Movie Review: Gone Baby Gone (2007, Ben Affleck)

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Cast: Casey Affleck, Michelle Monahan, Ed Harris, Amy Ryan, Morgan Freeman, John Aston, Amy Madigan, Titus Welliver, Michael K. Williams, Madeline O’Brien
Screenplay: Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard (Based on the novel “Gone Baby Gone” by Dennis Lehane)
114 minutes / Color

Brother team Ben Affleck and Casey Affleck surely make a great one. They BOOM the screen with a great action-drama “Gone Baby Gone” and show many harsh realities of a Boston town. The ensemble offers a big range of incredible performances, good performances and excellent performances (Affleck and newcomer Amy Ryan). With that, Ben Affleck’s directional debut “Gone Baby Gone” is way worth then just a single watch, but a way underrated movie.

Set in Boston, when a 4-year-old girl named Amanda McCready (Madeline O’Brien) gets abducted, the whole town AND the whole country goes on a frantic search for the frightened child. Amanda’s aunt Beatrice (Amy Madigan), then hires (romantic) private detectives Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monahan) to help the entire country to search for this one little girl.

Even though the two have very little experience, they are hired for two main reasons. One, they are not police and, two; they know the neighborhood that they live in. Head of Police, Captain Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman) thinks otherwise and thinks the two shouldn’t be in the case since he’s experienced loosing a child and thinks he should take care of everything. The two still continues in their search for Amanda.

As they search and research, they begin working with detectives Remy Bressant (Ed Harris) and Nick Poole (John Aston) on the missing child’s case. They have a hard time seeing that Amada’s mother, Helene (Amy Ryan) is a hard-headed junkie who abandons her child at home every night to go drinking and partying with her bar buddies.

For weeks they get nowhere and something always seems to get Patrick and Angie off track whenever they work with the cops. Helene tells them that there was money (around $300,000) she stole from a drug dealer and that stolen cash might be a reason why her child disappeared. Patrick soon links all his acquired evidence together and sees that not only did Amanda’s greedy Uncle steal her for the money as a ransom, but also Detective Remy and Capt. Doyle was apart of it too. It seems that, Doyle, after loosing his child, took Amanda from them thinking he and his wife would take care of her better. While Remy just wanted his own cut of the cash.

But the case isn’t finished yet when Patrick finds everything out and goes to the mountains to get Amanda from the hands of the elderly couple. He and Angie reach a decision that will change their lives: return Amanda to her unconcerned, fame-hungry, drug-addict of a mother or just forget the whole thing and leave her with the love of a kind elderly couple that will surely cherish and take care of her?

Angie thinks he should leave her, but Patrick cannot let the man get away with the law and take the kid from the privilege of having her real mother with her. Patrick decides and Amanda goes back to her mother, where she sits at home and watches TV while her mother goes on dates and parties like a wild cat. This soon leads Angie into her decision that they should be separated forever for she thought that the whole thing could’ve been solved in a “better” light.

Casey Affleck, as main star Patrick Kenzie, gives us a performance worth every single of his brother’s past performances. He doesn’t only give us that detective-looking-for-victim performance that we always see on TV or other non-worthy movies, but shows us that he is a very flamboyant actor with many skills. Affleck delivers us a nomination worthy action hero that we hardly get from the 80 years the Academy Awards have been going on. Casey was the best choice for his brother’s film and is an utter revelation as a confused character trying to do the right thing and trying to decide on that. He was brilliant.

Amy Ryan, on the other hand is so unforgettable that even though her character should be hated by the inner depth of all human beings, I cannot help but love her immensely. Her performance as a bad role model and fame-hungered mother, using her child’s missing status as something she could gloat about gives us a hard time to evaluate and analyze her complex character. Hey, saying that she was using her fame as an excuse is already an analysis and I think that I’m hardly right. That’s what I truly loved about her, she’s hard to keep tabs on. Her face showed that she was grieving, but they way she talked and acted made us think otherwise. Creating a character like this is very difficult and Ryan does it spot on.

Ben Affleck gives us a film that is really superior in terms of direction. This, his feature debut as a director is so good and so witty that he should never, ever graze the screen as an actor again. He has so much talent in writing and directing then doing whatever he does (gallivanting) around the screen like an idiot. His direction was top-notched and blew me away completely. I never knew Affleck has so much talent.

Affleck’s screenplay work with Stockard, to adapt Dennis Lehane’s Boston tale is great. The whole story keeps you locked to you see and it’s so very much engaging. You wouldn’t wanna leave you seats for this thriller is more suspenseful and exciting as any other “horror” film in this new decade.

To top of the banana spilt is the rest of the ensemble. Monahan finally puts herself into use again, after “Mission: Impossible 3” (2006), I didn’t know what was gonna happen to her anymore. Thanks goodness she did the right move. Morgan Freeman wasn’t so special however. Any man could have played that part. His name is too thrown around nowadays and I don’t really like it or enjoy hearing it. Harris and everyone else did great things to their tiny parts and made “Gone Baby Gone” truly memorable for me.

With “Gone Baby Gone”, the Affleck’s create a compelling crime-drama with so much spunk and fine performances that all of my raves today are truly deserving. C Affleck was excellent. Ryan was outstanding. The writing was heavenly. The direction was masterful and the story was full of thrills and twists.

The final twist in the ending gives the movie the final zest and richness it needed to be one of the best of the year. It lays to us a choice of morality or realism. With those two choices, that is how the world goes round and this is what makes the film so intriguing and so truthful that it’s hard to leave your seat for a split second.

I give this movie a standing ovation for not only entertaining me for nearly two hours but also giving us a lesson that stereotypes do exist in parents (Ryan’s mother) and that decisions, even though they seem morally wrong, have to be chosen for it’s the truthful and the “real” thing to do. If that makes sense to someone who didn’t watch the movie? Ben, Casey, Amy and all the other apart from them who helped in the creation of this wonderful flick, congratulations, you’ve done a brilliant piece of work. Kudos to you all.