Gone Girl

Rated R {3.5 out of 5 stars}

Yes, that’s really the title of this review. But hear me out.

Three weeks ago I spent $8.50 on a Friday night to see A Walk Among the Tombstones. “Hey,” said I, “it’s Liam Neeson tough-guy shit! What could go wrong?” Little did I realize that Tombstones would amount to nothing more than an embarrassing piece of misogynistic torture trash, poorly acted, directed and adapted. It was the kind of cliche, pseudo-noir rubbish that makes Nicolas Cage’s 8MM look like Citizen Kane. And all I can really do about it is sit and ponder the hows and whys of a movie whose sole purpose is showcasing ultra-violence against women. Therefore I spent the first portion of Gone Girl expecting to be upset.

I suppose that isn’t fair, though, to expect a David Fincher thriller to stoop to such ignoble levels, but conditioning is what it is. Gone Girl is not a gratuitous horror show. It’s actually a clever and detailed murder mystery, written and adapted by author Gillian Flynn, that uses unsettling themes and personalities to its tasteful advantage.

Without giving too much away, Gone Girl is the story of Nick and Amy Dunne (Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, respectively): an unhappily married couple detached from their once-elite Manhattan lifestyle. Having moved to Nick’s boyhood home of Missouri to care for his now-deceased mother, their marriage has since become a sham with divorce looming on the horizon. But when blonde and beautiful “Amazing” Amy mysteriously vanishes from their suburban mansion one morning, the ensuing investigation begins to point dirty fingers at Nick—all of which lead straight down an impossible rabbit hole of cold and calculating cruelty, emboldened by a national media frenzy.

The surrounding cast is a strong one. Nick’s twin and often incredulous sister, Margo, is aptly played by Carrie Coon (whom you may now recognize as Nora from The Leftovers); detective Rhonda Boney is Kim Dickens (The Zero Effect, Deadwood); bona fide weirdo Desi Collings is the lovable Neil Patrick Harris (he’ll always be Doogie Howser to me); and in perhaps the surprise performance of the film, Tyler Perry expertly plays celebrity lawyer Tanner Bolt.

While I won’t leap to compare Gone Girl to Fincher’s most brilliant directorial works like Seven, The Game or Fight Club, this is a smart film, touching a variety of nerves along the way. Much of the credit indeed belongs to author Gillian Flynn for penning both the script and book, but it takes the right vision to ultimately project page to screen, and Fincher was certainly up to the task. Themes of infidelity and jealousy are paramount, often causing a near visceral reaction as Fincher weaves the twists and turns in a manner that causes one to reevaluate character preconceptions along the way. To get that much out of Ben Affleck, for example, is noteworthy in its own right, as Affleck the actor can be so terribly uninteresting so very, very frequently. (A needless aside: During my initial perceived frustration with the film, I found myself internally cursing Affleck for once again casting himself as lead in a movie he directed, despite consciously knowing he wasn’t the director. Ben Affleck can have that effect on people, you know.)

Gone Girl’s imperfections stem from sheer plot density—there’s a lot going on pretty much all the time. You’d think that 149 minutes would be more than enough to properly attend to each thread and character, but that isn’t the case. Take Tyler Perry, for one: His portrayal of celeb attorney Tanner Bolt is arguably the best in the entire film, and yet he’s barely in it. The same can be said for Neil Patrick Harris, who deftly plays a freakish oddball you’d love to know much more about, yet we learn virtually nothing. Which doesn’t imply that most other aspects of Gone Girl are being overplayed; there are just so many characters, themes and emotions introduced, that many of them simply aren’t seen through to preferable completion.

But that’s nitpicking, at a point. Because this is a good movie, and one worth the time for anyone that enjoys an involved thriller. And that’s coming from a guy that wasn’t blown away by each and every plot ripple. What it comes down to, I guess, is that sometimes you don’t need to be blown away. Sometimes you just need to see something done right. And sometimes it takes a real horseshit flick like A Walk Among the Tombstones to put that into perspective.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

It feels like a cold, hard winter without the kids from Hogwarts to bring children of all ages out to the cinemas, and the first installment of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit is still over a year away. For those in need of a literary hero translated to the silver screen, Sony and MGM offer Lisbeth Salander from the frozen north of Scandinavia. She may or may not be good with a wand or sword, but she has a whip-smart mind and is lethal with a Taser.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was the first in a trilogy of novels written by Swedish author Stieg Larsson. It was a wild international success throughout Europe, and even spawned a trio of foreign films starring Noomi Rapace (whom U.S. audiences can see in this holiday season’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows), all of which were released in 2009. Now, TGWTDT gets a well-deserved American remake–sort of–with Rooney Mara cast in the lead role opposite the most recent James Bond (Daniel Craig) and The Social Network director David Fincher at the helm. It’s the making of a perfect event film, the kind that you’ll discuss over the water cooler at your office on Monday, but if you’re expecting the usual Hollywood-style big action flick, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

Craig plays Mikael Blomkvist, a disgraced journalist who is hired by Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to supposedly assist in writing a memoir. In reality, Henrik requires Blomkvist’s help in investigating the murder of Harriet Vanger, Henrik’s niece, who disappeared some 40 years ago. The investigation brings Blomkvist to an isolated island in northern Sweden inhabited by the Vangers and reveals the rich, reclusive family’s tortured and sordid past.

It turns out to be a difficult job, one that Henrik has more or less resigned to be futile. But when the trail proves warmer than anyone had thought, Blomkvist seeks help with his investigation. He eventually gets hooked up with Salander, whom the Vangers had hired to investigate Mikael before hiring him, and the two delve into a world full of Nazis, betrayal and Bible-thumping serial killers.

TGWTDT is the sort of movie that grabs you by the nostrils and shakes you around–at times quite violently. The frayed relationships between the members of the Vanger family–i.e. who refuses to speak to whom–is as difficult to keep track of as the myriad character names. Blomkvist even makes a wise crack about that very predicament as Henrik gives him a breakdown of the Vanger family tree. On top of that, the film hops back and forth between Blomkvist and Salander’s disparate plot lines, with him hot on the trail of an intricate mystery, and her forced to perform despicable acts in order to survive as a ward of the state. Fincher is asking you to trust him as he bombards you with twisted layers of intrigue, a menagerie of characters and scenes of violence that are difficult to sit through, without giving much of an indication where it all might be heading.

It’s a leap of faith, but luckily it turns out to be a rather rewarding one. The mystery that is at the film’s heart unfolds with great suspense, and once Salander and Blomkvist’s paths finally intertwine, TGWTDT bursts with frenetic energy. Craig and Mara are fantastic together. An odd couple of the highest order–he is clean cut, professional and cosmopolitan while she is donned always in black, her face pierced and shock of jet black hair–the two characters actually share a similar lost-in-the-woods quality. Blomkvist sees his career in ruins and is engaged in a long-standing affair with his boss, a married woman; meanwhile, Salander is a chronic outsider who craves a real human connection more than she’d probably like to admit.

To the film’s credit, the resolution of the mystery doesn’t mean the end of the characters. There is a long epilogue that follows that wraps up most of the loose ends while creating others. What all this does is make for one hell of a long movie–nearly three hours!–but there’s no reason for that to deter you. Get comfortable and enjoy. Baby, it’s cold outside.