Ben Affleck (2007)

Judging from the screen adaptations of his novels, Dennis Lehane works within an insistent or narrow range of tropes and settings.  The two events that propel the melodrama of Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River (2003) are the abduction and sexual abuse in childhood of one of the two main characters, and the murder, some 25 years later, of the other’s daughter.  The climax involves death by water.  In Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck’s debut as a director (he also co-wrote the adaptation, with Aaron Stockard), a child disappears, then another.  The investigation, which involves a paedophile ring, is led by a policeman whose own (and only) daughter was murdered some years previously.  A key scene describes an apparent drowning.  Both stories take place in Lehane’s home city of Boston.

The release of Gone Baby Gone in the UK was much delayed (around nine months after it opened in the US, in autumn 2007), because of sensitivities surrounding the Madeleine McCann case.  What makes the film potentially offensive in relation to the unsolved vanishing of Madeleine is the florid neatness of its denouement – which is designed to point up the moral issue of whether it’s always right for a child to be returned to her biological mother, however bad that mother may be.   All the main characters are tied into the resolution of the plot in a forced, mechanical way.  The selfish, irresponsible mother Helene is played by Amy Ryan:  it’s a strong performance, although a limited one.  Helene’s harsh belligerence may be her chief characteristic but Ryan sometimes focuses on this so intensely that it seems to be the only characteristic.  Ryan is best when she manages to suggest that Helene is pushing herself to be rebarbative in order to keep guilty feelings at bay (that also gives more depth to the predictable scene of the mother’s breakdown).

In the main part of Patrick Kenzie, the private detective hired by Helene’s childless sister-in-law (Amy Madigan) to complement police activities, Ben’s younger brother Casey is impressive.  His resemblance to John Barrowman could be a problem for a British audience[1] but it’s a problem minimised by Affleck’s unsmilingness – that makes sense both as an expression of Patrick’s inner distress and as a professional poker face.  And the fact that Casey Affleck looks so very young – Patrick is supposed to be 31 but ‘he looks younger’, says his life and work partner Angela – works really well:   it becomes another part of the mask, of Patrick’s technique of making himself innocuous, thus gaining people’s confidence, thus getting results.  Morgan Freeman is such a true actor and a dignified voice and presence that he gives the police chief’s speeches an undeserved credibility (although the casting makes you all the more aware of the contrived nobility of the character).   As a detective deep in the rigours of the neighbourhood he’s worked in for too long, Ed Harris – always on the edge, blue eyes burning with misery – is able to individualise what’s a stereotype in this kind of material.  Michelle Monaghan has a grave, sad placidity as Angela but she’s inert – and the character is underwritten:  it seems to be constructed largely in terms of issues for Angela to raise wih Patrick that cause tensions between them.

On the whole, Ben Affleck handles the cast well and creates a richer, more documentary texture of Boston lowlife than was seen in Mystic River; unfortunately, he also gets mesmerised by the gross looks of some of the locals – in a way that seems to equate physical ugliness with moral depravity (and which seems offensive in a realistic setting).   In a scene in which an armed man bursts into a bar, his ugly mask is scary but not completely incongruous among the usual clientele – and the scene itself seems a natural extension of an earlier one in the bar, when violence was threatened but largely withheld.  Some of the violence elsewhere in the film seems gratuitous; the several deaths are more garish than they need to be.

10 June 2008

[1] Afternote:  I doubt this was a problem – in retrospect, I don’t know how I saw any such resemblance …