moviereview - Gone Baby Gone

GONE BABY GONE

	A private investigator is embroiled in the case of a missing child, one that takes him to the top of Boston's police department.	score 3+	moviereview rates films from 1 (unwatchable) to 5 (unmissable)
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Cast
Casey Affleck, Ed Harris,
Amy Ryan, Morgan Freeman, Michelle Monaghan

Director
Ben Affleck

Screenwriter
Ben Affleck
Aaron Stockard

Country
USA

Rating / Running Time
MA / 114 minutes

Australian Release
April 2008

Official Site

Remember this. Despite the intolerable sins of Gigli and Jersey Girl, Ben Affleck won a shared Oscar for Good Will Hunting. Gone Baby Gone, his directorial debut (unless you count 1993’s I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her On A Meat Hook and Now I Have A Three Picture Deal At Disney) marks a seismic shift in the fortunes of the one-time pin-up boy and suggests that, good looks notwithstanding, his strengths lay behind the camera. Gone Baby Gone is a moral tragedy dressed up as a cop drama that throws down some deeply uncomfortable questions. When should a law be broken? When is intervention intrusion? Who gets to draw the line? PI Patrick and his girlfriend are about to find out. Called in to investigate the disappearance of a little girl, they slowly uncover a plot that reaches far beyond her dysfunctional family.

For all the film’s extraordinary moments, and there are many, there’s a troubling undertow of the pot boiler that Affleck and co-writer Aaron Stockard never quite shake. Based on a novel by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River), it’s the kind of cops-in-crisis story that always shakes the force to its core. And these cops, led by Morgan Freeman and co-opted by Ed Harris, take them into very dark territory indeed. It opens a basket case of moral dilemmas in which the central theme, that of a child stolen for its own good, will resonate loudly. Yet there’s something in the handling that doesn’t always ring true, an implausibility that niggles and is compounded by a glossing of crises. Where Patrick should disappear into an emotional black hole, the loss of his girlfriend is little more than inconvenient; the death of a suspect is brushed aside.

Affleck is on much firmer ground when he soaks up the surrounds of his story. Boston inhabits Gone Baby Gone with a gritty resonance and gives added weight to Amy Ryan’s striking performance. As the missing child’s junkie mother, she is utterly, revoltingly, distressingly believable. Casting brother Casey in the lead might smack of nepotism, yet his unobtrusive tone and baby-face is a good match for Patrick’s earnest naivety. Together they generate some truly vexing cinema, rasing haunting ethical questions, and incendiary conclusions.

// COLIN FRASER