Gone Girl

Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike    d/ David Fincher

Mystery/thriller which was mysterious for a while (WTF is going on here?) but never thrilling. This had an overwhelming sense of screenwriter (or novelistic) contrivance: clever without being engaging.

Part of the problem was the pat nature of the drama. Part was the wooden performance by BA. At this point he is so bulked up and stiff he moves as if wearing a cervical collar...his hands held stiffly a foot away from his hips. But the major problem was that it took place firmly in the artificial reality that fiction has been forced into by the continual demand for ever-increasing complexity and thrills.

My personal reaction at the end was that I simply didn't give a shit about any of this. It completely failed to engage my emotions or intellect. Like watching an elaborate mechanical toy play out its program.

The only thing I liked was the supporting performance by Kim Dickens as the investigating detective. She managed to humanize her character and gave me the sense she actually had a life she would go home to outside this artificial terrarium everybody else was stuck in.

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