Gone Girl (2014)
Directed by David Fincher
With his wife's disappearance having become the focus of an intense media circus, a man sees the spotlight turned on him when it's suspected that he may not be innocent.
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64 films that influenced Gone Girl
What critics say influenced Gone Girl
The film, with a screenplay by Flynn, is as bifurcated as the half-truths it is built on, with echoes of "To Die For" and "Fatal Attraction."
Sure, it makes knowing nods to classics directed by Hitchcock, let alone lesser but hugely popular ’80s flicks as Fatal Attraction and The Jagged Edge.
Pike leaves nothing behind, delving full throttle into an iconic performance that will rank up there with the likes of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.
Suffice to say that its explicit sex and violence and one-damn-thing-after-another, to-hell-with-realism plotting put it in the " Basic Instinct "/" Fatal Attraction "/" Presumed Innocent " wheelhouse.
The fact that this film is getting as much play on the talk-show route as “Fatal Attraction” did only makes me think of the dirth of quality TV, and that the Super-smart, Sexy, Ivy-league, Sociopathic Wife is merely the latest flavor of the month — probably to keep us, the 99%, from looking at the real sociopaths who run things.
Shocking, subversive, and often wickedly funny, Gone Girl is not Fincher’s best film, but certainly one of his most entertaining, and Fatal Attraction-level damning to romance (great for your anti-date night!).
Nick Dunne borrows some from Henry Fonda in The Wrong Man and Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, never coming close to either actor’s performance.
Framed in close-up, the part running down the top of Pike’s ice-blonde hair instantly evokes Hitchcock’s famous image of Kim Novak’s bun in Vertigo; ripe with duplicity, the story’s playing field is already wildly unstable.
In all of this “Gone Girl” has a good deal in common with Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” which also offered its big revelation early on, and then toyed with viewers by becoming a dark study of romantic obsession.
It's a little like "Vertigo" (but with an entire, extra third act).
But the biggest star here may be Fincher’s surgically precise insight and silky style of suspense, which makes this film a modern companion to such classics as Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” and Clouzot’s “Diabolique.”
Psycho is a touchstone (as is Body Heat ), though Fincher utilises suspense as a smokescreen for social critiquing.
I kept thinking of William Hurt and Kathleen Turner in Body Heat (1981).
That can work on film, as shown by another beauty, Gene Tierney, in “Laura” and “Leave Her to Heaven,” but the scheming of Tierney’s heroines was matched by a rare, ornate febrility in the movies themselves.
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Nick Dunne borrows some from Henry Fonda in The Wrong Man and Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, never coming close to either actor’s performance.
That can work on film, as shown by another beauty, Gene Tierney, in “Laura” and “Leave Her to Heaven,” but the scheming of Tierney’s heroines was matched by a rare, ornate febrility in the movies themselves.
Its dark themes—including a marriage battle that makes The War of the Roses seem like a tickle fight—could prove too heavy for some mystery fans, and the subversive handling of satirical elements might be mistaken for schlockiness.
Ostensibly a scathing examination of how a marriage can quickly devolve from wedded bliss to homicidal tendencies (“The War of the Roses” as scripted by Hannibal Lecter comes to mind), Fincher and Flynn manage to also work in an equally acidic satirisation of the frothing media frenzy that often gravitates to these sort of cases in real life, primarily via Missi Pyle as a cable news talking head in the Nancy Grace mold.
It makes “The War of the Roses” seem warm and fuzzy.
Gone Girl may come advertised as a thriller, but that’s Fincher being a trickster—he’s gone and made the curtest, nastiest, most acidic black comedy about the marital accord since The War of the Roses.
Pike, a Hitchcockian beauty with Sharon Stone’s Basic Instinct chill, is a revelation as Amy, who may not be as “amazing” as she seems.
The film version, directed by reigning prince of darkness David Fincher (“Zodiac,” “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”), is this generation’s “Basic Instinct.”
Suffice to say that its explicit sex and violence and one-damn-thing-after-another, to-hell-with-realism plotting put it in the " Basic Instinct "/" Fatal Attraction "/" Presumed Innocent " wheelhouse.
Meanwhile, the third act is pure Basic Instinct , its she devil philosophy and orgasmic splashes of blood eerily replicating the cool frenzy of Verhoeven’s Euro-influenced Americana.
It's Basic Instinct meets Scenes From a Marriage.
Around the midpoint, Fincher shifts to a neutral perspective and the narrative slides into Basic Instinct territory, complete with unconventional sex and copious amounts of blood.
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Narrated scenes from Amy’s diary—many of them set in an artificial, mannered nighttime New York that seems modeled on Eyes Wide Shut—run parallel to the investigation into her disappearance.
It may be as dense as Stanley Kubrick’s final poison-pen valentine, “Eyes Wide Shut,” which ends with the line, “You know, there is something very important we need to do as soon as possible… Fuck.”
The great femme fatales -- the characters played by Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and by Jane Greer in Out of the Past to name just two -- have been the creations of men, irresistible dream girls onto which men can project their fears and longing.