[COLUMN] Ten Years Later, Gone Girl Remains the Quintessential Ben Affleck Movie | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Gone Girl, which has been out ten years and is well worth a watch if you haven’t seen it. 

When Gone Girl was released a decade ago, most of the discussion tended to focus on the eponymous character, Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike).

Reviews rightly praised Pike’s performance as “revelatory.” She would go on to garner the movie’s one and only Oscar nomination, which had a profound effect on her subsequent career. Looking back on the opportunities that she enjoyed in the wake of Gone Girl, even Pike conceded “the nomination helped hugely.” Much of Pike’s subsequent career – including star vehicles like I Care a Lot – is in conversation with her work on Gone Girl, something the actor acknowledges.

Even outside of Pike’s performance, much of the pop culture legacy of Gone Girl is rooted in the film and novel’s approach to Amy Dunne. In the publishing world, the book sparked what has been described as “the Gone Girl effect”, a wave of thrillers about complicated and flawed female characters. Critics talk about subsequent thrillers trying to replicate “the Gone Girl twist”, the midpoint revelation that the missing Amy is not only alive but faked her own death.

However, in the decade since the film’s release, the most interesting legacy of Gone Girl might be its understanding of star Ben Affleck. Affleck is the actual lead of the movie, playing Amy’s hapless husband Nick who quickly becomes the primary suspect in her disappearance. It is subsequently revealed that the entire crime has been staged by Amy in order to implicate Nick, an elaborate revenge against a husband who she feels has disappointed and betrayed her.

The reveal that Amy is alive comes at the movie’s midpoint. So, on first watch, the audience spends the first half of the movie unsure what to make of Nick. While Amy narrates her diary, accounts of her initial attraction to and subsequent alienation from Nick, Nick remains largely unknowable. The only glimpse that the audience has inside Nick’s head comes in a single line of narration at the start of the movie as he confesses imagining “cracking her lovely skull, unspooling her brain.”

Although there is hardly a mountain of evidence against Nick, there is enough to suggest that something is not quite right about the guy. He can’t help smiling at the wrong moments, particularly next to a poster of his missing wife. He is enthusiastic in greeting the volunteers who come to help look for Amy. Amy’s mother, Marybeth (Lisa Banes), opines that he’s acting like “the goddamn Homecoming King.”

“Oh, look,” Officer James Gilpin (Patrick Fugit) sarcastically observes as Nick gladhands the volunteers. “He's being a good guy. So everybody can see him being a good guy.” Detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens), the officer in charge of the investigation, responds, “You really don't like him, do you?” Gilpin answers with his own question, “What’s to like?” Even Nick’s twin, Margo (Carrie Coon), begins to suspect him. “It's all right,” Nick assures her after the fact. “I would have, too.”

There is a sense in which this tension works in a very broad and general way. One of the central ideas of Gone Girl is that there is no “normal” way to behave in such a surreal situation under such scrutiny. Nick’s behavior following his wife’s disappearance is unguarded, because there is no single correct response to what is happening. Those individual poor decisions – his “pie-eating grin”, his willingness to pose for a cheerful selfie – are all excusable, but they add up to create something uncanny.

However, there is also something more fundamentally off about Nick. He is an incredibly handsome and charismatic guy. It’s easy to understand why Amy fell for him, even as she acknowledged his “quite villainous” chin. Although Nick and Amy are going through financial trouble, they have a lovely home and Nick operates a local bar. Indeed, the central tension of the marriage is that Amy seems to sense the potential for greatness in Nick, but Nick always seems to fall just short.

It is, in other words, a role that is almost perfectly tailored to Ben Affleck’s star persona. This is interesting, because the part was reportedly originally offered to Jon Hamm. This is a similarly logical choice. Hamm and Affleck are quite similar physically, sharing that villainous chin and an archetypal handsome profile that “looks like a cartoon pilot.” Hamm’s signature role as Don Draper on Mad Men frames his handsome charisma as a superficial sheen hiding a slightly sinister undercurrent.

However, there is something specific to Affleck in Gone Girl. Like Nick, Affleck is an immensely handsome and undeniably charming young man. He emerged in the 1990s as a wave of young and handsome leading men, but one with a genuine interest in the mechanics of film production. He won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar at the age of 25, along with his friend and long-term collaborator Matt Damon. There was a sense, from the outset, that Affleck was someone important.

However, Affleck seemed to coast. This is most obvious when comparing him to Damon. Damon worked hard to establish his creative bona fides, working with legendary directors like Steven Spielberg, Steven Soderbergh, Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood and Christopher Nolan. Damon was often willing to accept smaller roles in the projects, putting in the work. When Damon came to his first true blockbuster franchise with The Bourne Identity, even that had a sense of prestige and artistry to it.

In contrast, Affleck immediately pushed himself as a leading man in forgettable projects like Forces of Nature or Bounce. There is a reason why “Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms, yo!” served as a recurring punchline in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. When Affleck did work with veteran filmmakers, it was often in films that were at best forgettable and at worst disastrous: John Frankenheimer’s Reindeer Games, John Woo’s Paycheck, Martin Brest’s Gigli. It’s hard to know if this was just bad taste or bad luck, but it defined Affleck’s stardom.

Like Nick, Affleck had an outwardly perfect life. In many ways, he seemed like the ideal celebrity. He was starring in blockbuster movies like Armageddon and Pearl Harbor. He was dating Jennifer Lopez. However, there was also this sense that – particularly in contrast to Damon – he wasn’t living up to his full potential. His blockbuster vehicles like Daredevil or The Sum of All Fears were poorly reviewed. The tabloid reporting on his relationship with Lopez became intrusive, alienating and nasty.

At the point where Affleck was on top of the world, it was very easy to dislike him – this very handsome multimillionaire who dated beautiful women and made terrible movies. Affleck had been introduced to the public as the next big movie star, but he quickly became a punchline. In one particularly telling swipe, Family Guy joked that Damon had actually written Good Will Hunting while Affleck lounged on the couch of their apartment, getting high and farting.

Affleck is a paradox. In Gone Girl, Nick ruminates on his strange relationship with the public. “They disliked me, they liked me, they hated me,” he explains. “And now they love me.” Part of the push-and-pull of Gone Girl is the sense that, despite his goofiness, Nick is entirely capable of delivering on his potential when he absolutely has to. His survival hinges on him nailing a prime-time interview with Sharon Schieber (Sela Ward) – and he does. It’s hard to know if this makes him more or less infuriating.

Like Nick, Affleck’s fortunes tended to ebb and flow. In the late 2000’s, the actor reinvented himself. In Hollywoodland, he took on the role of George Reeves, a tragic actor who had played the lead role in The Adventures of Superman and perhaps became trapped inside of it. It seemed like Affleck was grappling with the failed promise of his early career. He moved behind the camera, directing films like Gone Baby Gone, The Town and Argo. He married Jennifer Garner.

This seemed like Affleck taking a second run at building himself a movie star persona, one living up to his potential. However, once again, there was this sense that Affleck wasn’t entirely capable of delivering - whether due to his own issues or outside forces. When Argo won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, Affleck wasn’t even nominated as Best Director. Indeed, Argo was the first film to win Best Picture at the Oscars without a corresponding Best Director nomination since Driving Miss Daisy over twenty years earlier.

Just as Affleck seemed like he was back, he found himself struggling very publicly with alcohol and gambling addictions. Garner and Affleck divorced. Affleck fell back into patterns of destructive behavior. Despite claiming that the failure of Daredevil “inoculated” him against ever wanting to play a superhero again, he agreed to star as Batman in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Despite the failure of their earlier relationship, he began dating Jennifer Lopez again. The two would later marry.

On the surface, Affleck has everything that a human being could want. He has millions upon millions of dollars. He has played one of the most iconic superheroes in the world. He has married some of the most beautiful women in the world. Like Nick in Gone Girl, there is a sense that he is perhaps too perfect to be true. Like Nick in Gone Girl, it can feel like there’s something a little rougher and not quite right underneath the surface. Much like Nick responded to personal and career setbacks by returning to his hometown of North Carthage where he could be treated like a hero, Affleck seemed eager to revisit his own celebrity. 

There is a faint sense of tragedy in Affleck's attempts to “do-over” his 2000s period. His tenure as Batman was rocky, to say the least. Lopez recently filed for divorce. It’s an odd thing to feel pity for one of the most successful actors in the world, but Affleck has become an evocative figure. The internet projects upon photos of his new back tattoo, his orders from Dunkin Donuts, even a shot of the actor enjoying a cigarette. Affleck is somehow at once an abstract idea and a relatable mood.

While actors like Tom Cruise and Will Smith carefully craft their media personas, Affleck is a genuinely contradictory public figure. He is both immensely talented and supremely lucky, but he also somehow feels like he falls just short of fully delivering on his potential. Many of Affleck’s most recent performances play on this unique facet of Affleck’s stardom, particularly his work in J.C. Chandor’s Triple Frontier and Gavin O’Connor’s The Way Back.

It's also the magic of Gone Girl. Nick is a flawed and complicated individual, who looks like a movie star but can make stupid choices under the pressure of the constant media glare. He’s smart and charming, but not necessarily self-aware. Gone Girl demands that the audience’s relationship to Nick shift from scene to scene. For the film to work, the audience needs to both hate Nick’s too-perfect exterior and feel some measure of sympathy for a man who can’t control his own narrative.

Even more than in 2014, that feels like the perfect encapsulation of Ben Affleck’s movie star persona.