Gillian Flynn sent us into a tizzy when she hinted a few months ago, in the pages of Entertainment Weekly, that she had changed the ending of Gone Girl so significantly that it shocked Ben Affleck. “This is a whole new third act!” he reportedly told her. Flynn later stepped back a bit,
saying claims of a new ending had been “greatly exaggerated.” And the
largely positive reviews for the film say that Flynn’s screenplay sticks
very closely to the book. So what actually happens at the end of the
new Gone Girl? Spoilers ahead, obviously.
The facts of the ending remain the same—Amy is pregnant, having
secretly fished Nick’s sperm out of a bank, and essentially forcing her
husband to stay with her, making a pretty convincing argument that they
actually deserve each other. Key scenes from the book, like Margo’s
tearful reaction and Nick’s violence toward Amy (a slam against the
wall, rather than an attempted strangling), remain in place. But the
context of the final scene is brand new; the Nancy Grace-like cable-news
figure played by Missi Pyle has arrived at their house
for a follow-up interview, and it’s on national TV that Amy announces
her pregnancy, with Nick forcibly smiling beneath the glaring TV lights.
The final scene is the same as the first, and straight from the opening
of the book—Nick looking at Amy’s head, asking himself, “What are you
thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each
other? What will we do?”
The interview scene in the new ending accomplishes what so many other parts of Gone Girl do so well, and what so many novel adaptations fail at spectacularly.
It explains visually the conflict of the story’s conclusion—Nick’s
entrapment, Amy’s calculations, marriage as a hostage crisis—with the
media once again standing in for the ways in which we all pretend to be
other people for the sake of our mates. The movie is even more of a
satire of media vampirism than the book is (maybe thanks to a director
whose endured one too many press junkets), and the new scene unites that
with the story of Nick and Amy’s toxic marriage. You are never safe
from the story the world wants to tell about you. Not even within your
own home. Playing Nick with thick, bleary-eyed handsomeness, Affleck is quietly
persuasive as a guy who in another era might have been a master of the
universe, but is still reeling from having that perch snatched from
under him. For her part, Amy, radiantly played by Pike in the kind of
leading role she has long deserved, emerges in flashbacks and reenacted
diary entries first as a too-good-to-be-true Manhattan singleton, then
as a young wife whose patience with her husband’s personal and
professional setbacks may not be entirely long-suffering.
Both Affleck and Pike are convincing as the compulsively
self-conscious, highly unreliable dual narrators of “Gone Girl.” The
film also features some terrific supporting performances, most notably
from Dickens, Coon and Tyler Perry as a celebrity criminal defense
attorney who winds up being an alternately amused and exasperated Greek
chorus observing the story’s most vertiginous zigs and zags.That those turns finally send “Gone Girl” into such outlandish
territory is very much in keeping with the book’s florid third act, here
featuring a wildly miscast Neil Patrick Harris in a pivotal role. But
the story’s pulpy nuttiness isn’t particularly well served by Fincher’s
careful, literal-minded restraint, in which what might have been a
teasingly perverse romp on a par with “To Die For” becomes something more glum and fatally defanged.
On a meta level that Detective Boney would no doubt appreciate, “Gone
Girl” contains within it a fascinating meditation on TV scandal
culture, gender politics and the private and performative selves that
comprise every marriage. But rather than reel in the audience by
adopting the book’s own seductively confiding tone, Fincher keeps the
material at arm’s length, depicting Nick and Amy’s courtship and
marriage with the unlived-in emotional distance of their bland, Pottery
Barn-perfect house. The result is a movie that’s nominally all about
subverting expectations but that never gives us convincing expectations
to subvert.
Fincher’s somber, exacting tone leeches the diabolical humor that
would have given “Gone Girl” much-needed satirical juice. With few
exceptions (often by way of Coon’s tartly revelatory portrayal of the
acid-tongued Margo), the film plays even the story’s most darkly funny
passages tensely straight, ending up less a parodic pageant of fame
whoredom, image manipulation and pseudo-feminist, have-it-all
rhetoric than a conventionally pessimistic — and, by the way, very talky
— thriller. Whether all that talk winds up buying into or playing off of trite
images of controlling women and callow men may depend on each viewer’s
individual lens. What’s less debatable is how little fun Fincher seems
to be having with the tussle. Put another way, in the context of the
filmmaker’s oeuvre, “Gone Girl” could have used less “Social Network” sober-mindedness and more “Fight Club” brio — or even the moxie of “House of Cards,”
the Fincher-produced Netflix series whose length, breadth and cynical
streak might have more suitably served Flynn’s slippery characters and
their unsettling sleights of hand (and heart). “Gone Girl” may get the job done as a dutiful, deliberately paced
procedural, but it never quite makes the splash it could have as a
thoughtful, timely and thoroughly bracing plunge.
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