Murky tale with moral ambiguity

Rating: 6/10 (30 May 2008)

An interesting movie about what happened to a little girl that disappeared, involving characters like the mother of the missing girl, her relatives, the police and private investigators out to find her. The mother of the girl could be characterised as being "poor white trash" and there are many nasty possibilities as to her fate.
Casey Affleck plays Patrick Kenzie, one of the private investigators recruited to find the girl. He disconcertingly looks like the love child of Ben Affleck (his famous brother) and David Byrne, of the band Talking Heads, perhaps. HIs partner in the movie is the lovely Michelle Monaghan, who plays Angie Gennaro, his lover & fellow private investigator.
Kenzie's qualities are illustrated in some formulaic scenes which establish his "tough guy" credentials, as Hollywood leading men are supposed to have.
This movie strives to be profound, I think, but it does leave unexamined some Hollywood clichés as to what is right & wrong. In any case, it does serve up some interesting dilemmas to engage the viewer.
That is best illustrated by the character of Kenzie. He's meant to be some sort of model of justice and integrity, but really, some of his actions made me squirm and question his morality. The act that most troubled me (and I won't reveal it here) was, I think, a populist appeal to the mob. Plenty of contradictions in Kenzie for people who like their characters complex.
This might be a movie best viewed on DVD so that you can go over scenes to nut out what is going on...a device which is used on TV cop shows would have been useful...a guy just summing up what happened, along with a flashback of it. There was some of that in the movie, but it wasn't entirely easy to follow (with regard to the crucial event at the quarry).
Gennarro is lovely to look at but isn't very well fleshed out. She does have a crucial dilemma of her own to deal with but I was unconvinced by it, as she was otherwise Affleck's handbag for most of the movie.
Dark at times in the subjects it explores...not for the squeamish.