Although I briefly skimmed Gone Girl in the bookstore while it hovered at number one as best-seller, I forgot about it until the film came out. Then I avoided reviews because it was billed as a thriller and I didn't want to spoil the icicle-in-hell chance of actual thrills. For the first third of its considerable run time, Gone Girl does crackle along in a Hitchcockian vein of domestic bliss freezing over. Ben Affleck's is effective as an ethically challenged husband who may have staged his wife's disappearance.
Then the train jumps the track, the thriller ends and we drop into a weird battle of the sexes that feels spookily Reagan 80's. Without spoiling the surprises (you'll probably see the film on cable or a plane flight), I'll state the obvious: the plot beggars belief. Strangest to me in a best-selling contemporary novel is the shameless, ugly stereotyping of the female character. While the movie head fakes a he-said, she-said symmetry, Ben Affleck's clueless, philandering jerk is no dramatic match for Rosamund Pike's ice queen.
To the good, Gone Girl describes the living hell your life becomes if you are cursed enough to end up as tabloid fodder. The news vans descend and the vixen pundits of daytime TV start feeding on your entrails. The cast is sharp with especially well tuned performances from Tyler Perry as a celebrity lawyer and Neil Patrick Harris as a well heeled stalker.
I chuckled as the film bumbled along from on absurd plot twist to the next like some kind of psychotic vaudeville, but Gone Girl isn't canny or creative enough to be really twisted. And my chuckling was tempered by the realization that this book had been on the NYT best-seller list for months. I guess you can always put lipstick on a pig, if that pig is a beautiful controlling blond.
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