Gone Baby Gone(Yeah, yeah… no commas on account of they cost fifty bucks a-flockin’-piece on theater marquees, so do the math for thirteen thousand cine-flockin’-plexes across the country, Professor Plum… well, all right then!). Directed by Ben Affleck (who also wrote the script but not the book the script is allegedly “based” upon; that was Dennis Lehane, same guy wrote the book upon which Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River is/was “based”… uh… upon, another cheery jaunt into inner darkness/madness of Boston, Home of the Bean and the Cod). Starring Casey Affleck (no relation); Michelle Monaghan (no relation); Morgan Freeman (no relation); Ed Harris (sporting hair for some reason… all over); John Ashton (who never caught on, second banana shield—and we know what happens to them—from the Beverley Hills Cop franchise); Amy Ryan (no relation).
Well, this ain’tBeverleyHills… as endless, loving pans of the misshapen, the oblated, the hirsute, the bloated, the skeletic, the ricketsic, the tubercular, the ill-dressed and unkempt, the deformed and infirm, the shady and shabby, the grotesque and brutal and vulgar and crippled and wretched and hopeless and plain ol’ vanilla ugly testify to. A cellul-ode to the mean streets of Boston from the brothers Affleck, who’ve evidently hired every Irish bit player except Ted Kennedy to authenticate at least the flattened a’s (not to say the flattened ass) and the rosy cheeks (not to say rosy nose) of that city’s denizens and her reigning (raining) ambience (variously pronounced but French for : “Way’re takin’ oop a collicktion fer th’Iyahray. Fitch oop with a coopla foyves or a coopla tayth.”). It’s a somber, shadowy world of scary specters, unwritten strictures, and whiskey-breath silences, a world—in short—where it’s hard to imagine the baby-faced younger Affleck (or his turnt-up nose paramour, Angie) as a tough… or how he mighta got to be a tough or why a doll like Michelle Monaghan would settle for a tough (or why they’d tap a Monaghan to play a “Gennaro”). How Patrick (Affleck) manages to shuffle in and out of Southie’s seedy dives with his teeth (and his butt) intact is perhaps less testament to the beef he lacks than the iron he packs… or maybe somehow to the endless dapping and hugging and high-fiving and heybro-ing and yodude-ing and muhman-ing he engages in with the prickly dons of the dungeons. And tough talk. Ohhh… lotta tough talk. And for that reason, might wanna check this one out before you take little Melissa and young Jason with you… unless you figure they’ve already heard enough about umph umph up the umph and go umph umph yourself with an umphety umph till your eyeballs umph out there in the schoolyardbetween SOL’s. Or you might wanna umph umph yourself with an umphety umph till your eyeballs umph. Your call.
Meanwhile… what’s Right? What’s not? And who? And why? Baseline: Can’t be Right to snatch a baby from its mother, can it? Ever? Well… Decidedly unadorable lowlife, potty-mouf’, crack-head, tight jeans floozie Helen ducks out for some blow and a quick umphety umph only to return to the flat she shares with reformed druggie in-law Lionel and his upright wife Bea (Aint Bea?) to find adorable little Amanda gone! We call in Boston’s snatched baby squad led by former snatchee (lost his daughter himself under heartbreaking circumstances) Captain Doyle (Freeman,looking a hunnert years old in this one and the closeups put you right off your gummi bears ™), who assigns two bored street dicks, Poole (John Ashton, appropriately soulweary) and Bressant (Ed Harris, remorseless but cynical, displaced Loosianianian as his first name, Remy—same as Dennis Quaid in Big Easy—testifies and who’s evidently displaced some of those looseLoosianianian values—and we all know what they are—along with his household) to the case. The bereaved family, though, like all the slightly bruised inhabitants of Southie, mistrusts both the competence and the motivation of the cops. They hire missing persons private eye Patrick Kenzie to conduct his own investigation inside the demi-monde of low-life lo(w)cals (“…people who won’t talk to the cops”). Reluctantly and at the teary insistence of Aint Bea, Kenzie and his live-in sidekick agree to tackle the mystery. And we’re off…
Who has done what and why. How the mystery unravels itself. What costs attend the Do-right Moment. Whether a snatched little girl may actually be better off snatched than with a dissolute and hopeless parent. These things Ben Affleck spins (first time) out with considerable art through the tenebrous light of smoky bars, eerie quarries, seedy tenements, ill-lit auto interiors, dim alleys and mostly in the darkness of some troubled and troubling inner city innards. We have no difficulty imagining the widening gyre of Evil as it sucks in the Innocent. What about thatchurning whirlpool Righteousness? Is a feller any less drowned on account of the water is sweet and not salt?