Gone Baby Gone

So this is what people mean when they say Boston is misrepresented on film. The city portrayed in Ben Affleck’s excellent directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, bears little resemblance to the city Spielberg destroyed in War of the Worlds or the metropolis that Jimmy Fallon infects with hang-dog anti-charm in Fever Pitch. Even Scorsese’s vision of Boston in The Departed could have easily been mistaken for New York if not for the tweaked accents, while the actors in Clint Eastwood’s solid Mystic River (based on another book by Gone scribe Dennis Lehane) behave in a manner too self-consciously Shakespearian to come off as truly authentic.

Meanwhile, Affleck’s Boston is a crude and often malevolent place where an exchange as simple as ordering a drink at a bar can easily erupt into violence. Affleck spends a great deal of time portraying his birthplace at its worst, but within these filthy coke-dens, lower-income housing projects, and windowless taverns, the director is able to examine the notions of cultural identity that can simultaneously empower and inhibit a city’s poorest denizens. That such a moving portrayal of inner-city strife was conceived by the once painfully ubiquitous Affleck should come as less of a surprise than people are making it out to be. Make no mistake: Gone Baby Gone is the film Ben Affleck was born to make.

Like Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone probes the unimaginable horror of losing a child by examining the tragedy from the perspectives of the family, the police, and the perpetrators, while obscuring the lines that separate each of these concerned parties. After eight-year-old Amanda McCready is kidnapped from her South Boston home, private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro (Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan) are asked by the girl’s aunt to “augment” the police’s investigation. Essentially, Kenzie and Gennaro’s job is to talk to the kind of people who don’t talk to cops, as a desperate last-ditch effort to uncover leads on a case that grows more unsolvable by the hour. This initiates a series of seemingly disjointed events that flow strangely into a climax that is both shocking and inevitable.

It would be unfair to reveal anymore plot points, for the joy (if such a word can be used to describe a tale as dark and miserable as this) of watching Gone Baby Gone lies in following the emotional highs and lows of Lehane’s fittingly labyrinthine plot and awaiting whatever mysterious destination we might arrive at in the end. Along the way, every cast member from the leads right down to the extras (most of whom were played by native Bostonians and non-actors) lends painful realism to a story that, in the hands of less convincing performers, would surely have crumbled under the weight of its own twists and turns.

And while Amy Ryan has the juiciest role (and has thus enjoyed the most acclaim) as Amanda’s drug-addicted mother, the film’s success largely depends on Casey Affleck’s deft handling of Patrick’s rhythmic, kinetically homegrown dialogue. The younger Affleck brother is in nearly every frame of the film, and he gamely matches up with actors like Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman, unafraid to be the most compelling force onscreen. Much is required of Affleck, for when you dig beneath the thick layer of grime and corruption at the surface of Lehane’s story, you ultimately find a portrait of Patrick’s soul, one that strives to be “wise as a serpents, yet innocent as a dove.” Whether Patrick lives up to his own lofty credo is the question that surrounds the film’s devastating final act, and Affleck sells his character’s turmoil with the effortless skill of an old pro.

Granted, I’m sure there are many who will become frustrated by Gone Baby Gone’s hedge-maze of a plot. But seeing the film a second time, with the knowledge that every miniscule side-plot or seemingly meaningless character was in fact a small piece of evidence, I was impressed by the tightness and purposefulness of the storytelling in a way that would be impossible upon an initial viewing. Maybe that’s a fault, or maybe it just means the film offers entirely new reasons to enjoy it upon repeated viewings. Either way, Gone Baby Gone is a powerful and extremely well-acted crime story that bleeds and stinks like a real decaying city as it drags the viewer into a corrupt and dangerous world that we wished only existed in the movies.