Ben Affleck a genius? Get out of town!

Rating: 8/10 (8 December 2008)

Ben Affleck's film career has been, as they say, "chequered", meaning that his resume consists of a lot of total dogs and a small handful of nice appearances here and there. Up until very lately, I had always been inclined to agree with the British film critic David Thomson, who wrote in 2004 that Affleck was "lucky to have got away with it so far".
Because Affleck really isn't a very good actor, or at any rate not a consistently good one. When Kevin Smith attempts to hang an entire movie on an Affleck performance (Chasing Amy, Dogma) Affleck looks wooden, but when Smith brings the actor in for a quick, mischievous cameo, he seems to be galvanised - he is effective as a thuggish boyfriend in Mallrats, and his smirking few minutes as both Holden and as himself in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back are good fun.
Elsewhere, though, anyone who can see the point of Pearl Harbor or Gigli needs to gain some serious perspective. Then, in 2006, he delivered an unexpectedly lovely performance as the fading actor George Reeves in Hollywoodland - overweight, sagging, stoical and with a touching sense of faded glamour. When we in our house heard that he'd a.) directed a movie and b.) it was supposed to be pretty good, we were interested - mildly.
I started watching Gone Baby Gone with a sense of let's-just-give-this-ten-minutes, and it says much for Affleck's sense of pace that the movie is, to be begin with, both thoroughly unenjoyable and totally gripping. It's a subject which has a lot to say to any parent: the four-year-old daughter of a working-class Boston woman (Amy Ryan) has gone missing, and two private investigators (Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan) are asked by the woman's sister-in-law to help with the police investigation. The initial twist is that Helene, the mother, is a deeply unsympathetic character; she's a bored, slobbish, neglectful mother who drinks beer in the middle of the day and seems almost uninterested in what has happened to her daughter.
Before the film is over, you will have changed your mind several times about Helene, and indeed about pretty much every other character. The film starts like a detective thriller, but it isn't one really. It's a highly intelligent and subversive film about family and morality and the cost of doing the right thing.
Full marks to an excellent cast. To begin with I found Casey Affleck's voice sort of irritating, but his performance is actually very subtle; the film plays very well on his capacity for blue-eyed innocence. Amy Ryan is truly remarkable as Helene. Everybody else is just spot on; there's a scene in a bar, featuring mostly non-professional actors, that makes you marvel at how unbelievably unfriendly the modern American drinking hole can be.
My admiration for Gone Baby Gone grew as it went on and I'm glad I watched it to the end. The final image, a simple shot of two people sitting on a sofa watching television, is one of the saddest and grimmest moments I've seen as a film-goer recently. The film sticks in the mind. Affleck should make more films as a director, because on the strength of this movie he already deserves a more illustrious place in cinema history than his acting has so far managed to earn him.