In this image released by 20th Century Fox, Patrick Fugit, left, and Kim Dickens appear in a scene from “Gone Girl.” The film, based on the best-selling novel, will release on Oct. 3. (AP Photo/20th Century Fox, Merrick Morton)By Kenneth Turan
LOS ANGELES – Based on a whopper of a best-selling novel, with a major star in the lead and a top-of-the line director behind the camera, the film adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” couldn’t be a bigger deal.
Great is the interest in this deliciously twisted David Fincher film starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike as the couple from hell. And or once, all the fuss is justified. Superbly cast from the two at the top to the smallest speaking parts, impeccably directed by Fincher and crafted by his regular team to within an inch of its life, “Gone Girl” shows the remarkable things that can happen when filmmaker and material are this well matched.
Fincher, whose work can be gratuitously disturbing (“Seven”) as well as formally impressive (“The Social Network”), is by nature a chilly director, a temperament that meshes well with the unsettlingly bleak view of human nature that “Gone Girl” is all about.
Novelist and screenwriter Flynn must have been briefed by the Shadow himself about the evil that lurks in the hearts of men (and women), not to mention the lies, manipulation and self-interest that live there too. But the fact that Flynn’s subjects are essentially love, marriage and personal relationships gives “Gone Girl” a human connection that was absent in Fincher’s off-putting last work, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”