Is Ben Affleck deliberately inviting ridicule with his directorial debut? In adapting Dennis Lehane’s novel about the abduction of a young girl, he’s practically inviting wise cracks about his own career vanishing without a trace. But here he is, resurgent in his new role, exuding a quiet authority behind the camera, and co-authoring a pin-sharp screenplay with Aaron Stockard.
His brother, Casey, plays Patrick Kenzie, a native of Dorchester, the blue collar Boston community, where, with his girlfriend Angie (Michelle Monaghan), he finds “the people who started out in the cracks and fell through”. They specialise in solving local cases, the ones where the police can’t get a foot in the door, but when Amanda McCready goes missing from her junkie mother’s shit-hole apartment, they’re pitched into something altogether bigger, deeper and unpleasant. Alongside detectives Remy Bressant (Ed Harris), Nick Poole (John Ashton) and Captain Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman) they’ll explore the dark heart of Boston on the trail of the one beautiful thing in all that ugliness.
Gone Baby Gone is Lehane’s fourth novel featuring Patrick and Angie, which leaves Affleck senior with some difficult decisions. He makes a decent fist of establishing the pair for newcomers without getting bogged down in back story, and though the result is a central relationship that feels a little under cooked, this will eventually work in the film’s favour. He also effectively tackles the age gap between book and screen (in the novels, Patrick and Angie are closer to 40 than 30); deftly undermining Casey’s angelic good looks while making sure we’re in no doubt that Patrick is not a man to fuck with. The scene in which he brazenly threatens a mobster in his own hideout is pure badass bravado.
That’s what’s most striking about this debut: the confidence. There are some signs of inexperience – the distribution of information is uneven and some of the transitions between scenes are awkward. Towards the end, a series of flashbacks and voice-overs cause a concertina effect in the rush to get to ‘The Truth’, but you can blame that at least partly on the genre, which has always relied on the last minute reveal. Perhaps Affleck overuses the helicopter shots too, but in his defence, these aren’t the glossy cityscapes we’re used to but the salt deposits at the harbour, the late night drug busts, the rusted, rotting innards of the city’s decaying underbelly.
It’s to the director’s credit that this isn’t a ‘Ben Affleck film’. There’s personality, but no ego. If it’s a paradigm of authenticity he’s after, then he very nearly achieves it, although there’s something a little weird about the neighbourhood people he puts on camera. By all accounts the cavalcade of disfigured, obese, Jerry Springer watching grotesques that we see on screen are real Dorchester residents, but you can’t help wondering if this is a movie star’s idea of what ‘real folk’ look like.
And yet he’s earned the benefit of the doubt because there’s more to his relationship with this material, and this town, than a Hollywood tourist borrowing a bit of urban cool. At its heart, Gone Baby Gone is a film about the things that make you who you are by a filmmaker who has more reason than most to wonder. A decade after Good Will Hunting put him on the map, Affleck returns to the milieu that made him with a new perspective on how the choices you make and the company you keep define you. Fitzgerald may have said that there are no second acts in American lives, but Gone Baby Gone is, at the very least, Affleck’s opportunity to prove that he’s still Benny from the block after the J-Lo years all but destroyed his reputation.
But if Affleck’s past brings a frisson to the film, it’s nothing compared to the shadow cast by Madeleine McCann. The embers of the McCann firestorm were still too hot to handle last year, when the London Film Festival canned a preview screening. And if that seemed like an overreaction at the time, watch the film and you’ll see their point. Even now, 12 months after the abduction, Gone Baby Gone has a shocking resonance. There’s the beautiful, blond-haired little girl, the ugly media circus, the mother who may be complicit in the abduction, and the frantic police search apparently doomed to failure. And just to add an extra layer of perversity, Amanda herself is played by another ‘Maddy’, Madeleine O’Brien, who bears more than a passing resemblance to the real thing.
Maybe some people will think it’s ‘too soon’ to explore this territory, but while the McCann case is an ongoing tragedy that’s all the more reason not to ignore the issue, even (especially) when presented with the uncompromising clarity of Gone Baby Gone. At the same time, however, perhaps our collective experience of Maddy’s abduction inevitably affects our perception of the film. Not because of any moral judgment, but in the sense that, because it dramatises an event that seems so familiar, any false notes are immediately obvious. At one point Amanda’s mother, Helene (Amy Ryan), breaks down in front of a news cameraman who doesn’t give her a second glance, an oversight that we know is palpably wrong.
But this feeling of privileged perspective also works in the film’s favour. When an abrupt shift of focus puts Amanda to one side while a new child enters the frame, what might have felt like a failure of the film’s narrative structure becomes, in the light of Maddy and new cause célèbre Shannon Matthews, a convincing comment on the ephemeral nature of our media obsessions, and the heart-rending pain of hope. As Patrick says, “Amanda was even more haunting for never being found, but what they did find was another story.” As long as we fail to find them, what is a missing person but just another image on TV owned and operated by the media – just another story, not really a person at all.
This ambiguity comes to a head in an extraordinary sting in the tail that elevates Gone Baby Gone from an engaging crime film to something else altogether. It’s here that Patrick will face a moment of truth that will put all of his – and our – assumptions about the nature of right and wrong to the test. Look closely and there are hints along the way that this is a film with a finely honed sense of moral complexity. Certainly it compares favourably to Clint Eastwood’s adaptation of that other Lehane classic, Mystic River. Contrast the climax of that film, where the paedophile gets a bullet in the back of the head – job done, world safer, fade to black – with the way Affleck handles a similar shooting. Inside a hospital called, with knowing irony, Our Sister of Infinite Mercy, Angie will tell Patrick that she’s proud of what he’s done. Some people, she says, don’t deserve to live. Eastwood, grizzled Right Wing gunslinger that he is, probably would have left it at that, book or no book. But outside the hospital Patrick is left to ponder the nature of guilt and shame with Bressant, whose own explanation of what it means ‘to do the right thing’, will set Patrick on a course for the film’s denouement.
That denouement forces us to look our own humanity square in the eye and ask ourselves whether any of us know what the ‘right thing’ really is, and whether we’d have the courage to decide. But more than that, it throws our relationship with these media manipulated figures into sharp relief. For Angie, her vicarious relationship with Amanda McCready has become more real than her love for Patrick. Angie is a peripheral figure for much of the film, but here she reveals her true colours. She might believe that she truly cares about Amanda, she might believe that she knows what’s right, but Angie is the embodiment of our sick obsession with tragedy. She’s every person who indulges in voyeuristic grief, every person who stays glued to these fictitious tabloid soap operas, creating the market for the lies, voyeurism and emotional hysteria that inevitably follow. Whether you agree with his decision or not, it’s Patrick, not Angie, who looks into the depths of his conscience. Angie has the courage of false conviction – the same twisted morality that tells her who deserves to live and die – but Patrick has the courage to doubt himself, to live with uncertainty, and to live with the consequences. It’s a brilliantly provocative ending from which nobody walks away unscathed.
That, really, is what you’ll remember about Gone Baby Gone. Yes, there are solid turns from Casey Affleck, Ed Harris and especially Amy Ryan, who displays a rare combination of innocence and vulnerability for a foul-mouthed drug mule who takes her kid on the job. And yes, there’s a sharpness to the writing and direction, and a convincing grittiness in John Toll’s photography. But it’s the film’s comfort with its own complexity that makes it a rarity, especially when so many American films seem to confuse the idea of justice with retribution. This is a powerful debut from Ben Affleck, but more than that, it’s an intelligent one. And while it may not exactly announce him as a new force in American filmmaking, it makes his own reinvention a tantalising reality.
