Child snatching leads into the underbelly of American life

Rating: 8/10 (24 June 2008)

From the simple basis of a child going missing from her bedroom - with its terrible overtones of the Maddy McCann and Sharron Mathews cases in Britain (completely unintended as the film was made a good year before those cases hit the headlines) - we are taken on a downward spiral into the underbelly of the American Dream. This is a world where, to quote Patrick Kenzie (Casey Afflick), the people were born in the cracks and then fall through them.
Drug dealing, alcoholism, abuse, corruption are all encountered as Kenzie and his assistant Angie Gennaro (the underused Michelle Monaghan) 'assist' the Boston police in their search for young Amanda Mcready. The characters are all, with barely an expectation, the dregs of the earth, and show little, if any, concern for the missing girl, especially when their own interests become threatened. As the plot unravels, and quite a complex one it is too, we begin to realise that this is a film with little hope, either for the missing girl - and a poor young boy who also becomes a victim of the depraved nature of some of the characters - or anyone else caught up in the case.
At the heart of the film lies a moral question - is it right to commit a crime which society finds heinous for what may be the right reasons? It is to the credit of the intelligence of the film that this question is not answered with any easy options, instead it is us that are left to consider our own response to this dilemma.
As one might expect from a film of this quality the performances are universally excellent, from Casey Afflick (building on the promise he showed in 'The Assissin of Jessie James by the coward Robert Ford'), to the ever reliable Morgan Freeman. But the outstanding performance comes from Amy Ryan as the missing girls' mother, a disgusting slice of humanity, who cares more for her drinking, drugs and men than her daughter, who she uses on drugs trips etc. The final scene further emphasises the uncaring nature of the character, and further questions our response to the central moral question.
The direction is also excellent, and you would never guess if you did not already know that this film is a first effort from Ben Afflick. This shows great promise, and it is just possible that American cinema has found another actor/director in the mould of Eastwood and Penn.
This film is never an easy watch, and you will not leave the cinema full of the joys of spring, but it will give you an insight into a part of America that normally remains hidden from view