Saturday, January 24, 2015

Gone Girl - Best Actress

Fincher is one of my favorite directors, so it was no surprise to me that I enjoyed Gone Girl. The story is delightfully twisty, the performances are solid, and it looks great.

Marriage is run through the ringer in this film.  We are given a very extreme, highly dramatic look at how married couples get lost in their relationships and the lengths they are willing to go to to break the monotony of monogamy. I'm all for melodrama, so why not hatch a super complex scheme to leave a marriage and exact revenge? Toward the end of the film, the symbolic versions of the characters' actions seem to take precedence and steer the story in ways that don't always hold up as logical choices for real people, but I felt I was able to make allowances for that.

Rosamund Pike is nominated. She played broken and psychotic (but outwardly functioning) incredibly well, at times even winning me over to the thought that she is really a sort of feminist hero doing her best to come out on top despite society's challenges for her. But of course that's wrong, 'cuz she crazy.

There is a scene in this film that involves a lot of blood and it holds in my mind as one of the most hauntingly beautiful things I've seen on the screen this year. I realize this demonstrates a certain amount of depravity on my part, but I'm willing to own that. The color of that blood was stunning!

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