There is an idea of an Amy Elliot Dunne; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real Amy; only an entity, something illusory.
And though she can hide her cold gaze, and you can shake her hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense your lifestyles are comparable…she simply is not there.
It’s in the eyes. It’s all in the eyes.
For his role as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, Christian Bale took inspiration from Tom Cruise, particularly, Cruise’s “intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes.”
In Gone Girl, Rosamund Pike puts on an unnerving masterclass as Amy Elliot Dunne, and it’s all about the eyes – there’s nothing there. An endless, eerie void.
Pike plays Amy with a haunting stillness; she’s unsettlingly calm. A glacier housing a volcano. Her mellow voice is soothing, but something is lurking just beneath the surface.
It’s all rather remarkable. None more so than her barren eyes, devoid of any inkling of emotion. It’s disturbing. That empty gaze hides her malice, her contempt and her vindictive nature, all waiting to spew out into the world.
David Fincher at times frames her like a horror villain, a monster in the dark. And Amy is scary, very much so.
Meticulous, conniving and deeply narcissistic, Amy doesn’t tolerate any slight against her, whether it’s a cheating husband (Nick Dunne), or a marginally unkind comment.
She will frame you for murder for the former, and spit in your glass of Mountain Dew for the latter.
I was, much like everyone else, immensely impressed by Rosamund Pike when I saw Gone Girl in 2014. But the subtle nuances in her performance have become increasingly notable with every subsequent re-watch.
The next time you watch Gone Girl, focus on Pike's eyes.
It’s a genuinely distressing performance from Pike, and that speaks to her ability as an actor.
Rosamund was someone that I had seen in four or five different movies over 10 years, and I never got a read on her. I never got a sense of who she was. I didn’t know what she was building off of. There was an opacity there and it was interesting.
David Fincher
Nick Dunne, you were but a kite dancing in a hurricane. You never had a chance.
There is an idea of an Amy Elliot Dunne; some kind of abstraction.
But she’s simply not there.
0 Comments