When I think of my wife, I always think of her head…. And what’s inside it…. Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts. What are you thinking Amy? What have we done to each other? What will we do?

So began Gone Girl the book. So begins Gone Girl the film. The 2012 Gillian Flynn bestseller that examines the dark and dangerous underbelly of the modern marriage found its way to the big screen in Se7en man David Fincher’s Gone Girl that released last Friday, for which Flynn has penned the screenplay. Having loved both the book and the film, t2 highlights 10 instances in which the film departed from the book…

The narrative: In the book, the narration is evenly distributed between Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) and his wife Amy Elliott Dunne (Rosamund Pike), with each putting forth his or her point of view… their take on the marriage that seemed perfect at first but has unravelled slowly and dangerously. The first hour of the film is, as Fincher had pointed out in a pre-release interview, a “he experiences, she experiences” watch as opposed to the book’s “he said, she said” read, sometimes being told through Amy’s journal entries. It’s only from the middle hour that the film starts being told from the two points of view.

Result: The film’s narrative feels impersonal and disjointed in some instances.

The motifs: “The problem with Amy’s treasure hunts… I never figured out the clues.”

Fincher’s film retains most of the book’s motifs. The BuzzFeed-like personality quizzes that Amy writes for a living, the board games Nick and his twin sister Go stock at The Bar, the secret signs between husband and wife, primarily the “two fingers on the chin” gesture Nick makes to Amy every time he wants her to believe him (“100 per cent true… no bullshit,” he tells her) and the treasure-hunt game that the two play on their wedding anniversary every year that leads Nick to his gift. In the film, the treasure hunt — a crucial lead in the police’s investigation into Amy’s disappearance — is truncated severely, with Nick having to travel to only three places to recover Amy’s clues. A vital clue from the book — that leads Nick to Hannibal in Missouri where he had spent time with both Amy and his mistress Andie — is not a part of the film.

Result: The truncated treasure hunt takes away some of the thrilling edge, but it helps the film run at a brisk pace.

Time and space: “I met a boy, a great gorgeous dude, a funny cool-ass guy.”

In the book, after Nick and Amy meet for the first time, they don’t see each other for eight months before randomly bumping into each other again in the middle of a busy New York street. But in the film, it’s one seamless transition from first meeting to casual sex, relationship to marriage. And then it’s the day of their five-year anniversary. As Nick says: “It came fast... and it came furious!”

Result: The film feels crisper than the book with things moving at breakneck speed.

The proposal: “Amazing f***ing Amy is getting f***ing married.”

In the film, Fincher crafts a romantic scene in which Nick proposes to Amy — with a ring hidden in his reporter’s notebook — while he is interviewing her at an Amazing Amy book launch (“Amy’s world-class vagina,” is his reason to marry her, he tells everyone at the table). But the book has no mention of how Nick popped the question to Amy.

Result: The charming scene wins brownie points for Fincher’s film.

The mall investigation: “Amy wanted to buy a gun!”

In the book, Nick, Amy’s father Rand and a few other friends, armed with baseball bats, search for Amy in the suburban mall that has shut down long ago and is now overrun by drug addicts and small-time gangsters. It is here that alcoholic Stucks Buckley tells Nick and co. that Amy had approached him a few weeks ago wishing to buy a gun. In the film, cops Boney (Kim Dickens) and Gilpin (Patrick Fugit) do the mall investigation themselves.

Result: The scene — that gets an entire chapter in the book and is glossed over here — makes the discovery of Amy’s intentions to buy a gun a wee bit abrupt.

The modus operandi: “I feel like I could disappear.”

Being a visual medium, Amy’s disappearing act is far more elaborate in the film than it was in the book. The change in look — from snipping off her hair to slipping on glasses — to the carefully thought-out plan — journal entries over three years and checking into a nondescript motel without arousing suspicion — are more graphic in the film.

Result: The film benefits from the graphic plan and execution of Amy’s disappearance.

The players: Nick and Amy apart, Go (Carrie Coon) is the only other well fleshed-out character in the film. While Amy’s parents Rand (David Clennon) and Marybeth (Lisa Banes) are reduced to side players — and even caricatures — in the film, Andie’s (Emily Ratajkowski) scenes are drastically cut with that entire sequence of her biting Nick’s cheek in disgust not making it to the film. Nick’s dad Bill — an important character in the book — has just one scene in the film, while Amy’s former boyfriend Desi’s mom Jacqueline has been cut out of the film totally.

Result: Less number of characters works in keeping the focus on Nick and Amy.

The murder: “I thought I could control Desi, but I can’t. I feel like something very bad is going to happen.”

In the book, Amy drugs Desi’s (Neil Patrick Harris) martini and kills him after he passes out. Fincher makes the murder a lot more gruesome and graphic with Amy slashing Desi’s throat repeatedly with a box cutter while they are having sex. The camera pans on the blood gushing out of Desi’s throat and staining Amy’s white bra and bedclothes.

Result: The sex may have been blurred out for Indian audiences, but the violence in the moment comes through the minute Amy slashes Desi’s throat.

The balance: While the book stops short of taking sides, the film, especially in the last hour, is skewed too much in favour of Nick, painting Amy as a psychopath with no scruples, a wife who, for Nick, goes from “exceptional and alive” to “taming shrew” and “controlling bitch”, while Nick the “maybe killer” becomes the “victim”.

Result: The bias against Amy is sure to disappoint fans of the book.

The “Cool Girl Speech”: “Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding....”

Amy’s Cool Girl Speech — an iconic part of the book — is partially changed in the film, narrated when Amy is driving down the countryside, relishing her new found freedom.

Result: A watered-down version of one of the most iconic lines in the book.

PS: The bit we liked best? If you have read the book, you almost wait for Nick to crack “the smile” even as he “pleads” with the public to find Amy. Fincher executes this well with Affleck’s sudden smile in the middle of so much tension, almost unnerving the viewer. The film also retains Nick’s smiling selfie with a flirtatious local socialite, even as his wife — the “gone girl” — remains missing.

Priyanka Roy

Book or film — which did you like more and why? Tell t2@abp.in