Review: Gone Girl (16s)

Adapted by Gillian Flynn from her phenomenally bestselling novel, Gone Girl (16s) opens with Nick Dunne reporting the disappearance of his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), from their family home in North Carthage, Missouri. Signs of a struggle suggest that Amy has been abducted, but Nick’s odd behaviour leads police detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) to make Nick the prime suspect. A conventional tale to open with, Gone Girl very quickly starts to twist, turn and loop-the-loop: Flynn and director David Fincher have modified the novel’s narrative structure but otherwise the movie remains faithful to the source material, embroiling Nick – who is, of course, nowhere as innocent as he pretends – in a wonderfully baroque tale that is part revenge thriller, part lurid psychological dissection, and part ‘domestic noir’. Pike and Affleck are superb in the lead roles, not least because both are required to play ambivalent characters who become increasingly nasty in what amounts to a blizzard of revelations and volte-face turns – the story pulls few punches about the worst aspects of both male and female behaviour – while Dickens, Patrick Fugit and Carrie Coon provide strong support. Overly long for a thriller at 149 minutes, the movie is nevertheless full value for virtually every moment (the last ten minutes or so are unnecessarily tacked on), and Fincher and Flynn further offer a fascinating variety of storytelling techniques – Nick’s first-person voice-over, the flashbacks courtesy of Amy’s diary, the distorting prism of media overkill – to tease out the truth of what really happened to Amy Dunne. It’s not perfect by any means, but Gone Girl is an intensely gripping thriller that offers one of the most fabulously entertaining femme fatales of the past two decades. ***** ~ Declan Burke

This review first appeared in the Irish Examiner.

A Joke Before The War

I mentioned a couple of weeks back that I interviewed Dennis Lehane in a public Q&A at Eason’s in Dublin, and terrific fun it was, too. Earlier that morning, I also sat down with Lehane over breakfast, interviewing him for the Irish Times. The result kicks off thusly:

If anyone is still wondering whether Ireland is closer to Boston or Berlin, Dennis Lehane suggests that a certain kind of black humour provides the answer.
  “Boston’s Irish,” says Lehane, the Boston-born son of a Cork father and Galway mother. “Irish-American, okay, but Irish. So the Boston humour, it’s the sense that you might just want to comment on the fact that the world’s going to screw you, just before the world screws you. That makes it easier.”
  Raised in South Boston, Lehane is the critically acclaimed and best-selling author of THE GIVEN DAY (2008), MYSTIC RIVER (2001) and SHUTTER ISLAND (2003). The latter two novels were successfully adapted for the screen by Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese, respectively, while Ben Affleck directed Lehane’s GONE, BABY, GONE. That book was one of a series of novels featuring private eyes Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, the most recent of which is 2011’s MOONLIGHT MILE.
  Over breakfast at the Merrion Hotel, Lehane is a warmly engaging font of anecdotes and forthright opinions, his no-nonsense approach to the craft of writing echoed in his considered responses and unaffectedly flat Boston vowels. For a man who has achieved at the age of 45 the kind of success most writers can only dream of, Lehane’s roots remain firmly buried in South Boston, his Irish heritage and particularly that sense of gallows humour.
  “My wife’s Italian, okay?” he says. “And she just doesn’t understand our people at all (laughs). It’s the Irish thing of, y’know, we’re not going to talk to a psychologist about our problems, we’re just going to make a joke and move on. Because it ain’t getting better. Whereas my wife will sit there and talk with her family, usually with their hands, about a situation for hours. And then she’ll be like, ‘Honey, what do you think about it?’ ‘Well, what I thought about it five hours ago.’ (laughs) I think what I love about where I grew up is that the people were terribly funny. And in a very caustic, off-hand way. And Patrick [Kenzie] has that sense of humour. The reason I was really happy to go back to Patrick and Angie with MOONLIGHT MILE was I missed telling jokes. I’d gone ten years without telling jokes in the work.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: Gone Baby Gone

Called in by the family of a missing girl to augment the official police investigation, Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) use their experience of growing up in the area of Boston where Angela McCready (Madeline O’Brien) went missing to winkle out some leads. Soon they’re working as equals with the detectives assigned to the case by Captain Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman), but when one of those detectives is a self-confessed by-any-means-necessary rule-breaker like Detective Remy Bressant (Ed Harris), that’s not necessarily a cause for celebration. Drawn deeper and deeper into a web of drug-dealing, abduction and double-cross, at the heart of which lies the missing girl’s mother, Helene (Amy Ryan), Patrick and Angie find themselves compromised at every turn. Postponed on this side of the pond from its original release schedule last year as a result of the disappearance of Madeline McCann, Gone Baby Gone (based on the best-selling novel by Dennis Lehane) is a bleak and hard-hitting tale of moral corruption on the mean streets of Boston. Strong performances from an excellent cast give the story a gritty authenticity that is at times almost too real to bear, particularly in terms of the police department’s pessimistic outlook on the chances of finding young Angela. Casey Affleck, building on his superb turn in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, is the star of the show, although Harris – who looks eerily like Dennis Hopper – matches him with a chilling portrayal of slow-burning intensity. Ben Affleck, who also co-adapted the novel, directs with no little style in his debut at the helm, slicing out the fat and leaving us with a lean, taut tale. By the finale the character of Patrick Kenzie is a little too squeaky-clean to ring entirely true, but this is a compelling and disturbing movie nonetheless. **** - Declan Burke

This review first appeared in TV Now! magazine

More O’Irish Than The O’Irish Themselves

Bandwagon-jumping being about the only exercise the CAP elves get these days, they were visibly palpitating with joy when The Elf They Call Karlos announced, via CNN, that Martin Scorsese has signed on to film Dennis Lehane’s (right) SHUTTER ISLAND with Leonardo DiCaprio in talks to assume eye-candy duties. This, of course, coming on top of Ben Affleck’s brilliant* take on GONE BABY GONE, which is currently burning up a silver screen near you. So why are the elves launching themselves headlong at that runaway bandwagon? Quoth the CNN wallahs:

[Lehane’s] talent is not, he insists, originality of plot, going so far as to say his plots “could be found on an episode of CSI or LAW & ORDER. He’s merely happy to take credit for doing what he does very well, which is to write meaty, morally ambiguous, thought-provoking crime novels centred in the seamiest parts of Boston. No, his explanation for his success is simpler: pure luck. “I am just the luckiest guy on the planet,” he says. (If you suspect he used a more colourful word than ‘guy’, you’re right.) “Because I’m Irish, I keep looking at the sky, waiting for it to fall.”

So, the Big Question: is Crime Always Pays entitled to claim Dennis Lehane as an Irish crime writer now that he’s damned to Hollywood fame? Stick your answers where the sun don’t sign, people.**

* Yeah, we know. Ben frickin Affleck. Who’d a thunk it?
** Erm, that’ll be the comment box, obviously.