Gutsy cop movie is fresh, with unexpected ending

  • By Robert Horton Herald Movie Critic
  • Thursday, October 18, 2007 9:28pm
  • LifeGo-See-Do

“Gone Baby Gone” has quite a few things going for it, notably a great ear for wild, profane dialogue and a strong sense of place. It’s a cop movie, so it covers well-trampled ground, but it finds moments that are fresh.

So give credit to the director … Ben Affleck? Yep, the same guy whose Icarus-like career as a bright shiny movie star crashed in the early ’00s. “Gone Baby Gone” doesn’t exactly announce a stunning new directing talent, but it’s a gutsy film from start to finish.

Affleck, who also co-wrote the script, adapted a novel by Dennis Lehane, the guy who wrote “Mystic River.” It’s set in the less desirable parts of Boston, a place Affleck shows some feeling for.

The story begins with a missing, probably kidnapped, little girl. The layers surrounding this event are plumbed by a private investigator named Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and his girlfriend?/assistant? Angie (Michelle Monaghan).

Part of the joke of the movie is that these two are the opposite of what we’ve come to expect in private eye movie heroes: They look far too young and frail to be walking down mean streets. The other characters think so, too.

But that’s what gives the movie its offbeat appeal. And Casey Affleck, the director’s brother, captures a great sense of the blind, foolish nerve Patrick probably shouldn’t have. (He’s also excellent in “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.”)

And director Affleck’s cast is uniformly good. The real standout is Amy Ryan, who plays the coke-snorting mother of the missing girl. I suppose a role like this has “guaranteed Oscar nomination” written all over it, but that shouldn’t obscure the fact that Ryan nails it beautifully.

The cops include Morgan Freeman and an especially heated Ed Harris, and Titus Welliver (“Deadwood”) does fine, subtle stuff as the missing girl’s uncle. There are also plenty of grotesques to make this a genuine tour of the underworld.

“Gone Baby Gone” comes around to a genuinely difficult moral proposition, and doesn’t back away from it. The final 20 minutes are almost a critique of movies that offer easy answers — an eye for an eye, shoot the bad guy in the head and everything will be all right. “Gone Baby Gone” ends by sitting with a difficult solution. As good as it had been up to then, I liked it even more when the end credits came up.

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