks as the film begins, and at its heart, Gone Girl knows that for all of the blood shed and all of the horrors uncovered, the worst thing Nick and Amy ever did was assume the other would allow them to be the protagonist in the story of their lives. And as the whirlpool opened, each found, to their horror, the other swimming not to support them but for the opposite side of the drain.

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