GONE BABY GONE

Starring: Casey Affleck, John Ashton, Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, Michelle Monaghan

Written by: Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard

Directed by: Ben Affleck

Distributor: Miramax Films

Rated: R

Ben Affleck makes his directorial debut with an entertaining drama based on a novel by Dennis Lehane. Set in dark, seedy Boston, Gone Baby Gone is immersed in pleasantly hazy moral ambiguity. Affleck’s brother Casey (To Die For, Ocean’s Eleven) stars as private investigator Patrick Kenzie, who is contacted by a couple hoping that he can help them find a lost girl. He and his partner Angela Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) reluctantly accept the case, drawing them into a complex web of human motivation.

True to contemporary-thriller form, the story wastes little time getting convoluted. Affleck pulls the camera from one seedy location to the next, ensuring that the feel of the film is anything but Hollywood. Gone Baby Gone was filmed entirely in Affleck’s home state of Massachusetts with a number of locals in semi-prominent roles. The authentic Boston accents and non-Hollywood faces serve the film well, grounding it solidly in its location in a way so many films fail to do successfully.

There are a number of impressive performances by Hollywood actors here, too; Morgan Freeman puts in an exquisite performance as a high-ranking police officer whose tragic past makes the quest for the missing child personal. Ed Harris (Pollock, A History of Violence) and John Ashton (Detective Taggart, Beverly Hills Cop) make for an interesting pair as police detectives assigned to find the child. Michelle Monaghan and Casey Affleck center the drama as notably earthbound figures who know the ugly side of Boston better than the police they are working with. Casey in particular proves that he can produce considerable gravitas in the right role.

Everything in the film works so well that it’s heartbreaking to see it ruined by a weak plot. We miss much of the intensity behind the story somewhere between an inadequately adapted screenplay and the uneasy visual style and pacing of a first-time feature director. When the missing girl is presumed dead halfway through the film, the story loses its focus and lacks momentum until its final twenty minutes, when questions of moral ambiguity begin to surface and the plot starts to move in a non-Hollywood direction. The film’s final scene is quiet, but captivating; it may be just two people watching TV, but it’s a moment that holds more meaning than any other scene in the film. Here we see Affleck’s significant – but yet unrealized – potential as a director.


Gone Baby Gone premieres October 19.