Title: Gone Baby Gone Movie Review
Genre: Crime/Drama/Mystery
Cast: Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman, …
Director: Ben Affleck
Release: (2007)

Contrary to popular belief, Gone Baby Gone is not actually a film about Ben Affleck’s box office mojo as a leading man, but rather it’s his feature length directorial debut about a kidnapped little girl and the race to find her. Common mistake. With that cleared up, let me just apologize in advance for any similarly uncalled for cheap shots I might decide to take from the comfort of my own home here and say up front that this actually, turned out to be a really great film.

Set in and around the streets of Boston (Hey, did you know Ben Affleck is from there? I’m not sure he’s ever mentioned it before but, in fact, he is.) Gone Baby Gone tells the story of a missing little girl, her unsympathetic mother (Amy Ryan), the cops trying almost reluctantly to track her down (Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman) and two private investigators (Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan) brought on board to help look into all the seedy nooks and crannies that aren’t always available to the cops. As they begin, the investigators find out quickly that there’s no way to be sure who to trust anywhere and that finding the girl may even make things worse for her than they already are.

I know that’s a pretty brief and vague synopsis, but even that much detail might be toeing the line of spoiler material when it comes to this tightly wound thriller. Ben Affleck may not be a student of Stanislavsky, but it seems he might be a student of Hollywood history because if this effort is any sign of things to come he may already be on an early Eastwood trajectory. Like Clint Eastwood, who was able to rehabilitate his plummeting appeal as a leading man (following a series of relative bombs including Space Cowboys and Blood Work) by reinvigorating his appeal as an acclaimed director with a gritty crime drama set in the working class streets of Boston (Mystic River), so too does it appear that Ben Affleck may be able to do the exact same thing. And I know some of you are probably thinking it’s not the same because Eastwood was also directing long before he made the switch from actor/director to director/actor, but actually this is not Affleck’s first experience behind the camera either. Bennifarner first began cutting his teeth all the way back in 1993 when he directed his debut film, I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney . So who’s the dummy now, dummy.

While Ben has clearly made great strides as a director since then, he is also helped greatly here by the support of a tremendous cast. Nepotism and two very corny monologues at the beginning and end notwithstanding, Casey Affleck’s performance seems to start off shaky but quickly escalates to excellent and remains there as he carries the emotion of this film the majority of the way. What at first appears to be just plain overacting turns out to be exactly the right note needed to make his character seem believable - a baby-faced private investigator forced to constantly overcompensate to be taken seriously in a world of gnarled and weathered tough guys. Michelle Monaghan seems to be turning up in every other movie I see these days, and for good reason, and Amy Ryan earns a well-deserved first Oscar nomination here for her role as the girl’s drug-addicted, derelict mother. And speaking of Amy Ryan, she’s not the only cast member from the greatest drama in TV history to show up in this film – there’s a nice appearance by the baddest man on the planet, Omar, in here for you fans as well. (Probably not a coincidence, since Gone Baby Gone was based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote a few episodes for The Wire and oh, by the way, also wrote Mystic River. Uh-huh. It’s all starting to come together there for you now isn’t it? It’s alright, I knew you’d catch up, I don’t mind waiting.) Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris round out the superb cast with Freeman doing his same cop/detective/James Patterson novel character to perfection again and Harris adding to his already impressive resume of skills the claim: “grows a fat goat.”

Ultimately, I think the most impressive thing I took away from this was that Ben Affleck’s direction was legitimately really, really good. He wove a very tight storyline and had some really interesting style choices and edits throughout that made me think if he really wants to put his mind to this, we could see some great things from him in the future. Or he could just chuck it all out the window to do a few more terrible romantic comedies and continue his crusade to convince everyone that the pompadour look is still cool. Let me just jump on over to IMDB here for a second and see what it looks he’s up to and, … uh … damn.

Grading

Story: A
Acting: A
Visuals: B+
Originality/Innovation: A-
Enjoyability: A
Overall: A