Gone Baby Gone

Just saw Gone Baby Gone. From the Dennis Lehane novel, directed by Ben Affleck.

This last book in a great series as been served well. In the books, private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro investigate crimes of abduction and sexual abuse often involving children. The books are dark tales, dark both in the sense of the material but also in the lack of easy resolutions. The detectives are themselves plagued; for a few of the books Angie is part of an abusive marriage, even as she helps the abused she herself is a battered wife. Her character in the books is strong, utterly physically capable, but trapped in bad domestic patterns. The tension in the relationship between the two detectives is that he wants to help her, to take her husband down, but she will not allow him to interfere.

The movie makes one think that Ben Affleck might be taking up Clint Eastwood’s mantel. Eastwood did Mystic River, the last Lehane, and this one has Morgan Freeman who is becoming more and more an Eastwood regular. The film has a true sense of place. Affleck tried to keep the shooting unstructured and hired many local nonactors in acting roles. The shots of the streets and the people make most other so called realistic films look preppy. These are real faces and bodies, and the only downside is that Casey Affleck who plays Patrick looks a little too pretty and light next to the stolid working class Bostonians he’s surrounded by.

This is a film about place. A line near the beginning goes something like “we’re shaped more by the things we didn’t choose - our neighborhoods, our families, etc….” You don’t escape landscapes inside or out. All of the players seem to trying to lose their pasts, all of them become grayer and less certain as you get to know them.

Its a fine film which ends on a quandary. The only fault might be that a couple of revelations seem to occur without enough information but I would have to see it again to see if I just missed something. And it has Ed Harris. Fine might be a little weak to use here; let’s call it great.