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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