Gone Baby Gone (2007)
Gone Baby Gone is, as the title partially suggests, another “our collective mistrust, guilt and secret hatred as crystallized by the disappearance of an innocent” picture. This one is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, who inspired another entry in the genre, Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River. You’ve no doubt heard that Ben Affleck served as director and co-screenwriter of Gone Baby Gone, and, if you havent seen the film yet, or read some of the positive notices, you can probably be forgiven for assuming this film is a desperate vanity project, or, best case, merely forgettable.
Gone Baby Gone is a memorable, confident picture and refreshingly lacks the lifeless “Great American Director” self-importance that killed Mystic River. Affleck has made a tasty little detective story with a strong moral outrage that sticks. Most private eye pictures (and I say this as a fan of the genre) revel in the anti-social cool of their protagonist. The PI has been fucked over several times in the past and he knows the score, and the films are usually about him lording his street smarts (whether he knows the full story or not) over every other character in the movie.
Gone Baby Gone is about that initial fucking over that sours the PI to begin with, and it’s about struggling to maintain a sense of balance and optimism in an environment that discourages such ambitions. Some have mumbled “too young” in regards to Casey Affleck’s Patrick Kenzie, but that is precisely the point. He IS too young, but the film’s course of events probably ensure that he will one day be giving some other young do gooder the advice that Ed Harris (doing a particularly effective variation of his thing) and his partner (nice to see you back John Ashton) give him here. Kenzie is a tricky part, it’s tempting to make him an insufferable bore, but luckily both Afflecks understand that to navigate this world, optimism or not, you still to have some inner savage.
Affleck the director acknowledges this in a wonderful scene near the beginning when Affleck the actor and his partner, Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan, regrettably marginalized) begin to look into the case of a young neighborhood girl that has gone missing. They stop by a bar that the mother (Amy Ryan) is known to frequent, well, frequently. They immediately find something the cops have missed. Someone begins to talk, and a few other someones in the bar begin to resent this. Ben Affleck stages the scene with authority and surprising quicksilver viciousness. Most surprising is Casey Affleck, his Kenzie isn’t the pretty boy his looks may lead one to believe. He’s an emotionally stewed pit bull, and he’ll snap at someone twice his size, and be the first to pull a gun.
Emotionally stewed, constipated, tortured, none of that would do Amy Ryan’s performance justice. Ryan’s Helene McCready is one of the more lived in creations of bottom dweller desperation and self-loathing that I’ve seen in the movies. It’s exhilaratingly unsentimental work. McCready is the sort of the casual monster that is much more dangerous than the barroom thuggery that Patrick fruitlessly confronts; McCready represents something more insidious, and impossible to supress. MCready’s casual obscenity, her unflagging sense of reckless, unsubstantiated entitlement, her self-absorption, her fleeting moments of clarity, it’s all remarkably realized by Ryan. Many films have acknowledged the chicken and egg business of broken homes, or abusive, unstable families; but most are unable to avoid sanctimony as gracefully as Ryan and Affleck do here.
The naivete that goes with attempting to interrupt the endless cycle of people screwing one another over is the ultimate punchline of Gone Baby Gone. The film has a broken heart, and it drives it home in an ending so powerful you forget for a few hours how deeply absurd it actually is. The film depends on a few unlikely realizations that recall some of the last act convolutions of Mystic River, and Affleck’s film gets vague just when it should be snapping into focus. Affleck hasn’t made a great film, but he’s made a good one, a genre film with snap and conscience, a requiem for giving a damn.
★★★
November 17th, 2007 at 6:35 am
C-bo, I just watched this last night. I for one had a hard time with the girlfriend, and her out of no where passion for the girl/case. I was a little tired of the movie driving home the fact that Patrick Kenzie was among the people and could extract information from so much easier than the cops. They did it about 4-5 times.
*SPOILER ALERT*
I also found myself outraged at how the crowd was reacting at the end of the movie. Most specifically when Patrick calls the cops on the former chief. They all groaned and moaned, but I was just thinking “good!”. I realize that Ben Affleck wanted us to think twice about what future that girl would have w/ her new found parents, but the bottom line is that people were killed, bribed, paid off and deceived to kidnap a kid. No matter whether or not the girl would have a 100x better life with the chief vs her real mother is irrelevant. Just because a kid is better off somewhere else, doesn’t mean you can take them. For some in the theater it seemed like a valid question, but it was much more cut and dry for me. Did you feel this way too?
November 18th, 2007 at 10:35 am
Jeff-
Valid points, though I confess that I was rooting for Kenzie to let Freeman keep the girl too. Is that right? No. Is it cut and dried? I would also say no, because that girl will be much worse off with her mother, and blindly following the rules no matter what can sometimes get you in hot water. But breaking the rules whenever you feel wronged can get you in hot water too. I applaud Ben Affleck for acknowledging this ambuigity and still having the courage to keep an ending that much closer resembles what would happen in “real life”. I also applaud Affleck for resisiting the urge to imply that the mother had learned something from the experience, I’ve unfortunatley encountered women like the Amy Ryan character in my work, and my experiences have generally led me to believe that women that self-absorbed and far down the ladder of decency rarely “change”.
I accepted Gennaro (the girlfriend’s) interest in the case, but I do wish that Affleck (the director) hadn’t pushed her so far to the sidelines. She’s basically Kenzie’s conscience here, but I recently read one of the other Kenzie-Gennaro books and was (happily) surprised to see that she’s as much a character as Kenzie, a partner, not a foil. Affleck obviously has to keep the plot skipping along, but I wish some more attention had been paid to her.
Nice to hear from you Jeff, continue to keep me on my toes!