Movie review: Gone Baby Gone

by Alex Bentley

The drumbeat for a Casey Affleck Oscar nomination is getting stronger and stronger as the year goes along. Yes, the man previously best known as being a wise-ass in the Ocean’s trilogy and for being Ben’s younger brother (more on that in a minute) has officially come into his own thanks to back-to-back stellar performances in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and now Gone Baby Gone.

The cynical person would take a look at the credits of Gone Baby Gone and say, “Well, of course Casey Affleck comes off good…in a movie written and directed by his brother!” But any thought of nepotistic finagling is instantly forgotten once the movie starts. Affleck commands nearly every scene he’s in as Patrick Kenzie, a native Bostonian who uses his lifelong neighborhood connections to help his work as a private detective. When a young girl goes missing, Patrick and his partner/girlfriend Angie (Michelle Monaghan) are hired by the girl’s family to assist with the police investigation, somewhat to the chagrin of Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman), the head of Boston Police Department’s missing children division.

If you recognize more than a little Mystic River in Gone Baby Gone (local Boston tough tries to find missing girl separately from police), that’s because they’re both based upon books by Dennis Lehane. Apart from somewhat similar storylines, the two films also share a certain aesthetic quality, including exploring the increasingly blurry lines between right and wrong. In Mystic River, Sean Penn’s character never really cared about finding out the absolute truth; he just wanted someone to pay for his daughter’s death. In Gone, Patrick searches relentlessly for the truth of what happened to the missing girl, only to be confronted with some confounding decisions when he discovers the truth. I would argue that this is the best film in a while to make a convincing argument for both sides of a particular issue. The decisions Patrick makes may be moral ones, but are they the right ones? Even though that may sound redundant, in the case of this film, it describes the situation perfectly.

The misfires in the film are relatively small, but noticeable nonetheless. I wish Ben Affleck had given us more of a background on Patrick. While Casey Affleck is extremely believable in most circumstances throughout the film, there are a couple of situations (usually when he tries to act intimidating) where his bravado seems a tad forced, and it’s hard to tell if this is supposed to be part of his character or if it’s a failing of the screenplay. Perhaps that wouldn’t be the case if we had been given more information on Patrick’s history. On the story side, there’s a significant change of pace about halfway through the film that serves to severely curtail the momentum of the plot for awhile and to muddy the waters of the story unnecessarily. The elder Affleck chooses to give Casey his lone voiceover of the film at this point, which almost makes you feel as if the movie is over. The way the rest of the film rolls out justifies the abrupt switch in the end, but there’s still the nagging feeling that the transition could’ve been handled a lot more smoothly.

Despite those flaws, Ben Affleck shows that he has the talents to be a great filmmaker with Gone Baby Gone. His writing skills have already been proven (he won an Oscar with Matt Damon for Good Will Hunting), and if he can improve his directorial choices in the future, he may end up with more hardware on his mantle. As for Casey, it’ll be a crying shame if he’s not up for a golden guy for at least one of his performances this year.