Reviewed by Katherine Ramsland
Welcome to Our Town...the Dark Side. The South Boston neighborhood setting for this film sets up a claustrophobic atmosphere of people who remain in one place, body and soul, their whole lives. Some deteriorate, which is evident in their substance abuse, situational morality, and neglect of hearth and home. A child's bedroom, for example, is a barren pit, while the mother enjoys cocaine and an LCD TV. But the moody discomfort pays off in a provocative plot that forces us not only to ponder life's largest questions but also to appreciate the firm control Ben Affleck wields in his directorial debut. Not only did Affleck bite off a considerable chunk when he took on Dennis Lahane's 1998 crime thriller, Gone Baby Gone, but he also added the challenge of directing his talented younger brother in the sensitive lead role.
Casey Affleck, just coming off The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, opposite Brad Pitt, hits all the right notes in portraying Patrick Kenzie. He offers authentic mannerisms, a streetwise attitude, and perfectly timed hesitations over life and death decisions. His character "looks young" but at a moment's notice can be tough beyond his years. For this spare but complex script that Ben Affleck penned with Aaron Stockard, the younger Affleck is surrounded by an awesome cast. Morgan Freeman plays Jack Doyle, the respected head of a special force dedicated to preventing crimes against children, and Ed Harris shows up as Detective Remy Bressant. His performance alone makes the film worth seeing. Every character, it turns out, has secrets, some darker than others, but all intricately intertwined in a slippery slope of moral and criminal compromise.
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| Gone Baby Gone Movie Poster |
The film opens with a startling voiceover: "The dance you don't choose makes you who are." Immediately, we wonder about our own "dance," which is fitting for what lies ahead. Viewer beware: you should know your personal moral grounding before you slide into this quicksand of good and evil. Rarely have the two been so skillfully blended.
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| Gone Baby Gone Star Casey Affleck |
Patrick's many interactions with regular folks, hardened criminals, and testy cops all orbit around a missing four-year-old girl, Amanda McCready, the daughter of a serious drug addict, Helene (Amy Ryan). We can quickly surmise that the story of Amanda's disappearance — Helene was away just for a minute — is hiding the truth, but it requires some sleuthing to learn what wasn't said. Enter Patrick and his "associate" and girlfriend, Angie (Michelle Monoghan). They're not exactly seasoned private eyes, but Amanda's Aunt Bea (Amy Madigan) nevertheless implores Patrick to exploit his lifelong ties to the neighborhood to ask around where cops cannot tread.
Angie wisely suggests they might not want this job, but Patrick decides to see what's involved. The sweet girl's photo hooks them both, so they decide to probe. "It can't hurt," they naively believe, just before their entire world falls apart. In fact, their first venture into a seedy bar in the middle of the day, where habitual patrons display the ravages of their "dance" with liquor in ugly disfigurements, nearly gets them killed. The territorial bartender and his clients know about Helene, but they're not offering information. Nor do they want someone to come and get it. Yet Patrick and Angie do manage to learn what Helene is hiding, and they offer the cops the name of her drug dealing boyfriend.
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| Gone Baby Gone Star Morgan Freeman |
While Jack Doyle is upset about Patrick's involvement, he assigns two top detectives to work with him, one of whom is Bressant. But when a dangerous situation gets bungled, Doyle accepts full responsibility, which spells early retirement. Patrick feels responsible and wants to set things right. His blindspot derives not from his inexperience but from his idealism about things like nobility, justice, and order. Thus, he plunges once again into dark waters that quickly close over his head, and then worse things occur, including one of the most disconcerting scenes involving a pedophile to be shown in a serious movie in a long time.
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| Gone Baby Gone Director Ben Affleck |
Ben Affleck took some interesting risks as a new director: he chose a tough, gritty film that makes intellectual demands on viewers, he delved freely into objectionable subjects, he undermined many comfortable cultural stereotypes, and he decided to include nonprofessionals in his film. He took cameras to the various locations and just started filming. Whoever was walking by, hanging out a window, or standing on the porch of a "three-decker" got into the shots, creating a sense of authenticity. It was a risk, but it worked.
If anything hurt the plot's momentum, it was the intrusion of some voiceovers in places that raised expectations for a wrap but did not deliver. The film also required following every step: if you crunched your popcorn too loud when someone's name was mentioned, you could miss some crucial element that pops up later on. The trick is to keep it all straight, because you're going to want to be fully prepared as the film descends to its peak emotional moment. (Yes, descends.)
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