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Posted: |
Nov 13, 2014 - 4:24 PM
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By: |
joan hue
(Member)
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Arthur and Dana, I like the movie better than you two. I felt it was a complex novel, and Fincher did capture the complexities of the novel, including the shifting point of view. I think he did the best job possible with the narrative. The author of the novel, Gillian Flynn, penned the script.
My only complaint about the movie was that it hurried too much her point of view and her life when she was hiding. However, movies have to condense more than novels.
I think the book did delve deeper into the personas of Nick and his wife than the movie could. The reality is that both of them when they met in New York gave each other what they thought the other wanted, and both were fake personas. Nick “appeared” to be a New York sophisticated writer and hard worker. She appeared to be a gorgeous, nice hard-working wife who supported her husband. Then Nick, supposedly to help his mother and because he lost his job, moves them both to the Midwest where he takes her money to buy a money losing bar. He teaches for ego and cheats on her. He is rather lazy and not that cool. When the point of view shifts to her, we do lose sympathy for Nick because he was a phony. He did not deserve our sympathy. When we see her inner core, her real self, we lose all pity for her too. She is a “don’t-you-dare-leave-me-ever-psycho bitch.” We are fooled by both of them for a while and end up intensely disliking both at the end. The ending of the book and movie was criticized because there really is no one wearing a white hat, no hero, and mostly, no justice for the victims. Most of us don’t expect an ending like that, but I think it has a certain verisimilitude. For me it is a change from the, “Good guys win in the end.” It is unexpected. Both will make each other unhappy. Our sympathy should be given to their unborn child for having to endure two such narcissists as parents. (Just my two cents.)
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Posted: |
Nov 13, 2014 - 10:59 PM
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By: |
Dana Wilcox
(Member)
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From my viewpoint this ending was a fraud: There is no true equilibrium in the "arrangement" (this whatever-it-is relationship we are left with). The chance of the "family unit," with or without child, continuing as such for any extended period of time seems tiny. Nick will have to either fake his own death and disappear, or arrange in some manner for her death, or he will surely be murdered by her sooner or later. Or there might be some other unexpected outcome, one that would amaze and impress us all, a Hitchcockian twist perhaps (as I, for one, fully anticipated). It struck me that the author did a good job of crafting the plotlines in leading us to that point, but was unable to come up with an appropriately clever resolution. I paid $8 for that resolution (not counting the popcorn and drink!). I felt cheated.
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