a nifty directorial debut

Rating: 7/10 (5 April 2008)

Working for the first time on the opposite side of the camera, actor-turned-director Ben Affleck has delivered a solid, if imperfect, crime drama entitled "Gone Baby Gone," based on the novel by Dennis Luhane. Ben's brother, Casey, and Michelle Monaghan play a pair of missing-persons investigators hired to find a little girl who disappeared from her Boston home three days earlier. Her mother is a foul-mouthed coke-fiend who is not very particular about the company she keeps and who seems strangely reluctant to cooperate with the authorities working to get her daughter back. Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris co-star as cops whose involvement with the case grows ever more complicated as the drama unfolds.
Affleck co-wrote the screenplay - his first since 1997's "Good Will Hunting" - with Aaron Stockard, and together they have gone beyond the surface simplicities of the standard whodunit to probe the ethical complexities that are, for good or for ill, an integral part of law enforcement work. As the central character, Patrick is continually confronted with the moral relativism of his actions, be it in negotiating with child abductors without police authority, shooting down an unarmed pedophile who has just murdered a child, or going after a crooked cop who reveals a legal indiscretion to him in a moment of drunken confidence. Yet, when all the murky details of the case are finally revealed, Patrick realizes that, when it comes to doing what's "right," even he has a line over which he will not cross - even if, by refusing to do so, he loses the one thing that matters the most to him in his life. And yet there's still no guarantee that the choice he makes will be the best for all concerned in the end. As an over-arching theme, the film also points out how difficult it is to raise children in a world in which so many adults are themselves deeply troubled and maladjusted.
As director, Affleck has extracted fine performances from every member of his large cast, most notably Casey, Freeman, Harris, Amy Madigan and Amy Ryan, impressive enough to have earned an Oscar nomination for her work here.
The multi-layered script occasionally defies credibility and pushes too hard to make its points, but "Gone Baby Gone" is at least willing to explore the ethical uncertainties of life and to honor that stance by ending on a note of ambivalence and ambiguity. That alone makes it a rarity in commercial American film-making.