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Gone Baby Gone (2007)

Director: Ben Affleck

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23 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

With their tribal loyalties and unkillable grudges, the cops, hoods, and hard-eyed women of South Boston have become the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy at the movies in recent years. The neighbourhood is a hotbed of broad-vowelled agonistes in Eastwood’s ‘Mystic River’, Scorsese’s ‘The Departed’ and now ‘Gone Baby Gone’, the flawed but impressive directorial debut by Boston native Ben Affleck.

Like ‘Mystic River’, Affleck’s film is adapted from a novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane, it’s steeped in local colour and texture, and it hinges on a lost child, an anguished parent, and a grievous backstory that sort of explains all. (Due to superficial resemblances to the Madeleine McCann kidnapping case, ‘Gone Baby Gone’ was withdrawn from the London Film Festival last year and pushed back from its original December release date.)

When little Amanda McCready goes missing, hopes are dim. She’s from a neighbourhood where residents aren’t disposed to talk to the cops, and her junkie mother, Helene (Amy Ryan), has incurred the wrath of a drug kingpin. Those are reasons enough for Amanda’s devoted aunt and uncle (Titus Welliver and Amy Madigan) to hire a young boyfriend-girlfriend team of private investigators, Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck, Ben’s brother) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan in an inert, thankless role), who then spend the requisite amount of time earning the trust of the cynical, squinty detective on the case (Ed Harris, naturally) and the heartbroken police captain (Morgan Freeman), who knows parental sorrow all too well.

The Oscar-nominated Ryan is fantastic, creating a character who’s at once fearsome and pathetic. Casey Affleck’s wry, soft-spoken poise is the movie’s backbone, and as Kenzie’s investigation twists and deepens, the character enters uncharted and hopelessly blurred moral territory, where sacred bloodlines seem to lose their resolution and doing the right thing starts to look all wrong (and vice versa). The rub, though, is that the film’s compelling ambiguities come to a head in a final, puzzle-solving final-reel development that is so mawkishly convoluted and screamingly absurd that it threatens to upend all the fine work that went before it.

Author: Jessica Winter 2008-06-03 10:20:18

Time Out London Issue 1972, 4 – 10 June 2008

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User reviews of this film

Matt said...

Posted on Jun 09 2008 17:02 I wasn't expecting much from this film, but there was nothing else on. Suffice it to say I really enjoyed it. Affleck manages to do as good a job as is probably humanly possible of disguising the twists, at least enough to make you doubt your intuition about what must be coming. Casey Affleck was, IMHO, really good. Only niggle, and not here fault, but Michelle Monoghan's character never really got to develop....

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Bina said...

Posted on Jun 09 2008 16:44 No. No.No. Give this a miss. It's an interesting story badly told. Acting is fair, dialogue often incoherent. Affleck barely moves his mouth when he speaks- it's a definiite affliction. Lots of continuity slips ups. All in all a slipshod attempt at mimicking Eastwood's Mystic River.

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cat said...

Posted on Jun 09 2008 10:30 dont no was ok

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Ziggy said...

Posted on Jun 08 2008 23:59 Take a mastermind with you to explain the plot line changes, which fiinally exhaust all the permutations by the end of the film. Thankfully no aliens turned up during the credits. All got a bit tedious half way through, better spend your money getting out The Wire to see Baltimore rather than this simple view of Boston.

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Boysie said...

Posted on Jun 08 2008 08:38 What Usman says ... goes for me too!
The honesty of the film. The squalidness seen through the eyes of a man with a truthful lens. The despair, life's deadend alleyways, full of broken bottles and discarded plastic bags. The biodegradable lives dwelling in Boston. The vicious cirle of life turning and turning but never changing. The babies born without love in the sperm. The latchkey kids raised on burgers and sunshine and rain. The maudlin and mundaness of lives gradually turning to anger and bitterness, in turn, turning on eachother. Until all that is left is despair and dirty bowls full of yesterdays wheaties. I love this film!

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usman khawaja said...

Posted on Jun 08 2008 02:40 THE DOOM AND DAMNATION OF A DOMESTICATION-The degenerate cops and profligate gangsters are a garb to show the centemporary moral fabrication of the western culture ,the violent killings ,cocaine snorting and missing kids are the plot with an angelic baby kidnapped in the irish catholic hell of Boston ,but instead of stereotypes we get an origonal,squalid yet profound look at our lives,it is nominally boston but the young swearing kids and the drug junkies could be from Mexico city,Brixton or Berlin .
This is an indictment of the system that has failed to deliver justice overtly and is thus obsolete and the people here are obliged to fulfill its obligations without any belief in its values ,that it needs a rethink was obvious decades ago ,now it is a charade where people have to decide the wrong or right in alliance with their conscience and this is the idea that makes this a classic greater then NO Country for old men ,a poorly realised treatise on violence with hardly anything to say except some silly gimmicks,this on the other hand is a reflection of the working class and professionals diatribe in the current milieu and Afflecks deliver it with enough honesty ,style and finesse to make it a memorable event.
The Departed is mediocre when compared to these hard talking ,grey characters who are trying to do the right within their dominions with limited choices ,but what is right is a mystery and the conclusion is inconclusive appropriately as it is only our perception of right that we regard as one,the truth is obscure and will be revealed only at odd moments in human destiny .
The movie suceeds in trying to explore and divulge part of the truth ,dressed as a kidnapping it dares to tread a fine path and expose the underbelly of the irish catholicism ,but the same holds true world wide and boston here becomes a social mirror to the global condition of humanity.
Casey is a great new talent ,even better than he was in THE KILLING OF COWARD ROBERT REDFORD,and Ben affleck makes the Coens look like the kids in this movie; pawns in the chess game between a corrupt system and degenerate social values .
The script is as sophisticated as Valley of elah and the political strife is just culminating as a means to an end to whitewash the reality ,with no one bothered to know the truth or adminster justice ,which has indeed become a rarity and very precious commodity today .a great movie by afflecks .
USMAN KHAWAJA

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Boysie said...

Posted on Jun 06 2008 23:18 The quality of this film took me by surprise. The acting is top notch. This is serious film making aimed at people who take film seriously. Casey Affleck’s unassuming authority holds the film together until the very end. Some of the dialogue has electricity running through it. The action is toned right down which grounds the film to a nice and consistent level.
I didn’t buy into the ending or the so called debate it engendered, because it is unquestionably silly (in my opinion). No spoiler here.
Full marks to Ben Affleck on his directorial debut. I look forward to his next film

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CarolJ said...

Posted on Jun 05 2008 15:03 Saw this film yesterday and Ben Afflek did a brilliant job. Go see this movie and when you come out you'll be asking yourself 'would I have done that?'

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