Gone Baby Gone

I was excited to see Ben Affleck’s first crack at being behind the camera and finally got around to seeing Gone Baby Gone on Friday. He made some smart decisions that led to a very fine first film: (1) He stayed behind the camera (2) He worked with a veteran writer and chose source material that was not only great but he had a personal connection to (Boston). Dennis Lehane wrote the novel on which the film was based and I’m a big fan of one of his previous adaptations: Mystic River (directed by Clint Eastwood). Based on this and my understanding of the plot from the trailer and reviews, I was expecting something similar to Mystic River. In some ways the films are similar, but they differed more than I expected. Gone Baby Gone was much more personal and much less stylized as compared to Eastwood's neo-mobster thriller.

Just a note: the marketing for this movie was very interesting. The trailer (see below) made the story seem much more straightforward than it actually was. The film revolves around the abduction of Amanda, the three year old daughter of coke-addict Helene (Amy Ryan), and the private investigators hired to augment the police investigation: Patrick (Casey Affleck) and his girlfriend/business partner Angie (Michelle Monaghan). For the first half of the movie, it was a simple whodunit that had a sudden and premature “fake-out” ending. At this point, the story slipped into a strange purgatory focusing mostly on the dectective, Patrick. Then suddenly, it came back to Amanda’s case and we started to see that all the facts weren’t as they first seemed. There was a potential for losing the audience with the unconventional structure (and I should probably go see it again), but it paid off in the end.






As far as the portrayal of Bostonians, Ben Affleck was definitely going for “photo-realism”. It was clear that many of the incidental characters and extras were actually people from “the neighborhood”. My one complaint was for as real as the film felt, looked, and sounded, some of the plot points seemed a little outside of my suspension of disbelief: specifically, a sequence when Patrick executes an unarmed child molester after discovering a child’s body in his home and seems to bear no judicial recourse. Not that I’m defending the rights of child molesters, but I think that if something like that actually happened, the officer (or PI) involved would be looking at criminal charges or at the very least be arrested.


All in all this was a very strong ensemble cast and a tight story with a succinct theme of “black-and-white” morality. Gone Baby Gone was not just a strong start for an emerging filmmaker, but an extremely entertaining movie in general.

Gone Baby Gone

(4.5/5)