BLACK COMEDY
I think Black Comedy should be listed under this movie's genre. It's more that than anything else. It's definitely not a drama. It's a Black Comedy/Mystery.
April151CT
The only thing I found even vaguely comical was her over-the-top pathology.
shareThen you missed the satire on marriage. I started laughing my ass off when the movie switched to the scene of Amy throwing her frilly pens out of the car, while she described why she was framing her husband for murder simply because he was a lazy schlub and continued laughing until the end of the film. That scene was when the movie switched genres and went from thriller to satire/farce.
shareI did the same thing too. I was watching the first-half intrigued by the mystery, and when the big twist came around, I started laughing in astonishment, knowing that the $10 I spent on this movie was worth it all. And that's what happened, I was laughing at the moments when she was puppeteering the circumstances around her for her plans, I just love how clever she really is at planning things with such detail and patience. Boy, she really *beep* Nick over.
shareYeah, I thought it was fairly obvious - and I remain surprised that so many people seem to have missed it (and I suspect Fincher/Flynn were surprised too). I guess the fact that his 'Girl with a Dragon Tattoo' immediately preceded this (and not 'Fight Club'), had people convinced to try to force this into the "serious thriller" genre.
Some of the scenes are so obviously over-the-top (e.g. the "interrogation" of Amy at the hospital by a jam-packed room of kowtowing FBI officials; the blood-soaked Amy "fainting" in Nick's arms in front of a sea of paparazzi, etc) that it's bizarre to see people arguing about how "full of plot holes" the movie is.
I think no one discusses those parts because they already lost interest by that point...
shareDon't be such a pretentious prick. I think there's no one who didn't miss the shift in tone. That doesn't mean it's appropriate or good. In fact, changing the tone of your movie halfway is a bad thing.
shareI have to disagree that a change in tone halfway through is a bad thing. "Jaws", for instance, would not be considered a classic if the tone didn't change from realistic to mythic halfway through, and a million adventure films work because the tone changes from fun adventure to serious life-and-death struggle halfway through. Like maybe "The Magnificent Seven" or "The Dirty Dozen" to name some classics?
I don't know if the change in "Gone Girl" works that well, though. Because to me, it was not so much a change from serious to darkly comic, but a change from the Scott Peterson case to "you weren't expecting the Scott Peterson case to turn out like this!".
I don't recall a major tone shift in Jaws, to be honest. I don't really consider the climax and its build-up a tone shift. They're facing the bad guy, so to speak, so of course the last act is going to be big. It feels quite natural in Jaws, the tension grows and grows.
The tone shift in Gone Girl, on the other hand, is something else. A dead serious thriller suddenly turns into an unfunny spoof.