Gone Baby Gone – Little Girl Lost and Boston at its Grittiest

Article first published as Movie Review: Gone Baby Gone – Little Girl Lost and Boston at its Grittiest on Blogcritics.

Gone Baby Gone (2007) takes place in the poorer neighborhoods of Boston, mainly Dorchester, where it’s also filmed. The story itself revolves around the case of a missing four year old girl, Amanda McCready (Madeline O’Brian). Amanda’s aunt Bea (Amy Madigan) hires the private detectives Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) to help with the investigation on the assumption that because Patrick is at home in the neighborhood he can get more information than the police.

The Boston police take missing children cases seriously, mostly because of the personal history of the police chief Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman), who has lost a child himself, so there is already a full media circus when the Patrick and Angie get involved. The police chief assigns detectives Remy Bressant (Ed Harris) and Nick Poole (John Ashton) to the case and they have a good report with the private detectives. It turns out that the girl’s mother, Helene McCready (Amy Ryan) is involved in drug running, and a user herself, and not the most suitable mother, which seems to have something to do with Amanda’s abduction.

The whole investigation crawls through the underbelly of the working class neighborhood with its petty, and not so petty, criminals, some of which are old friends of Patrick’s. It takes a sharp turn for the worse when a ransom is suggested by the drug dealer Cheese (Edi Gathegi) who is everyone’s prime suspect. There is an exchange at a quarry that winds up looking like Amanda simply ran off a cliff and was drowned. Patrick can’t stop worrying at the case, though, there are too many things that don’t add up.

The story is complex, but not confusing, multi-layered and rich. It’s got an undeniable feeling of authenticity which is certainly due to some extent to the fact that Affleck has chosen authentic locations and cast a lot of non-professional local extras that sort of make you go “where did he find these people?”. It gives the street scenes and the occasional interiors of bars and clubs a flavor of overall gritty reality that makes the story hit all the harder.

The performances in this are really outstanding. Amy Ryan as Helene gives one of those performances where you just want to slap her character for not understanding what her behavior does to her daughter. The cast in general is stellar, to the point where it’s actually hard to single out any particular performance as carrying more weight than any other.

There are several interesting moral questions raised here, not only through the details revealed in connection with the missing child case. There are further reaching implications than you can glean at a first glance and they are all treated with the same understated gravitas in the context given by the story. So, yeah, it’s not simple. There’s an undeniable air of Noir over the whole story too, which I personally really like. It’s not only realistic and understated, it also challenges the viewer to pay attention and stay with the story, despite how dark it occasionally gets. The characters are genuinely interesting and complex enough that whatever moral questions arise they don’t feel tacked-on and gratuitous.

Ben Affleck has done an excellent job of directing this movie, his familiarity with Boston certainly adds layers to his interpretation of the story and what looks like blatant nepotism at a first glance, choosing Casey Affleck for his lead, is actually a very smart choice.

Gone Baby Gone (2007) is based on a Dennis Lehane novel with the same title. Directed by Ben Affleck it stars Casey Affleck (Patrick Kenzie), Michelle Monaghan (Angie Gennaro), Morgan Freeman (Jack Doyle), Ed Harris (Remy Bressant), John Ashton (Nick Poole), Amy Ryan (Helene McCready), Amy Madigan (Bea McCready), Titus Welliver (Lionel McCready), Michael K. Williams (Devin), Edi Gathegi (Cheese), Mark Margolis (Leon Trett), Madeline O’Brien (Amanda McCready), Trudi Goodman (Roberta Trett) and Matthew Maher (Corwin Earle).

The Human Stain

The Human Stain (2003) directed by Robert Benton is based on Philip Roth’s novel of the same name. We have Anthony Hopkins as the elderly college professor Coleman Silk – a man who carries around a pretty dark past and who has led most of his life based on a whopping big lie. We have Nicole Kidman, playing Faunia Farley, a woman in her thirties who several reviewers have described as leading a white trash existence… Frankly I think that is a pretty stupid characterisation. We have Gary Sinese, playing Nathan Zuckerman – Coleman’s friend and the narrative voice. We also have Ed Harris in the role of Lester Farley – Faunia’s ex-husband, a Vietnam veteran with some bad habits, a couple of tours of duty and a few madhouses behind him as well as a grudge. Young Coleman is played by Wentworth Miller, who does a good job and gets to wear the nicest suits.

Looking at the cast, the script, the original material and the time, money and effort I can’t help thinking this should be a better movie than it is. Stellar performance by Hopkins, as always. He plays the distinguished college professor of Classical literature who is shown at the very beginning giving a lecture on Achilles, the man who could not give up the girl, and then acts out that same tragedy without being all over the place. I think some of the choices he makes are very clever indeed, showing the emotional restrain of a man who has had to live a life of hiding his true identity and not act on his first impulse at every given moment. Kidman is nothing but emotion, which can get a little tiresome frankly. The ridiculously named character Faunia Farley talks to crows, thrashes kitchens and keeps the ashes of her two children in gold-coloured boxes under her Spartan bed. She swears like a sailor and works three jobs, all manual labour, claiming to have been brought up in a very wealthy home. As a sultry femme fatale she does a pretty good job, but I would have preferred a little more depth and a little less emoting wildly all over the place. Ed Harris is good at being the scary guy. It’s just a matter of walking on for him, with a face like that. Gary Sinese has the dubious pleasure of being the story teller, a writer living as a recluse in a cabin in the woods, telling other peoples stories rather than his own. There are moments of warmth and humor between Zucherman and Coleman that really add to this story, but then there is the rather thin voice over narrative that I feel is neither needed or particularily interesting.

Sidetrack: A bad voice over is always worse than risking a little confusion on the viewer’s part. We’ve got functional voice overs – I think this one falls in that category. But there are voice overs that add and deepen the story – Terrence Malick does that best, even if it sometimes just makes people angry. There are voice overs that just set the scene and then leave the viewer alone for the most part – like The Crow (1994). And when it doesn’t work we have the much debated voice of Deckard in Blade Runner (1982) which was taken out for the director’s cut version. It’s a good example of what happens when studio heads think the audience needs help – and that fake Noir never really worked for some reason. Wether it is diegetic or not, the voice over is clearly a breach of the fourth wall and that makes it extremely tricky to pull of. You have to understand who you are speaking to and try not to insult their intelligence.

Second sidetrack: Writers have a tendency to stick writers in their plot. Just working with what they know, I guess. It takes a special kind of talent to make an author interesting, we are basically dealing with a character who sits around observing events and then turning that into words on a page. Solitary exercises, typically done in a corner sitting on your arse. It can be done well, but that generally involves authors like Oscar Wilde, Shakespear, de Sade, Rimbaud or something like The Basketball Diaries (1995) or Naked Lunch (1991).

But I digress.

Coleman and Faunia have an affair, for lack of a better word, which is frowned upon by people around Coleman. Faunia seems to have no other human relationships, living in a void she herself has created. Coleman and Faunia have one thing in common – they can’t seem to get past their past. I don’t really respond well to Faunia’s stark hurt, thinking she should have learned to subdue some of the rawness of her pain because no one can burn like that all the time and not burn out. Coleman, on the other hand, reveals his secret towards the end of the film, and this is almost treated as an en passant, which I think is kind of odd. His whole life has been about hiding this lie and now it’s like “oh? really? let’s have some coffee…” And without spoling too much I can say that the deaths of the main characters is treated in a similar manner.

Main themes of this story are all deeply interesting things: racial concerns, mind/body dichotomies, youth/age, “action is the enemy of thought” as a basic premise of how to live you life, lies, past hurt, betrayal, friendship, love and so on and so forth. Maybe one of the reasons I keep feeling it could have been better, deeper, richer, darker and more subtle is because it tries to do all these things all at once. And that usually means you have to stay on the surface and just keep moving forward. The literary connotations are buried pretty deep, despite the closet reader being able to churn out some of the classical themes of Achilles and the siege of Troy and his well sung rage.

We are left with a film that focuses on the actor’s performances, which are all good, at the expense of the story. It’s well worth watching none the less and there’s food for thought, but over all I find it somewhat lacking in depth. It has the potential to be more than it is.

Mule