THERE is such a thing as bad publicity. Gone Baby Gone was supposed to be out in the UK a whole year ago, but was postponed in the wake of Madeleine McCann's disappearance. In some ways this was a quite peculiar decision. Yes, the film features the abduction of a young girl, and yes, the actor who plays the young girl happens to be called Madeline. But her character's name is Amanda, meaning that the chances are nobody would have even noticed any connection unless they scoured the final
And there the film's similarities to the real-life tragedy of the McCann family end. Gone Baby Gone is set not in Portugal but on the meaner streets of Boston, the kidnapped girl's mother is a drug addict, and the story is not about the parents at al
l – they barely feature – but about a private investigator called Kenzie (played by Casey Affleck).
In fact, Gone Baby Gone, based on a novel by Dennis Lehane (whose work was also the inspiration for Mystic River) – is one of those detective thrillers in which a man goes in search for the truth about a crime where the pieces just don't seem to fit, and ends up exposing corruption at levels of power much higher than he could have predicted. That the film's release could be delayed for an entire year because of the McCann case says more about the media's morbid obsession with one particular child than it does about the film. Ironically, the child kidnapped in Gone Baby Gone is not like Madeleine McCann at all; she is far more like the thousands of other children whose disappearances go relatively unreported – the character is the daughter of poor parents who have fallen through society's cracks.
Anyway, there are two reasons why Gone Baby Gone is a significant film, and neither has anything to do with Madeleine McCann:
1: The film has won rave reviews pretty much across the board, for its intelligence, its ideas, and for its bravery in ending its story on a moral dilemma which has no easy answer and is likely to have you arguing about it for weeks;
2: It is directed by Ben Affleck.
Yes, that Ben Affleck, whose last attempt at directing was a 1993 film called I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney. Yes, the Ben Affleck who has spent much of his career making terrible films such as Pearl Harbor and Daredevil, before being roundly ridiculed for making the preposterous Gigli – a film which, lest we forget, featured an oral sex scene with the lines "it's turkey time, gobble gobble" – with then partner Jennifer Lopez, whose career quality control seems even more shaky than his own when it comes to acting roles.
Gone Baby Gone, though, looks like being the next stage in the reinvention of Ben Affleck, which began in earnest with a thoughtful performance in Hollywoodland – about the death of George Reeves, star of the TV version of Superman – and looks set to continue with a starring role in State of Play, based on the political TV thriller that was a hit for the BBC back in 2003. Affleck will star as Stephen Collins, (played by David Morrissey in the original), and the film is being directed by Kevin Macdonald, fresh from The Last King of Scotland.
In the meantime, the delay of Gone Baby Gone's release means that we get to enjoy a serious, grown-up thriller at a time of year usually reserved for daft blockbusters. If you've already seen Indiana Jones and Sex and the City, here's one to squeeze in before The Hulk comes out next week.
