B | A private detective duo searches for a missing child. Directed by Ben Affleck Starring Casey Affleck, Michele Monaghan, and Amy Ryan Review by Jon Kissel |
That world is foregrounded from the start with some spare voiceover from Patrick, wondering how people can take such pride in a part of their lives they had no choice over. This monologue implicates Boston’s jealous self-regard and its civil slogan of ‘think you’re better than me?’ It isn’t long before someone says that phrase. There’s a psychic wage that comes from being Bostonian, where no matter how bad the rest of one’s life gets, they’re a junkie from Boston and thus superior to a doctor from Cleveland. The cast of Gone Baby Gone is one of the most stubborn collections of characters ever put to screen, thanks to their extremely healthy self-esteem. Everybody knows better than everybody else, from the corner bar goon to the hero police captain. That means they know who a person should or shouldn’t be talking to, and who is and isn’t deserving of being a parent to their kid. Affleck is not making a tourist ad for his beloved city.
The final question from that intro voiceover is how does a person get to heaven while protecting themselves from the evil of the world. Lehane’s books often feature the worst of crimes, from the child rape of this and Mystic River to the Holocaust in Shutter Island. In addition to having whiffs of horror amidst its crime noir plot, Gone Baby Gone is also a morality play where the act of looking implicates the looker, especially as it regards crimes against children. Someone has to look at the bloody underpants and continue on their day. Someone has to observe the bareness of the missing girl’s bedroom and smell the dishes stacked up in the kitchen and find empathy for her mother. I occasionally think about how deep my lefty convictions would be if I was a social worker or a teacher or a public defender (there’s no universe where I’d be a cop). How full is the reservoir of human compassion if I have to see how people treat each other or their children on a daily basis? Gone Baby Gone puts Patrick into a lawful good orientation, and he’s stripped of everything, including his confidence in the rightness of his choices when he’s left to babysit the daughter of a mother who didn’t know the name of her favorite doll.
This is a feel-bad film, but that doesn’t condemn the film itself. Affleck is still figuring things out with his scene selection and his editing, based on some useless filler scenes and the clumsy use of montage and voiceover to get characters from one location to the next. Where this actor-turned-director is strongest at this early stage is, unsurprisingly, as a director of actors. Everyone is uniformly great, from Casey Affleck on down. In the lead, Casey Affleck is incorruptible, ready to face down anyone because that’s clearly how it has to be in this neighborhood. There’s palpable frustration from Patrick that his neighbors are once again making him defend himself in an otherwise average interaction. Amy Ryan as the kidnapped girl’s junkie mother is a true empathy test, repulsive and clueless and mean but capable of generating some kind of maternal feeling, if only in her daughter’s absence. Titus Welliver and Ed Harris both kill me in their ability to display the crumbling of a manly façade, while Monaghan is as good as she’s ever been in her unraveling despair. Bit players have their moments, particularly in a midday corner bar staffed with a dudes selected for whoever’s got the fattest sausage fingers. Affleck must’ve found that background actor with a tracheotomy and told him to name his price. I’m as far from an expert on Boston as possible, but there’s just no corner of the world that seems inauthentic.
In addition to the directing hiccups, the ultimate reveal also leaves something to be desired. It works as a morality play, where there’s no right answer, but that’s the case within a contrived and doomed-to-fail scenario. It’s difficult to imagine a happy life for little Amanda and her adoptive family, as everyone involved is a well-known figure and they’re going to be constantly fearful of discovery. There’s undoubtedly plenty of kids to rescue from the Boston foster care system, why does it have to be the one tied into a heavily publicized kidnapping case? Gone Baby Gone is so strong in the details that this can be overlooked but it keeps the film out of the upper echelons, especially in a landmark movie year like 2007. Affleck will go on to greater and greater accomplishments as a director, but there’s a case to be made that his first film is also his best. B+