Gone Baby Gone

Director: Ben Affleck
Writers: Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard, from the novel by Dennis Lehane
Starring: Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman, Amy Ryan
Running time: 114 minutes

Plot: Private detectives Patrick Kenzie (Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Monaghan) are called to investigate the disappearance of a four-year-old girl. As they delve the background of her drug-addicted mother (Ryan), they are drawn into a world of dealers, pedophiles, and corrupt cops which puts at risk the detectives’ relationship and their very lives.

Lehane penned the novel behind 2003’s Mystic River, and Gone Baby Gone initially seems to be retreading familiar territory: again, the setting is down-and-out Boston; again, the key plot moments revolve around investigating the abuse of children, which lends the whole an extremely grim tone that will sicken most sensible viewers.

But the plot is in a sense secondary to Gone Baby Gone, because at its heart is a character study and some probing queries about the relationship between law and morality. The film rises or falls on how much the viewer believes in Kenzie’s character arc, and how much we engage in the choices he faces.

For mine, the film establishes these concerns well, and gives us enough time to see the horror of Kenzie’s moral questions and therefore connect with (or revile) his decisions. Praise must go here to Ben Affleck, who seems to have handled his first (serious) directorial effort very well. On reflection, the plot seems to develop a little too easily at points (some characters cough up more simply than we might expect; we wonder if other solutions might not have been found; some actions seem to lack the expected consequences). But the key scenes are tight and tense, the ending is superbly ambiguous, and throughout best use is made of the excellent cast.

In particular, Casey Affleck effects a mixture of fresh-faced vulnerability and sharp-witted hardman that allows us to believe he could do the job of wringing information out of the Boston lowlifes who would never talk to the police. This performance can only bolster any Oscar hopes for his Robert Ford. Meanwhile, Monaghan injects Gennaro with enough girl-next-door sense and empathy that she becomes the touchstone of ‘normalcy’ for us in the maelstrom that consumes the detectives’ lives.

Verdict: Tense and thought-provoking, this is one of my favourite films for this year. It is, however, very dark — much darker than the French 12+ rating would suggest! I look forward to more of the Afflecks in this mode: the senior behind and the junior in front of the camera.