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October 12th, 2008
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Missing persons

A moving effort from two Afflecks
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April 2nd, 2008 issue

By Rachel Shimp

Gone Baby Gone


Directed by Ben Affleck
With Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, John Ashton, Amy Ryan, Amy Madigan, and Titus Welliver

For the Post
The boys of Boston: Private investigator Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) gives losers the business.
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A newspaper headline skims through the frame in the final third of Gone Baby Gone: “Cop father of slain daughter vows: ‘Never again.’ ” That cop, as we learned earlier, has made rescuing lost and persecuted kids his life’s work.
But Captain Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman), as the leader of Boston’s Crimes Against Children task force, isn’t the only person in this absorbing thriller who cares about what happens to missing 4-year-old Amanda McCready. As her troubled mother Helene (Amy Ryan) watches Jerry Springer to cope, seemingly the entire town rallies in the effort to find the little girl.
Helene’s sister, Bea (Amy Madigan), and her husband Lionel (Titus Welliver) soon ask two skip tracers to stalk the neighborhood for them, as a supplement to police operations. And as private investigators Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) roll up to the McCreadys’ stoop, they’re taken aback at the frenzy. “It looks like a block party,” Kenzie deadpans. “Four Cape Verdeans were killed here last year, and nobody gave a shit.”
The racial dynamics of the city are as much a part of Gone’s story as the crime itself.
Written by Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard from the novel by Dennis Lehane (who also penned Mystic River), Gone is also Affleck’s first foray into directing. He’s known as much for celluloid dreck like Gigli as for his 1997 Academy Award–winning screenplay for Good Will Hunting, but now Affleck has undoubtedly made his best career move since the latter. And, in doing so, he’s engendered a second revelation: that his kid brother can really act.
Last seen in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (he played the coward), the younger Affleck gives Kenzie a tough, sympathetic believability. Sometimes you can barely see his lips moving to produce that thick Boston accent, but you can always read his shifting emotions. Whole conversations seem to pass between the eyes of Kenzie and his partner and lover as they’re on the case. It’s unusual for them — they’re used to tracking down types who steal recreational vehicles, not children.
“When your job is to find people who are missing, it helps to know where they start. I find people who started in the cracks, and then fell through,” Kenzie says in a voiceover. The types he and Gennaro encounter throughout their search for Amanda show that “evil” can be ambiguous as well as bloodily defined.
Boston itself is a character in Gone. Nighttime and skyline shots sparkle, but not with the stage-flashiness of the Boston in Scorsese’s The Departed. And sunset shots, particularly during a rooftop climax, add a strange touch of casual serenity. The extras don’t look like actors, and the barflies in stained white T-shirts playing Keno at 2 p.m. could be those in any depressed urban center.
One of the best things about Affleck’s direction is his honest, not condescending, eye. People watch trash TV, they get loaded in front of their children, and they use epithets like “skeezers and coconuts,” which are the least offensive ones you’ll hear in this film. What’s implicit is that these are the least of the disappointing things people do.
As Kenzie and Gennaro naively interview the local scoundrels, a portrait of Helene as an unfit mother emerges. We learn that on the night of her daughter’s disappearance, she was actually in the local dive bar doing rails of coke. In a movie that features unthinkable grotesqueries, things are most tense during the interactions between Helene and her brother-in-law Lionel, when it seems certain that someone is about to be righteously smacked. During a kitchen interrogation, she haughtily spits out her story, pops open another beer, rolls her eyes. Her inability to care enrages. But her admissions of sin do lead the detectives to a murder, a bag of $130,000 and a Haitian drug lord who may or may not know something.
The same can be said for the police. This procedural is gripping for the strength of every character. As detective Remy Bressant, Ed Harris resembles Viggo Mortensen, transmitting a similar electricity as another man on the beat with vigilante inclinations. He and his partner, detective Nick Poole (John Ashton), are smart guys who’ve been around the block. But while they belittle Kenzie’s age and inexperience, they need his added bravado to metaphorically — and literally — bust down the door.
This assignment turns out to be much more than Kenzie bargained for. After a life-changing raid, his Catholic guilt is explored in some fantastic scenes with Bressant, as they drink from brown paper bags in a parking lot. He’s not sure he’s made the right choices, or whether he’d make them the same way twice. But he’s surrounded by people who make no apologies for avenging, any way they can.
Rachel Shimp can be reached at rshimp@praguepost.com


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