The actor:	Rosamund Pike
The character:	Amy Dunne
The film:	Gone Girl
The line:	“You think you’d be happy with a nice Midwestern girl? No way, baby. I’m it.”

John Ford’s best movie is The Searchers, right? At this point that’s basically gospel, or, to say gospel as the Christians do, to have decided something together and to just go with it no matter how much people want to argue about it. If you asked people in 1966, when 7 Women, Ford’s last feature, was released, I don’t know that most of them would have called The Searchers his best. My guess is that you would have heard The Grapes of Wrath, or How Green Was My Valley, or maybe Stagecoach. But The Searchers has been reified by history. (In my opinion, that’s the right answer!) And Alfred Hitchcock’s best movie is Vertigo, an opinion that I’m pretty sure is even more concretized at present than The Searchers is for Ford. But when Family Plot was released in 1976, the consensus for Hitchcock would surely have gone more towards Psycho even if the world was beginning to bend a little closer to Vertigo.

Nobody’s heard of me and my job isn’t riding on this, so I can afford to be a little bit bold with this prediction. (And a little stupid, given that David Fincher is sixty and might be making movies another two decades…and that Ford was sixty-two when he made The Searchers…and Hitchcock fifty-nine when he made Vertigo…) For so long, the consensus with Fincher was that Fight Club was the masterpiece. Then it was The Social Network. Recently it’s Zodiac. I’m not a David Fincher acolyte, and on some days I’m not even a believer at all, but I genuinely admire how difficult it is for people to pin him down. When you think you understand Fincher as this gloomy director impressed with bloody nights of the soul, then you get The Social Network, which not only doesn’t have a body count but makes its most memorable sallies with dizzy humor rather than lye or knives. You can’t tell what people will come to value in David Fincher, and more than that, you can’t tell which movies from a director’s filmography will be most heralded in fifty years or more.

So here’s the prediction: when Fincher is dead and gone, Gone Girl will take its place as his “best” movie in the minds of critics and the public. I’m not cosigning this one. A quick look at my Letterboxd says I’ve got it sixth among Fincher’s movies, above Se7en and Mank but below The Game and Panic Room. It doesn’t really matter if I cosign this stuff or not, or if a handful of people don’t, because what the majority of people have come to appreciate most about Fincher’s films is in Gone Girl in its most attractive package. Movie star performances, buttery and dour cinematography, a terrific little twist, enough social commentary to interest us without overwhelming us.

And the screenplay. After double digit films, above all the wordy screenplay. Perhaps this shouldn’t be so surprising to me, given that Fincher has always looked to extremely popular material to make his films, but Gone Girl has the successful thriller in print become the successful thriller onscreen bona fides. Gillian Flynn is not as punchy as Aaron Sorkin in The Social Network or the savage joy of Steve Zaillian in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but there are zingers and monologues alike which stand out. The “cool girl” monologue has come dangerously close to being a kind of gender explainer for the kind of people who lust after Steve Kornacki or have Rachel Maddow in their DVRs. I’ve gone in a different direction, because I happen to like how well this line is put together. I poked around the shooting script to see if this was what they had going in, and it’s not. “Normal” is in there instead of “Midwestern.” This is so much better. Nick would not be happy with a nice girl. He would not be able to get it up for a nice girl. He can get it up for someone who says, “No way, baby. I’m it.” (Who can blame him?) What I like so much about this is that “Midwestern” is a type, and “normal” is a value judgment. Amy has worked in types, see “cool girl” for proof, throughout the film. Value judgments are not really her strong suit, nor the film’s.