A Venerating Directorial Debut About How Some People Should Not Be Parents

Rating: 9/10 (16 February 2008)

The first thing any viewer will notice about Gone Baby Gone is that it does for Boston what Deliverance did for the Cahulawassee River. The streets are filled with some of the most sickeningly ugly, obese, wiry, and disfigured people you've ever seen. And, as one indescribably feels every here and there during the film, it seems unnecessary or uneven. Nevertheless, it is really Ben Affleck's undercurrent of shock that he forces us to face about Dennis Lehane's reflection of the relentless nastiness of human beings. This film is a vengeful testament to superficiality and wrongness of all claims against Ben Affleck on the basis that he is a boyishly attractive movie star and other gross underestimations of "pretty boys" in Hollywood like Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. Ben Affleck, yes, handsome Hollywood hunk, directs a film that, instead of flaunting style, grits with a hard-edged rusty- kitchen-sink realism.
His younger brother Casey Affleck, an endearing character actor, gets his break as the lead here, in a down-to-earth, street-smarts role as a private detective who is used to handling vicious, shady people in grimy, scuzzy areas of Southie, but even having grown up around it can't prepare him for what he will have to witness and decide. Coarsely sexy Michelle Monaghan, who was hilariously callous in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, plays his detective wife, a motherly sort whose compassion she knows may blend dangerously with her work. The most powerful performance in the film, however, is delivered by the barrel of volatile explosives that is Ed Harris, who I don't ordinarily find as appealing as I did here, enlivening his capability of being intimidating and silently warning you of an ominous, lurking, terrifying side of him. He delivers a beautifully down-home monologue at one point about the innocence and rudimentary forgiveness of children. He chokes up, but shoves the tears back with anger. (His partner is played by John Ashton, who it's good to see again. Where's he been since the Beverly Hills Cop films?)
The film's uncompromising brooding with its dark, extremely depressing subject of child abduction pays off with certain poignant moments, possibly showing wisdom in both Lehane's writing and Affleck's rendering of its effects, as the movie shows us the importance of the effacement, recognition, and understanding of even the most painful experiences because they are what make the great ones great, as are reflected in the most disturbing images of the film and the most relieving ones. The story's culmination to its ultimate dilemma is such an uncompromising example of facing the world, in which black and white is a myth and grey is virtually always the reality. And no matter what the resolution comes to be, it may not boil down to black and white even still.