Film

Do us part

Gone Girl

David Fincher set out to make the nastiest, most poisonous movie about marriages gone bad ever made with Gone Girl. I think he succeeded. Fincher and Gillian Flynn, the author of the novel and screenplay, came up with a toxic cocktail, laced with dark humor, scabrous satire and blistering performances. Anybody who has suffered through a bad relationship, or doubts aspects of the one they’re in, will equate Gone Girl to a bound stack of tabloid magazines hitting you square on the chin. On the day of his fifth anniversary, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) returns to his home after sulking at the bar he owns with his sister (a funny Carrie Coon) to discover his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), is missing. Nick calls the police and the in-laws, and quickly finds himself sucked up in a media circus that leaves him dazed and confused. His demeanor in public is a strange combination of a malaise and ill-timed smiles. Yeah … he’s a suspect. Through a series of narrated flashbacks, we hear the story of the Flynne marriage from Amy’s perspective, chronicled in her diary. Everything started sweet enough, with the two of them being impossibly perfect for each other. Family deaths, money troubles and lapses in moral judgment leave them stricken with loathing and regret by the time the “wood” anniversary has arrived. Nick is skewered on TV by a Nancy Gracetype journalist (a snooty Missi Pyle) and the detectives investigating his case (the deadpan Kim Dickens and Patrick Fugit) have little faith in his innocence. The evidence against Nick is quite daunting, and it piles up. The whole thing plays a lot like the Scott Peterson case of 12 years ago involving a husband who killed his pregnant wife and dumped her body in San Francisco Bay.

Then, at about the halfway point, the movie goes completely, wonderfully insane. For those unaware of the plot twist, my best advice to you is that you should accept it— even though it’s totally bug nuts—sit back, and enjoy the rest of this messed-up ride. Anybody who goes to this movie thinking they’re going to see something grounded by Bob Grimm in reality will be setting themselves up for disappointment. Gone Girl is nightmarish bgrimm@ fantasy, a hyper-sensationalized “what-if” newsreview.com that thrives on its implausibility. Had this movie tried to stick closer to reality, it 5 would’ve killed too much of the fun. Pike, a British actress perhaps known best for Jack Reacher, gets the role of a lifetime with Amy, and she devours it. We see many faces of Amy, some of them a pure, divine delight and others as monstrous as Godzilla. What we see early in Amy’s story doesn’t prepare us for what comes later. Pike makes the earthquake-like shifts in Amy a wondrous cinematic feat. Often the victim of unjust tabloid garbage and internet slagging, there’s nobody better cast than Affleck as Nick. When Nick is required to show media fatigue, Affleck need only pull from his personal Battfleck or Bennifer experiences to hit the right notes. He has an eerie resemblance to Scott Peterson, which helps. Most of all, he shows what’s been true all along in his career: He’s a fine actor capable of great nuance, a movie star of the highest order. With this effort, Fincher erases the waste of time that was his adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and gets back to the business of being one of the world’s finest directors. As he did with his take on Fight Club, Fincher gets to the heart of the novel he’s working with, and does the book more than justice. He makes a helluva good-looking movie, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross put together a score that amazes. So, all of you married folks approaching the wood anniversary, beware what shows up in your gift box. If it’s Punch and Judy dolls, you need to head for the hills. Gone Girl will make many of us laugh (especially the single and divorced folks), a few of us cringe, and cause nightmares for those unsteady couples with rings on their fingers. Ω

"Who's Bruce Wayne? Sounds like a cool guy!"

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excellent 2 A Walk Among the Tombstones Liam Neeson plays a former policeman and recovering alcoholic in director Scott Frank’s sometimes interesting and always unpleasant serial killer drama. Neeson’s Matt Scudder, after accidentally killing a civilian during a shootout, has gone rogue since his days on the force. Eight years have passed, and while he’s quit drinking, he’s doing some pretty unsavory jobs as a private investigator. He gets pulled into the world of a drug dealer after his wife has been kidnapped, and a lot of bad, bad things start happening. Neeson is very good in the film, but the script, written by Frank and based on the novel by Lawrence Block, has too many cardboard characters. Worst of all is a homeless kid sidekick (played by Astro). There’s also the strung-out heroin addict, the whispery-voiced abductor of women, and the creepy guy who tends the cemetery and keeps pigeons on the roof … and he knows something. I liked Neeson here, and I wouldn’t mind seeing the character again. Hopefully, the next film with this character—if there is one—trims the fat.

2Dolphin Tale 2 Call this one The Empire Strikes Back of Dolphin Tale movies, in that it is slightly better than the original (not much— just slightly) and it has Tauntauns (actually, that’s not true). The likes of Morgan Freeman, Ashley Judd and Harry Connick Jr. rejoin annoying child actors Nathan Gamble and Cozi Zuehlsdorff (yes, the Cozi Zuehlsdorff) for another round of gooey sentimentality involving dolphins. This time out, and probably due to all of those current issues involving whales and dolphins in captivity, the story spends a lot of time on rehabbing and releasing animals rather than confining them for human amusement. In addition to Winter, the dolphin with the prosthetic tail, there’s a pretty awesome sea turtle and a kooky pelican that kids will love. The movie kind of works as educational fare, but when it drifts away from the aquarium tanks it’s a real hell ride. It must be said that Harry Connick Jr. can’t act for beans, Ashley Judd’s career has really hit the skids, and Morgan Freeman just has no business being within a million miles of this film. Gamble and Zuehlsdorff (yes, the Cozi Zuehlsdorff) are, I’m sure, a couple of exquisite human beings, but watching them in a movie is an annoying, tedious task. I love the dolphins and aquatic life in this film. It’s the humans who drive me crazy.

4The Drop This film features the final performance by James Gandolfini, and it’s a beauty. Luckily for the viewer, it’s not even the best thing about the movie. That would be the central performance delivered by Tom Hardy as Bob, a seemingly meek bartender of questionable intelligence who works for Cousin Marv (Gandolfini). Hardy disappears into this role, and will have you in awe that this is actually the guy who played Bane in The Dark Night Rises. The bar that Cousin Marv and Bob occupy is a drop bar, where many of the gambling winnings in a seedier part of Brooklyn wind up in a safe. One night, the bar is held up, and Cousin Marv has to hand over five grand. This puts Marv in debt to scary Chechen mobsters, now proprietors of the bar Marv once owned. Bob and Marv must devise a plan to pay the mobsters back, and when they do, they find themselves in an even deeper dilemma. Gandolfini’s Marv owes plenty to his Tony Soprano. He comes off like Tony after his power has been taken away, and his wife has abandoned him. The screenplay even gives him a nagging sister and a father in a rest home. Hardy delivers a character that’s always sympathetic, even when he reveals himself to be a bit more complicated than he first seems. It’s just another great performance in what is starting to become a rather impressive list of achievements.

3The Equalizer Based on a TV show from the ’80s that I never once watched, Denzel Washington plays Robert McCall, a quiet employee at a Home Depot-type store. Robert likes to go drink tea at a local diner and read his book, and it appears that there is very little to him. When a young prostitute (Chloe Grace Moretz) gets into trouble with Russian mobsters, Robert springs into action, and major details of his past are slowly revealed. Washington is pretty damn great in the role, playing a sweet, gentle man who can tear your face off in an instant without blinking an eye. The film is directed by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), and while Fuqua resorts to a lot of visual clichés (slow motion, rain) he totally owns those clichés. Marton Csokas is good and scary as Teddy, the film’s main bad guy. His confrontations with Robert are quite memorable. The movie doesn’t offer much when it comes to new things, but it does provide solid entertainment through and through. I’m hoping Washington gets a franchise out of this one, because I’d like to see more about the story of Robert McCall.

2The Maze Runner The maze in the title is a fun spectacle full of shifting walls and weird spider robots. When the movie is in the maze it is good. When it’s out of the maze, it kind of stinks. Dylan O’Brien plays Thomas, a teenager transported to a camp surrounded by a large, constantly shifting maze. The camp is inhabited by other teens, including Alby (Aml Ameen), Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) and Gally (Will Poulter). They are all clueless about why they have been put there and how to escape, but they do send a squad of “runners” into the maze to map it out and search its outer reaches. The searches are fruitless until the mysterious Thomas takes charge. The mystery of the maze is intriguing, but the payoff is blah. The Lord of the Flies drama between the leads is typical, boring stuff. I liked the design of the maze, and the maze turns out to be the film’s most interesting character. Second place goes to Poulter, who is a long way from the comic territory he staked out in We’re the Millers. Too bad the rest of the movie feels like a patchwork of many movies before.

4The One I Love A husband and wife (Mark Duplass and Elisabeth Moss) struggling in their relationship visit a retreat on the advice of their therapist (Ted Danson), and they make a startling discovery in one of the guest houses. That discovery results in something that is beautifully clever in addressing the problems that plague many relationships, while also playing like a really cool Twilight Zone episode. The big twist results in one of the better romantic comedies in years. Calling this a romantic comedy is almost an insult, but it has romance, and it is funny, so I suppose it falls into that genre. I do think it’s a movie that many therapists will hate, because it could save some couples a bunch of money. Duplass is making a name for himself as an understated, offbeat romantic comedy lead. He’s actually the star of another of the more recent great romantic comedies, Safety Not Guaranteed. Moss, star of TV’s Mad Men, has a movie career spanning over two decades, but The One I Love makes it feel like she’s just arriving. (Available on VOD, Amazon.com and iTunes during a limited theatrical run.)

4The Skeleton Twins Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader take their respective careers to the next level in this film, with both spreading their dramatic wings and proving their talents go well beyond things that are just funny. Craig Johnson’s second directorial effort has some intermittent laughs, but it gets a lot darker than one might expect for the Target Lady and Stefon. The movie should do a lot for both Hader and Wiig’s careers, and stands as one of the year’s best family dramas. The two play brotherand-sister twins, long estranged, who wind up back in each other’s lives. Milo (Hader) tries to commit suicide in L.A. after breaking up with his boyfriend. His twin sister, Maggie (Wiig), had been trying to do the very same thing back in New York when the call comes in that Milo is in the hospital. After an awkward reunion in a hospital room, Milo is heading to New York with his twin sis to lay low for a while. As Milo adjusts to life back on the east coast, Maggie conducts an affair with her scuba instructor. Luke Wilson is sweet and funny as Maggie’s affable husband, and Ty Burrell is memorable as a man from Milo’s past. Wiig and Hader make for a very convincing onscreen brother and sister, something that’s surely the result of all those years they spent together on SNL.