IT WOULD be nice, or at least handy, to believe that the decline of Ben Affleck could be traced to one movie so dreadful or one role so mortifying that from that point there was no returning from the valley of the damned. Gigli was certainly a film s
o awful it could probably generate a mid-air walkout if it was an in-flight movie, but more ruinously it joined a string of very bad or ill-advised Affleck vehicles such as Surviving Christmas, Smokin' Aces, and Jersey Girl. As an actor, Affleck now has more turkeys on his CV than Bernard Matthews, so you might reasonably wonder: what makes him now think he can direct?
The clue is that Gone Baby Gone is a raw yarn about people making poor choices co-written and directed by the star of Pearl Harbor and Man About Town. Suddenly Affleck seems a good fit, as someone well-versed in bad decisions.
Dark, didactic and fairly intriguing, this is a good though certainly not a great movie about a seemingly simple case of child abduction, which spirals into a convoluted, combustible case of conflicting concerns. The missing child's anguished aunt (Amy Madigan) believes the only chance to find the four-year-old is through clues from criminals who don't talk to the police. So she hires private investigators Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan), a partnership both professionally and personally. The couple have the underworld connections but perhaps not the courage for such a case, and along the way they get themselves into trouble with police, drug dealers and their own consciences.
Suspicions begin with Amanda's mother, Helene (Amy Ryan), portrayed by the media as the suffering, tearful mother. In fact, she's a cocaine user and neglectful parent, something Kenzie and Gennaro spot. "They kidnap the furniture too?" asks the detective, surveying the child's nearly empty bedroom.
Originally scheduled for release last autumn, the film was postponed because the its missing four-year-old girl, portrayed by a young actress named Madeline O'Brien, bore a similarity to Madeleine McCann and, like the McCann case, the mystery of her disappearance is conducted in the glare of the media spotlight. But the resemblance ends there: the movie veers into a realm of drug dealers, child abusers, churned-up families and soured police officers (Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman).
The film's themes and characters are more reminiscent of Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, because both are based on Dennis Lehane novels set in working-class Boston, which cast out tiny clues along the way as to what's actually going on.
Gone Baby Gone also serves notice that we may also have underestimated another Affleck, Ben's younger brother. Casey barely registered in lesser roles in the Ocean's series, or classics such as American Pie 2, while last year's The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford was the best western nobody could be bothered going to see. Brandishing a gun and interrogating men twice his size and age, the younger, more soft-spoken, tentative Affleck looks slightly ridiculous but plausible as Patrick, the kind of private detective who usually researches a situation, rather than gets tough.
Ben Affleck's first feature relies too much on easy narrative devices such as flashbacks, voiceovers and TV news updates for exposition, and he has a tendency to linger too long on images of grungy local colour. Yet his film is unflashy and affecting, even if not entirely convincing. It is certainly far better than most of the movies he has acted in, and marks his card as a director of flair and ambition.
On general release from FridayThe full article contains 624 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
