Till Death do us Part

As much as I am an unapologetic romantic and can happily sigh my way through some great romance movies (see posts Dream a Little and Love in all its Strangeness in this blog), my admiration as a cinephile tends to be stronger towards those movies that are able to capture the reality of a relationship or a marriage gone awry, since they respond more accurately to reality than those that capture our first endorphinous associations. Painful as they are to watch, movies like Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973), Mike Nichol’s Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolff (1966) or Heartburn (1986),  and, even more recently, Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale (2005), Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine (2010), or Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), impress and certainly explain the statistics of divorce.

Yes, sadly, love fades. Can it fade, however, to the point that one spouse isn’t content with just the legal end of a relationship and wishes to use the till death do us part vow as an early get out of marriage free card? These are the thriller marriage-gone-oh-so-wrong movies and they are quite the fascinating ones to watch, as can be attested by the close to 95 million dollars that David Fincher’s movie Gone Girl has made at the US box office in a mere two weeks.

Rosamund Pike as Amy Dunne in Gone Girl

Gone Girl joins a very fascinating group of thrillers that take us into this world of spouses plotting to kill their spouse, and no spoiler alert as to if they succeed or not. Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954) brought the beautiful Grace Kelly and the very talented Ray Milland into an excellent theatrical experience as this ex-tennis pro carries out a plot to murder his wife. The movie was remade in 1998 by director Andrew Davis, this time called A Perfect Murder and starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Viggo Mortensen and Michael Douglas; though a little less theatrical, quite equally captivating. Interestingly, Davis also directed The Fugitive (1993) in which Harrison Ford acts as the doctor accused of his wife’s murder. Ford seems to have acted in his share of whodunit-killed-the-spouse movies, which besides The Fugitive, also includes Allan J. Pakula’s Presumed Innocent (1990) and Roman Polanski’s Frantic (1988). Australian director Bruce Beresford took his hand at the topic directing Tommy Lee Jones and Ashley Judd in Double Jeopardy (1999), an intelligent thriller about a woman accused of murdering her husband. I could go on, but back to the most recent marriage-gone-twisted thriller.

Kim Dickens as Detective Rhonda Boney in Gone Girl

Gone Girl is a great addition to this sub-genre. The movie tells the story of a man whose wife disappears in what appears to be a violent manner and he slowly becomes the spotlight of a media circus that begins to question his innocence. The movie is captivating and flows tremendously well. Most certainly one of the advantages that Fincher has here is that Gillian Flynn, the author of the novel on which the movie is based, was the screenwriterased, was the screenwriter fontages that Fincher has here is that Gillian Flynn, the author of the novel on which the movie is . She is faithful to a fault to her book. The casting has also been phenomenal. As much as Ben Affleck plays Nick Dunne with wondrous subtleness, Rosamund Pike plays Amy Dunne with the unsettling flair with which Kathy Bates played Annie Wilkes in Misery or Anthony Perkins played Norman Bates in Psycho, which is to say she is chillingly great!  Carrie Coon as Margo Dunne and Kim Dickens as Detective Rhonda Boney come alive even stronger than in the novel. This is an actors’ movie, without a doubt. Not to say that Fincher’s directing isn’t good, but it is the actors that make it a little more than that. The movie feels very much, in mood and tinting, like Fincher’s previous one The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and both clearly solidify his work as a director of thrillers, adding Gone Girl to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Seven and Zodiac.

Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl

Movies like Gone Girls and others of this type are ultimately nothing else than very warped and upturned romances; what makes them such entrancing thrillers to watch is, ultimately, that the love and passion that once was is no more; sort of like those lines in Pablo Neruda’s poem “If you Forget Me”:

Ahora bien,

si poco a poco dejas de quererme

dejaré de quererte poco a poco.

Well, now,

If Little by Little you stop loving me

I shall stop loving you little by little.