Flawed But Impressive

Rating: 8/10 (26 August 2016)

Gone Baby Gone has its flaws and i had to decide between giving this a 7 or 8, but i think the strong performances ( Casey Affleck and Amy Ryan are awesome! ) just edged it towards a higher rating.
I will start with the positive things because so does the movie: The first hour is great. It has a solid story ( child gone missing ), which is nothing spectacular or innovative, but if done right it can definitely serve as a good foundation. And in my opinion it is done right in this film: There are well written and well acted characters who all have their own problems, ideals and a certain ambiguity. They are not perfectly fleshed out , but i think they don't have to be when so many characters are introduced in a short amount of time. No time and no scene is wasted in the first hour, everything is placed right where it should be and the well written dialogue supports the slowly building tension. Yes, there are a lot of questions and expository dialogue, but you cant get around them all the time in an investigative story. Here there is room left to find out little details about our characters. I also like how the streets and neighborhoods are photographed because they serve as a constant reminder of where these people come from and what they and we as the audience have to deal with. Most of the things we find out as the movie progresses can be traced back to them and the neighborhoods are used well as an overarching boundary for the story and characters. Ben Affleck delivers a directorial debut with a strong sense of tension, using a lot of close-ups in single- or double-character shots and the often vulgar "on the edge of violence" dialogue does the rest to suck you into the first hour of the movie. There is nothing fancy going on, but its as close,raw and real as it needs to be for the sake of the narrative.
That is where the movie starts to go overboard. Even though the entire cast is firing on all cylinders throughout the whole film, the story and the movie itself cant keep up the high level after the first "conclusion" because it feels like a deep cut in the narrative structure. Gone Baby Gone tries to touch so many morally ambiguous topics and ask so many questions about human nature that could have probably served as material for three separate movies. As the opening monologue by Afflecks character implies, this is a movie about decisions and if you can decide yourself or if ultimately the things that surround you, over which you have no influence,make the decision for you(predetermined). But i don't know how many important decisions the characters can make before it becomes unrealistic.It doesn't get bad by any means and the film picks up the slack again at the end, but i cant get around the impression that it is more like :" OK which difficult moral question can we tackle next" instead of being good storytelling. That said, this movie has given me some food for thought and i can imagine the (great) final conclusion causing some debate among viewers. I definitely thought about it more than once. Strong acting, good directing and writing with just the right amount of suspense should be enough to recommend Gone Baby Gone. Thanks for reading