Gone Baby Gone
Written and directed by Ben Affleck
Starring Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Morgan Freeman
Rated R

A plea for help screams from the heart of the lower middle-class Boston neighborhood of Dorchester. Gone Baby Gone, directed by Ben Affleck, is a crime noir thriller about two private detectives who specialize in missing persons, and their attempt to solve the abduction case of 4-year-old Amanda McCready. The detectives, live-in couple Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan), are hired by Lionel and Beatrice McCready, the uncle and niece of the aforementioned missing girl.

The investigating duo stumbles on hardship immediately when confronted with an uncooperative mother (Amy Ryan) and Police Captain Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman). The unforgiving neighborhood only exacerbates the ongoing investigation, several city blocks populated by the working poor and lower-class lowlifes that drop their paychecks on frowned-upon extracurriculars as quickly as they’ll drop their Rs. The Dorchester downtrodden people are as much of the environment as the dilapidated buildings. As various sequences chronicle the hard life of the neighborhood, we realize the loss of a child is literally taking the last bit of hope out of its people. Painstakingly shot exteriors detail a hard love that Ben Affleck has with the seedier side of Boston, Mass, something done elsewhere in Affleck’s co-authored script of Good Will Hunting. The greatest achievement of Gone Baby Gone is the depiction of hopelessness and character struggles in Dorchester, but no more so than in Casey Affleck’s portrayal of Kenzie, a man constantly fighting for what he feels is right.

The search for missing Amanda quickly disintegrates into a drug caper when the child’s mother, Helene (in a standout performance by Ryan), confesses that she and her boyfriend stole money from a Haitian drug dealer named Cheese, while the couple were in the midst of a drug run. Helene admits to using drugs herself and numerous exploits of her placing her child in danger are told throughout the film, but it’s through Ryan’s acting that most of her past is easily forgiven in the wake of an emotional, heart-wrenching plea for Amanda’s return. Ryan breaks the character down to the core feelings of a distraught mother, while Casey Affleck’s Kenzie is the optimum counter-balance, providing cool assurance and logic in the face of pure, heated emotion.

The law enforcement behind the investigation is comprised of Jack Doyle, the head of the missing child unit, and partners Detective Remy Bressant (played by the goateed Ed Harris) and Nick Poole (John Ashton). And while cooperative with Kenzie and Gennaro, the cops always seem to screw up well-laid plans, particularly after Kenzie fails to negotiate the ransom for Amanda’s return without outside help. The ineptitude of the investigation frustrates Kenzie and Gennaro, and the end of Amanda’s search comes when the teams give up hope on the child being alive. The movie could have easily ended here — a serious down note — but the shortened run time no doubt would have frustrated many a movie-goer.

Fast forward and another child’s disappearance later, Kenzie gets a follow-up from an old lead in the McCready case. With some help, Kenzie zeroes in on a pedophile, who had been a suspect in Amanda’s case, holed up in an old house with two known drug users (one of which is played by Mark Margolis). Alerting Bressant and Poole, the trio go to arrest the pedophile suspected in the disappearance of the second child and all hell breaks loose. Stories begin to breakdown, histories revealed and a labyrinthian plot device unravels like the bowels of a gutted game animal. And the worst aspect of Gone Baby Gone hits us flat in the face: the horrid “Crime Noir for Dummies” flashbacks give us a ham-fisted rendition of key clues baby-faced Kenzie failed to grasp (if flashbacks that reveal key plot points as if you’re an absolute moron frustrate you a la Lucky Number Slevin, then they’ll surely aggravate in Gone Baby Gone).

Gone Baby Gone was a great film until it falls into the twist-ending, but in that failure a conflicted Kenzie struggles with his own personal sense of right and wrong against the repeated outcries of the people surrounding his life. This personal crux doesn’t necessarily end in a happy ending, but does accomplish a particular moral victory for Kenzie’s tortured psyche. The younger Affleck really opens up with his performance as Kenzie, exercising his character’s conviction with a harsh, if even boyish, charm. It is Affleck’s silver-tongue delivery of lines that really welcomes the onerous air of noir dialogue, popping in Bostonian underworld slang with a mix of self-deprecating verbiage. Affleck’s crime thriller performance is a throwback to the old Raymond Chandler-stylized noir that we’ve only seen recently with movies such as Brick.