Rewind Review: Gone, Baby, Gone (2007)

Director: Ben Affleck
Starring: Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Amy Ryan, Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman

Two years ago today I reviewed Gone, Baby, Gone as my very first post on this blog. Since then I've reviewed approximately 350 other movies, but naturally Ben Affleck's directorial debut has retained a special place in my heart for being the first. To celebrate my second blogging anniversary I thought it would be fun to look back at the movie that started it all and examine how (or, indeed, if) my feelings about it have changed in the last two years.

Gone, Baby, Gone, based on the novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane, is a morality play disguised as a crime drama. Its ending hinges on the question of whether the right thing is what is technically right, or whether the right thing can come from something that is technically wrong. It presents a world of moral murkiness and decisions that can seem simultaneously right and wrong. For example, it's wrong of Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) to shoot an unarmed child molester and killer in the back of the head. But, on the other hand, given the horrors the dead man inflicted on others, it feels more like a visit from karma than a perversion of justice. Similarly, it is wrong of the people who took Amanda McCready to take it upon themselves to decide that her mother is unfit and then bypass the law to remove her from her mother's care. But, learning what we do about her mother, Helene (Amy Ryan), through the course of the film... you can see their point. The greatest strength of the film is that it doesn't present a simple, watered down view of right and wrong; it asks difficult questions and then forces the audience to try to answer them.

The atmosphere of the film is established immediately as the camera pans through neighborhood streets and we're sunk into a world so insular that everybody knows everybody else, if not directly than through the chain of relationships. The film's depiction of place feels real and so do the characters in it. When Pulp Fiction came out, Quentin Tarrantino was praised to the heavens for his ear for dialogue, for the way that he crafted the interactions between his characters to get to the heart of their relationships with each other. Affleck and co-writer Aaron Stockard didn't receive such praise, but listen to the way the characters talk to each other. Listen to the way that Dottie (Jill Quigg) assesses Angie (Michelle Monaghan) upon seeing her for the first time since high school, or to the dialogue between Patrick, Angie and Helene as they drive to where Helene hid the money she ripped off from a drug dealer. These conversations recount a shared history that just bubbles up to the surface of the film and then goes under again, offering a glimpse of the story beyond the frames of the film.

I liked this film a lot when it first came out - though "like" seems an inappropriate word to apply to something this dark - and really only had a couple of issues it. One was the use of flashbacks, which aren't quite as intrusive as I'd remembered. The other was the film's depiction of Angie, which I still find problematic. Gone, Baby, Gone is one in a series of books by Lehane, all of which I've read multiple times. One of the things I like about the books is that Angie is so kick ass, but the film version of the character is a shadow of the original and I find that extremely disappointing. To take a character that compelling and remove all vitality from her so that she's little more than an appendage for the male hero is the adaptation's one glaring weakness.

For her role in this film Ryan received an Oscar nomination as best supporting actress and seeing the performance again reconfirmed for me how deserving a winner she would have been (the award that year went to Tilda Swinton for Michael Clayton). It would be easy to say that any actress could have secured a nomination playing this role; the character has a lot of meat to it and it's a strong role before any performer ever gets theirs hands on it. But, nevertheless, Ryan's depiction of Helene amounts to more than simply showing up. She seems to approach the character from the inside out, rendering a lived-in performance that in fact makes the "performance" aspect disappear. She's at ease with this character and unafraid of looking foul and in her truthful, no holds barred portrayal she makes Helene entirely her own.

As I write this, Affleck is at work on The Town, his second feature as director. If what he achieves with Gone, Baby, Gone is any indication, The Town will be a film to watch for. His work here is strong and assured and he has a firm grasp of how to create and maintain tension throughout a story. He's a good director with a great deal of potential - let's just hope the projects he choses as director are closer to Good Will Hunting than Gigli.

Review: Gone, Baby, Gone

As a fan of both the source novel and of Ben Affleck, I’ll admit that I went into this with my fingers crossed, just hoping that it didn’t get screwed up. It doesn’t; this is a great adaptation. It departs somewhat from the novel – the novel is the fourth in a series and in it Patrick Kenzie and Angie Genaro are seasoned pros; here they’re new to the game and their experience so far has been limited to looking for people who’ve skipped out on their creditors – but it gets the essence of the story just right. This is a film that is very comfortable with its place and with the people in it, and we come to know the rhythm of the city and the way that these people get around in it.


The plot: 4 year old Amanda McCready is kidnapped in the middle of the night. Her aunt (Amy Madigan) doesn’t think the police are doing enough to find her, so she hires Patrick (Casey Affleck) and Angie (Michelle Monaghan) to do some extra leg work. Pretty soon Patrick and Angie (mostly Patrick – I’ll get to that momentarily) are figuring out that things don’t exactly add up, drawing themselves into the line of fire and, ultimately, a moral conundrum.

The characters are tightly drawn and the performances are uniformly good, especially those of Amy Ryan and Ed Harris. Ryan is pitch perfect as the coked up mother of the kidnapped girl; if you’ve read the novel, you’ll think she walked right off the page and into the movie. Harris, playing the lead investigator who alternates between anger at Patrick for getting in his way, and admiration for Patrick’s ability, is very effective as the skewed moral compass of this dark and scary world. Together these two characters make a pretty effective argument for doing the wrongs things for the right reasons.

I only have two real qualms with the film, which is on the whole a solid effort by Affleck as both writer and director. First, the character of Angie. In the novels, she’s a force to be reckoned with, a tough talking ass kicker. In the film her presence is so far diminished that she barely registers. The character essentially exists to offer Patrick comfort when things look bleak and to act as a sounding board for his thoughts and theories. Admittedly the novels, like the movie, are told from Patrick’s point of view, but at least in the novels one didn’t get the sense that Angie was just along for the ride. She was always in the thick of things, starting as much trouble as Patrick does.

The other problem is the use of flashbacks, the style of which seems to have been ripped off from CSI. It is a complicated plot, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the audience needs to be reminded of something that happened five minutes ago in order to follow, and the flashbacks to things we hadn’t already seen could have been dealt with in a more effective way. As it is, they took me right out of the movie due largely to the aforementioned similarity to the CSI style of storytelling.

But these are minor problems in a movie that is overall very good. It’s well paced and suspenseful, even if you’re familiar with the book. Come Oscar time, the performance by Ryan and the screenplay by Affleck and Aaron Stockard will hopefully be remembered and rightly honoured.