Living with Boys

I got to have a date movie with my husband! And I insisted on seeing this picture, which belies my usual lack of interest in movies based on books I've read. The novel just seemed so cinematic, I couldn't imagine it NOT making for an entertaining film. And, many thanks to David Fincher, I was not disappointed. Without giving plot details away, the movie works on the audience like a film noir, setting up its characters and then peeling back their layers, over and over again. Amy, the "Gone Girl", has so many personas/layers throughout the course of the story, that she may not have an actual personality of her own. She's the perfect girl, the perfect victim, the perfect bitch--and as unknowable in the last frame as she is in the first.

Both the movie and book have a lot to do with images, also. Amy (Rosamund Pike) was the model for her parents' bestselling book series, but her reality never matched up to their idealization of her--they used the books to "fix" her childhood, she says. As an adult, part of Amy's allure is how she changes her image to suit the part she's playing, and she manages to manipulate many people through her careful staging of herself and her environment. And meanwhile, when she goes missing, her husband Nick (Ben Affleck) finds himself poorly suited to play the image of the distraught spouse, making key mistakes like smiling at a press conference at a reporter's request. He is then tried in the public media for his apparent lack of remorse--all while the media frenzy grows. Fincher's direction cues us to her false perfection as well as Nick's weaknesses through careful compositions that somehow don't feel cold, but rather glossy, the pages of a magazine come to life offset against Nick's rumpled appearance or his twin sister's lived-in apartment.



And then there's this cat. A beautiful orange tabby that belongs to Nick and Amy, which is often part of the tableau in their house, silently watching the drama unfold. It wanders outside through the front door left open at the beginning. It perches on countertops watching Nick wander through the kitchen or stands guard behind the front door sidelight when the reporters converge on the house. Nick and his sister Go are affectionate towards it; the lead detective, Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens), feeds it. We never learn its name. Devastatingly, Nick clutches the cat to himself towards the end of the show, but it sits regally in front of Amy the next morning, becoming part of her perfect scene. The cat takes no sides. Does the movie? Does the audience?

What does it say about me that I watched a good portion of this movie with a big smile on my face, reveling in the twists and turns, the homage to films gone by? I certainly did not find myself in either of the two main characters--does that make me the cat?