MovieTime

Review

by Julie Rigg

The faces are the first shock in Gone Baby, Gone. Well, maybe they don't exactly shock but they do disconcert. Police have been called to a South Boston neighbourhood because a young child has gone missing from her home. While they confer, the neighbours come out on the street to gawk. The camera roams across their faces. They are seamed faces, marked by life, and by poverty. They are not faces we normally see on extras in movies.

On these opening scenes Ben Affleck has put his stamp as a director, signalling a seriousness in a film set in the city in which he and brother Casey grew up.

But it's more than just a pair of brothers filming in the neighbourhood. There are three Boston boys involved, the first among equals being Dennis Lehane, a writer who has set his thrillers among the close family ties, the neighbourhoods and the people of Boston's South Side.

Lehane is a crime writer of considerable power. Many of his stories are about children: as victims, abducted, preyed upon. But his stories are about children in other ways. The adults who people his South Boston novels know each other. Their ties go back to childhood, to playground feuds and loyalties. Some grow up to be criminals, some get out of the neighbourhood, and some stay on the right side of the law. In Lehane's world, those childhood loyalties define their adult lives.

Film people are just discovering his dark, evocative works. The first was Clint Eastwood, who filmed a much admired adaptation of Mystic River.

Gone baby Gone is the second adaptation, but we will see more. This one is from a series he wrote about two PIs who work in South Boston.

Casey Affleck plays a private detective, Patrick Kenzie. Michelle Monoghan plays his partner Angie Genarro. They make their living chasing up people who default on car or alimony payments. Their network will sometimes get them answers not available to officialdom.

When a middle-aged woman called Bea McCready and her husband Lionel call in Patrick and Angie to help locate their missing four-year-old niece Amanda, Angie is apprehensive.

'We have a nice life,' she tells Patrick. 'Odds are we will find ourselves looking into a dumpster and it will not be easy to walk away. I'm not sure I want to go there.'

The local detectives, led by Ed Harris's Remy Bressart, are already on it. Remy's boss Jack Doyle heads the child protection unit, and for once Morgan Freeman is not sleepwalking here.

They have questioned Amanda's feckless, junkie mother Helene to no avail. Then Patrick and Angie ask questions around the neighbourhood, and bring the cops their first lead.

There are many twists and turns in Gone Baby Gone. Affleck and co-writer Aaron Stockard have brought it to the screen in a way which doesn't signal a single plot move, and which retains the grim neighbourhood flavour, and the moral dilemnas which mark Lehane's fiction, which confront law enforcers and law breakers alike in this blighted neighbourhood.

Some of the richness of the film lies in the vividness of all the characters, starting with Helene, the missing girl's mother. Amy Ryan plays her as evasive, equivocal, opportunistic and entirely human. And a completely unfit mother. But when she breaks down and pleads with Patrick to find her baby, it would be inhuman to turn away.

And the two investigators? at first I wondered about Casey Affleck as Patrick Kenzie. His youthful looks, distinctive light, squeaky voice and drawl, which he deployed so superbly as Robert Ford in the Asassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, didn't quite fit my image of the streetsmart Patrick... Till a moment, quite early on, when someone challenges him. And he challenges right back with such authority they step aside. And I relaxed.

In Lehane's fiction, Angie Genaro is a contradiction. She's the granddaughter of a big mafia family, but one who has turned her back on their business. Her relationship with Patrick is equivocal. Michelle Monaghan gives it her best shot in this film, but she's written down as a character. She's the sidekick, rather than the leader. Pity, that.

Those who like intelligent crime fiction will like this film. I look forward to more films written and directed by Affleck. Maybe he has learned a thing or two watching the Baltimore based series The Wire. But there's a passion there as well, a care for people in the neighbourhood. Like the best thrillers, this comes with a distinct sense of place.

Director: Ben Affleck
Cast: Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, John Ashton, Amy Ryan, Amy Madigan, Titus Welliver, Michael K. Williams, Edi Gathegi, Mark Margolis
Producer: Ben Affleck, Alan Ladd Jr, Danton Rissner, Sean Bailey
Script: Ben Affleck, Aaron Stockard, Dennis Lehane (author)
Cinematographer: John Toll
Editor: William Goldenberg
Music: William Gregson-Williams
Australian distributor: Disney
Language: English
Classification: M