Review: Gone Girl

City Paper grade: B 

Pitting diary entries against the ostensibly objective third-person, Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl is all about perspective. Nick, played by Ben Affleck in this Flynn-scripted, David Fincher-directed film, sees himself as a man ground down by his wife's impossibly high expectations; Amy (Rosamund Pike) casts herself as the victim of an emotionally and, eventually, physically abusive spouse, who may be responsible for her disappearance, or worse. Fincher's movie adds a third perspective, or rather an interlinked set of them — the eyes of the world, which are increasingly trained on the media sensation brewing in small-town Missouri.

In the movie's first section, Amy is a present absence: a smear of blood not quite erased from a kitchen floor; a voice from a diary's half-charred pages. Later — well, that would be telling. Suffice it to say that Pike excels in a part that's all but impossible to bring to life, playing a character that's been constructed by others since her parents turned her into the star of a series of children's books. "Amazing Amy" quickly outpaced the real McCoy, but the former's success taught the real-life Amy how to hone in on the gap between who you are and who people want you to be.

That divide, and the way we use lies and half-truths to build a rickety bridge across it, is at the heart of Gone Girl, and a slick and sickly heart it is. Where Flynn's novel was blackly cynical, Fincher's movie is more wryly bemused — a shift, though not an improvement. Marriages are bound by aspiration: We agree to play our better selves, at least until we lose the stamina to keep it up. It's powerful stuff, but it's also thin, and Fincher doesn't do much more than slap on a dazzling coat of varnish.