Compelling, tightly plotted Baby feels authentic

Rating: 8/10 (16 February 2008)

Like its cousin Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone is based on a Dennis Lehane novel about an abduction. And like Mystic River, the novel - and the subsequent film - takes no predictable route to reach its conclusion and offers no easy answers to complicated problems. It doesn't just tug at your heartstrings, it snaps them in twain, reattaches them, and yanks them out again.
The three-year-old daughter of Helene MacCready (Amy Ryan) has gone missing, and the child's aunt and uncle approach private detectives Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) to help the police with the case. The detectives agree, albeit reluctantly, because a case of this scope and magnitude (including a lot of media attention) is a little beyond their purview.
During his time on the case, Patrick makes discoveries he wish he hadn't made, and facing opposition from people he knows in the neighborhood, the police, and even his lover, Angie, he makes quick decisions with the best of intentions. Some of these decisions work out well, and others change his life for the worse, forever.
The first thing that strikes you about this movie is how authentic everything feels, from the actors to the sets. The movie is set in a crime-ridden section of Boston, with plenty of working-class (and a lot of low-class) denizens with their almost stereotypically comic accents and coarse language. But although Affleck is a local boy, most of the cast isn't; this is, I believe, what they call acting. And, like Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, director Ben Affleck seems to have fully captured the desolate, desperate, and bitter lives of dishonest, disreputable people who often turn to crime and other shenanigans to get by in life. Affleck's Dorchester is unyielding, where hard people live.
Another asset is the film's narrative thread. Although the story is told linearly, it's not easy to guess ahead of time what's coming. And it's not a product of the film's moving quickly, as some films do (a fast-paced film means less time for the moviegoer to spot holes in the plot), as there are realistic lulls around every scene's corner. At one point in the movie, with the benefit of watching it at home, I had to pause it quickly to assess the situation at hand, and I tried to predict where the movie was going. I was wrong. It's tightly plotted, but it's not unjustly or implausibly plotted, not in the least.
Casey Affleck, who looks very much Ben's younger brother but apparently got all of the acting genes in the family, is superb as the conflicted but driven Patrick. His youthfulness notwithstanding (he's only 32), Affleck has the poise and guile of someone much older, a fact that's even noticed by other characters in the film. Faced with incredibly difficult decisions, Patrick has an unwavering sense of what is truly right, but he's never a single-minded, ignorant zealot who knows what he knows. At times during the case, Patrick's faith is shaken, and by the end of the movie he's not completely sure he's made the right decision. In other words, what you get at the end is not a neat, happy ending at all, a fact that shouldn't surprise those who have seen Mystic River.
As the anguished (but loose) mother, Amy Ryan notched a Best Supporting Actress nomination, but my opinion is that it's not a nomination that's entirely deserved. Ryan is good, especially for a fairly inexperienced actress, but she's not so commanding or compelling as to warrant that sort of accolade. Faring about the same was the usually steady Morgan Freeman, who's okay here but whose role (and use as a plot device) is a bit underwritten.
In fact, it's plain that this movie fails only where Mystic River succeeded so strongly; the former did not lapse into clichés, and Gone Baby Gone does. Although the movie generally presents plenty of plausible twists, some of the characters are rather predictable. The final resolution of the plot, in fact, seems almost too obvious in hindsight. Because of this, Gone Baby Gone just misses being a great movie, and instead it has to settle for being a pretty good film with an exhilarating performances from Casey Affleck and Ed Harris.