Gone Baby Gone is a strange creature. It has an odd two part structure, similar to Zodiac: The first part is comprised of a "rescue-drama" sequence, where a kidnapping occurs, the characters are introduced, and the rescue begins and ends. At the end of the first hour, you will have a vague feeling that the movie is winding down. You will not be satisfied with this apparent denouement, but you will be prepared to accept it. But then a second part begins with a tangent and a punch, and the movie becomes a mystery. Though it has many faces, in the end, Gone Baby Gone is an effective morality play that is entertaining and thought-provoking.
Based on the Dennis Lehane (Mystic River) novel of the same name, the story centers on two detectives, Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and his girlfriend Angela Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan). A young girl, Amanda, goes missing in a sketchy Boston neighborhood, which we know from the opening credits is an idyllic wonderland where kids play in the street and all the neighbors hang out on their porches and chat. The whole area is sucked in to the drama, as the media creates a spectacle out of the family's apartment, and the girl's piece of shit mother, Helene (Amy Ryan) plays it up in front of the cameras. Meanwhile, Patrick and Angela, who live just down the block, soak in the tragedy through their local news.
That is until the girl's aunt and uncle come to them for help. They don't trust the police, and want some locals to help. Patrick and Angela are hesitant to get involved, since they are relative lightweights (they explain that this is not the type of missing persons case they have experience with). But emotion overrides common sense, and Patrick and Angela join the investigation. The police, led by Capt. Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman) -- who lost his own child to a kidnapping in the past -- are predictably obstructionist to Patrick, whom they see as a young punk who has no business working on a case of this magnitude ("he's older than he looks," says Angela).
What Patrick brings to the table, though, is a familiarity with the town scum. So right off the bat, he goes into a bar in the middle of the day, with his girlfriend, and starts poking his nose in the criminal underworld. He finds out that Helene was lying about where she was on the day of the kidnapping, and that she was really whoring herself out and doing lines of coke in this bar. But before he can get any more info, the town scum attack him and threaten to rape his girlfriend, he pulls out a gun, and well, we're not off to a good start.
However, this lead starts the ball rolling, and before long, Patrick and the police detective assigned to handle him (played by Ed Harris), think they know who the kidnapper is. It turns out that Helene and her boyfriend stole $130,000 from a notorious drug dealer, and the investigators believe that this drug dealer has kidnapped poor Amanda to arrange an eventual swap for the money. The police arrange a meeting with the drug dealer, and well, you'll just have to see what happens for yourself.
The performances were above-average. I was especially impressed by Michelle Monaghan (who I used to find annoying but now find consistently likable), who emanates seriousness and professionalism by being subtle, and whose few emotional scenes are all the more significant as a result. Casey Affleck has proved that he is capable of carrying a film (I haven't seen the Assassination of Jesse James yet, but I find myself wanting to see it a little more than before), but I wasn't blown away. Amy Ryan was good, but she was barely in the movie (more than Judy Dench was in Shakespeare in Love, and more than William Hurt was in History of Violence, but still . . . not Oscar-worthy). Finally, I enjoyed seeing Titus Welliver, who you might know as "Adams" from Deadwood, as the kidnapped girl's uncle. Perhaps this is just because I miss Deadwood (I got excited to see Ian McShane in Hot Rod, after all).
Gone Baby Gone is a good film, but the thing that keeps this movie from being really great is that some of what happens is too far-fetched. For example, the content of the "reveal" in the second part of the movie is almost too convoluted to be true. It's believable enough to be palatable, but on second analysis, may be only a couple steps above the unlikeliness of the scheme in Flight Plan. Also, it really bothered me that Patrick was stupid enough to constantly bring his girlfriend into scummy bars and on visits to scary drug dealers where she is repeatedly in danger of getting raped or killed or worse. Perhaps there is more to this -- maybe in the book, Lehane wants us to know just how green Patrick is -- I haven't read it so I don't know. But in the movie it doesn't really play out this way (Patrick is kind of superhero-capable).
What makes this film borderline-great, is the fact that it was both entertaining and debate-provoking (usually I find these are mutually exclusive qualities in a film). The movie is not really about its hurried resolution, but rather it is about the audience soaking up Patrick's thought processes, his motivating guilt and his heartbreaking error. Essentially, Patrick has two opportunities to act in accordance with the "Rules": the first time he flouts them out of disgust and anger, and the second time he follows them out of guilt and legalism, and both times he gets it wrong. When he should have gone by the book, he lets his gut take over, and when he should have ignored the rules, he becomes a stickler. Of course, this is only my opinion (that's what makes it debate-provoking -- you can disagree). But the questions are good, and the execution by first-time director Ben Affleck (it pains me to say) is high quality.
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