Friday, October 3, 2014

Rosamund Pike Does a Star Turn in "Gone Girl"

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Gone Girl” a Star-Making Role for Rosamund Pike

By Skip Sheffield

Fearless prediction: “Gone Girl” is going to make British actress Rosamund Pike a star.
Ben Affleck already is a star, and “Gone Girl” should burnish his dramatic reputation further.
Stage actress Pike is mostly known in her native England, where she studied English Literature and graduated with honors from Oxford University. Due to extensive travels with her parents, who are both performers, she is fluent in French and German and obviously highly intelligent. She has a delicate, striking, singular beauty which makes her role as the mysterious “Gone Girl,” Amy Dunne, all the more alluring.
Novelist Gillian Flynn adapted her best-selling book for the screen, under the directorship of inventive David Fincher (“Fight Club”).
If you have ever endured the miseries of a crumbling marriage, you will surely relate to “Gone Girl.”
Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) and wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) have recently lost their magazine jobs in New York City. A Nick’s suggestion they have relocated to Nick’s Missouri home town to attend to his mother, who has a terminal illness. With the financial backing of his wife, who has a trust fund, and his sister Margo (Carrie Coon) have opened an Irish bar.
On the eve of their fifth wedding anniversary Nick arrives home to discover his house ransacked and his wife missing. As police investigate, circumstantial evidence begins to incriminate Nick. When gossip TV show TV personality Ellen Abbott (Missy Pyle) begins to speculate out loud on the possibility of Nick murdering his wife, Nick is forced to hock everything and hire the best lawyer money can buy: Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry).
One of the revelations of this film is what a good actor Tyler Perry is. We are used to seeing him in drag as the comic elderly black woman, Medea, but in business clothes Perry radiates a fierce intelligence and ingenuity.
Another revelation is Neil Patrick Harris, who plays a polar opposite character to that of his real-life personae.
Part of the fun of “Gone Girl” is the shifting allegiances we feel as both husband and wife are explored further. In short neither one is a saint, but the big reveal is that one of them is much worse than we could ever could have imagined.

“Gone Girl” is a cracking good mystery with a shocking dollop of ultra-violence. Surely it will be remembered at Academy Awards time.

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