Gone Girl: The Movie? Meh.

Will Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn make a good movie? We’ll find out come October 2014. Here’s my prediction.

This October, the book Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn will no longer be known as the bestselling, award-winning, bookclub-loving, mystery/thriller of 2012, but will go the way of all books that turn into a movie. Think Fight Club, American Psycho, Trainspotting. Is the average person even aware that these were books before they were blockbuster films? I’m not negating the wonderful financial and creative advantages of turning a book into a film. I’m just saying that often, not always, the movie becomes bigger than the book, overshadowing it’s previous literary incarnation. The movie Gone Girl starring Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne and Rosamund Pike as Amy Dunne is slated to premier in October of this year.

I can’t ignore this nagging feeling that the movie might just suck. Wait, let me restate this. The movie might be great. Flynn wrote the screenplay herself. I can see how taking the bare bone story line of Gone Girl and turning it into a Hollywood extravaganza could be really fun to watch, but not for those of us who have read and enjoyed the book. Yes, I know, most movie adaptations are never as good as the book (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Great Gatsby, The Time Traveler’s Wife) but some narratives lend themselves to the big screen (The Road, Carrie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest).What is the secret sauce that makes one book work as a film and another completely fail? I have no idea. But here are some reasons why Gone Girl may or may not work.

Reasons it won’t work:

1. A large portion of Gone Girl is written using fake diary entries by Amy Dunne as a means of framing her husband for her fake murder. I’ve run this through the old creative processor that is my brain and I can’t think of any possible way that a film could use this device to their advantage. They can’t show these fake diary scenes as real without completely confusing the audience. They won’t read the diary entries out loud, obviously, because that’s just bad film. My best guess it that they will have to leave out the entire fake diary portion of the book. But, hey, maybe the scriptwriters have something in mind that I can’t fathom to make this work in which case, that might make for a very cool movie.

2. Another great literary device that Gillian Flynn uses is the unreliable narrator. Through the entire first half of the book, Nick Dunne keeps admitting to the reader, and the reader only, that he is lying. He doesn’t necessarily tell us the truth, just that he is lying to other characters. In this way, we are still uncertain for the first part of the book whether or not he murdered his wife. For a while, I thought that he hired someone to do it. So as the sensational media pariahs in the book begin to accuse him of murder, I was also ready to accuse him. There is not a way for a film to show these kinds of inner thoughts without a contrived voice over. My guess is that the film will leave out much of this early ambiguity leading the audience to root for Nick from the very start.

3. They’ll have to change the ending. In Hollywood, there is a good guy and a bad guy and the bad guy must lose. There can be no ambiguity. I imagine that when they turn this book into a film, Nick Dunne will find a concise way to take revenge on his wife.

4. Nick Dunne is supposed to be a pretty boy who has a difficult time expressing his emotions, smiling inappropriately from a long-time habit of wanting people to feel comfortable around him. Ben Affleck is no Nick Dunne. He’s not a pretty boy. He doesn’t have to go out of his way to make people feel more comfortable. He’s the boy next door. How about Ryan Reynolds, Chris Hemsworth or Bradley Cooper?

Reasons it might work:

1. Neil Patrick Harris as Desi Collings.

2. Tyler Perry as Tanner Bolt

3. It’s a thriller with a twist. Hollywood is stocked full of action thrillers with interesting plot twists. Movie-going audiences just love those kind of movies, especially with big name actors. I know after a long day of work, when I’m ready to turn my brain off for the night, chocolate, a glass of wine, and a high-budget thriller is my recipe for success.

Final Analysis:

If you read the book, you’ll hate the movie for dumbing down the book. If you didn’t read the book, the movie might be fun, but you won’t have any desire to read the book.

What do you think? Will Gone Girl make a good movie?