I like the idea of casting Casey Affleck as a private eye. He’s 32 years old, but he looks maybe 23—and a scrawny 23 at that, as if he’s been skipping meals ever since childhood. There’s a scene early in Gone Baby Gone where he and fellow detective Michelle Monaghan walk into a seedy bar hoping to pick up some clues on a case they’re investigating, and she looks more like the big sister looking out for her kid brother than his partner. When the bartender scowlingly identifies himself as “Big Dave,” Affleck grins and introduces himself as “Medium Patrick.” The bartender doesn’t so much as crack a smile.The best movie detectives, I think, are guys like Patrick Kenzie, the guy Casey Affleck plays in Gone Baby Gone—and maybe that’s why detective movies rarely do well at the box office. They’re guys who aren’t very physically imposing. They carry a gun, but they still get beaten up a lot. They’re not rich. They scrape by. They tend to have a smart mouth on them, They don’t get along with authority figures. They get fooled by other people’s lies, and only figure out the truth when it’s too late for it to do much good. They can be counted on to do the right thing, but they rarely see any reward for their good deeds. If movies are about peddling wish-fulfillment fantasies, Gone Baby Gone is a failure—nobody would want to switch places with Patrick Kenzie, not even if it meant you got to sleep every night with Michelle Monaghan.
But as a crime picture, Gone Baby Gone is a big success—well-plotted, engrossing, and full of tangy, grimy details of life in lower-class Boston, land of meth addicts, white-trash thugs and terrible housekeepers. It’s based on the fourth book in Dennis Lehane’s series of Patrick Kenzie novels, but it doesn’t matter if you haven’t read any of the first three—once you figure out that the cute girl who tags along with Kenzie on all his cases isn’t a meddling lover but his full-fledged investigative partner, you’re off and running.
The complicated plot begins with Kenzie and Gennaro being asked to join the search for an abducted little girl. (Her mother, a thoroughly amoral, drug-running alcoholic, had left her alone in the house while she went off to have Big Dave pour her a few bourbons.) The trail of clues eventually leads them to a Haitian drug dealer, $130,000 in missing cash, a disastrous midnight payoff at an abandoned quarry, an armed standoff with a houseful of coke-fueled ex-cons, and a tough Louisiana-born cop named Remy (Ed Harris) who seems to know more about the case than he’s letting on.
The film was directed and co-written by Ben Affleck (his first screenplay credit since sharing the Oscar with Matt Damon for Good Will Hunting), and if you believe the arc all the magazine profiles about him are using, he seems to have taken on this project almost as an act of penance after taking a string of flops that included Surviving Christmas, Gigli, Daredevil and Paycheck—movies it’s hard to imagine Affleck regarded as anything more than, well, easy paycheques. What happened to him? How could someone who was best friends with Kevin Smith become so cynical?
Gone Baby Gone is a cynical movie too—but I mean that in a good way. It’s a tough movie set in a grim world where even people who set out with honourable motives can’t help but leave a lot of dead bodies in their wake. And yet it doesn’t wallow in its own grimness, the way Mystic River (also based on a Lehane novel) occasionally did. Affleck is more interested in a smooth-running plot and sharply drawn characters. He gets a particularly vivid characterization out of Amy Ryan (from TV’s The Wire) as the missing girl’s mother, Helene: the woman is utterly despicable, and yet Ryan plays her in a way that lets you see Helene’s deluded image of herself as a put-upon victim.
The whole story climaxes with Kenzie having to make a difficult ethical decision, and while I don’t want to give anything away, I applaud Affleck for cheating neither the choice Kenzie makes, nor the consequences that come with it. Will Affleck be making equally tough choices with his career from here on in? Gone Baby Gone sets a promising precedent.
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