Wazzup Pilipinas!
From the tour de force thriller that became a bestselling must-read comes David Fincher’s screen version of Gone Girl, a wild ride through our modern media culture and down into the deep, dark fault lines of an American marriage – in all its unreliable promises, inescapable deceits and pitch-black comedy.
The couple at the center of the story – former New York writer Nick Dunne and his formerly “cool girl” wife Amy, now trying to make ends meet in the mid-recession Midwest – have all the sinuous outer contours of contemporary marital bliss. But on the occasion of their 5th wedding anniversary, Amy goes missing -- and those contours crack into a maze of fissures. Nick becomes the prime suspect, shrouded in a fog of suspicious behavior. Amy becomes the vaunted object of a media frenzy as the search for her, dead or alive, plays out before the eyes of a world thirsting for revelations.
Taking the alternately guarded and exposed role of Nick is Ben Affleck. Says Fincher of casting him: “Putting a cast together is like putting a basketball team together and Nick was the point guard. He has to feed the narrative. It’s a ‘he said, she said’ in the book; but it’s ‘he experiences, she experiences’ in the movie. It’s more subjective. You’re not gifted with all these inner monologues in the movie. So you need an actor who is very deft to play this role. It’s 3-D chess, not Chinese checkers.”
Collaborating with Rosamund Pike in the role of Amy brought Affleck into an intense pas de deux unlike anything he’s done before. “There’s a kind of inscrutable, enigmatic quality to Rosamund that made her really right for this role,” Affleck observes. “A big part of this movie, at least from my point of view, is the constant calibration of where each of the characters stands as they keep shifting and evolving – so that sense of mystery in Amy was very important to the whole enterprise.”
When Nick reports his wife missing, he begins a thorny, unwanted relationship with Detective Rhonda Boney, the primary investigator on the case -- and Nick’s only conceivable lifeline. Among the image-obsessed characters in Gone Girl, Boney is the one drawn to cold, hard truth. Taking the role is Kim Dickens, best known for The Blind Side, “Deadwood”, “Friday Night Lights” and “Sons of Anarchy.”
Dickens says she felt an instant kinship with the character. “I felt I could climb right into her,” she says. “She’s a real salt-of-the-earth woman – pragmatic, humble but actually quite good at her job.”
She notes that Boney chooses to sidle up to Nick because that’s the most promising strategy, guilty or not. “The percentages are very high when a wife goes missing that the spouse is involved,” Dickens points out. “But Boney knows that even if Nick did it, she still has to get him to think she’s on his side so he’ll open up to her. She knew him as a child, but now she has to try to figure who he has become as a man – and it’s not all that clear right off the bat. Things feel a little hinky. But she still gives Nick a little benefit of the doubt because that’s what her instincts about human behavior tell her.” Fincher was impressed by Dickens’ organic take on the role. “I wanted Boney to be a kind of Midwestern Sherlock Holmes, and that’s what Kim brings to her. She doesn’t miss much,” he says.
Thrilling and chilling clues unfold when “Gone Girl” opens October 8 in cinemas nationwide from 20th Century Fox to be distributed by Warner Bros.
Ross is known as the Pambansang Blogger ng Pilipinas - An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Professional by profession and a Social Media Evangelist by heart.
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