Gone Baby Gone
March 2008 Reviewed by: Charlotte Meyer Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

It’s V. I. Warshawski in Chicago, Easy Rawlins in L.A., and the team of Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro in Boston. Good crime writers seem to know that fictional detectives need real cities. Ben Affleck seemed to know he’d need a real city but also a very good crime writer for his directing debut. So he and Aaron Stockard teamed up to remake crime writer Dennis Lehane’s novel about Boston, Gone Baby Gone, into a screenplay. They shot it in Dorchester, a tough neighborhood south of Boston, where Ben and Casey Affleck grew up. Casey, who is Ben’s younger brother, plays Detective Patrick Kenzie. The brothers know the streets, the accent, the shops and hang-outs, and the subtle intangible customs that make the neighborhood unique. Local people, not actors, appear in most of the scenes -- a fat woman leaning out the window, an old man with a bulbous nose smoking on his porch. And local places too -- a front door with yellowed newspapers for curtains, a child’s dingy bedroom, a shelf loaded with kitschy Catholic statues. Cinematographer John Toll creates the city by capturing people where they are, doing what they always do.

A four-year-old named Amanda is abducted, and Patrick and Angie (Michelle Monaghan) are hired by her aunt and uncle to augment the police search. The story involves the abducted child’s cocaine-using mother (Amy Ryan), a police captain (Morgan Freeman) whose own daughter had been abducted some years before, a missing-child detective (Ed Harris) who seems to be hiding something, a Haitian drug lord who sends the ransom note, and a pedophile in a crack house. Casey Affleck plays his role with a Dorchester accent and compelling low-key manner. He’s slight in build but tough and unafraid, and he commands the screen. After lots of violence and lots of ugly people doing ugly things, the plot resolves itself -- twice -- in a moral ambiguity. Patrick risks and loses much sorting out that ambiguity and so does his girlfriend Angie. We are left weighing whether doing the wrong thing for the right reason makes a wrong thing right. Both author Dennis Lehane and director Ben Affleck are passionate about the protection of children, and their passion drives that ambiguity. It’s an emotional and demanding film.

The cinematography of John Toll gives the film much of its character. It follows the path Patrick Kenzie takes to find the child, often down blind alleys, sometimes using camera techniques, like jerky handheld shots, to play up his uncertainty or indecision. The DVD has wonderful bright daylight scenes of Dorchester, but the many night scenes are dark, sometimes almost opaque, such as the ransom scene at a quarry. Those scenes are predictably clearer and have a more three-dimensional feeling in the Blu-ray edition. The Dolby Digital 5.1 is clear and crisp, the dialogue in a nice balance with the score. Good luck with the Southie accents, though, and Casey Affleck’s mumbled articulation. Except in two gunfight scenes, the surrounds don’t often demand attention by being loud, but go a long way in subtly establishing ambient atmosphere in quieter scenes. The sound design seems to fit the mood of the film, even more so on the Blu-ray Disc, where the tracks are presented in uncompressed PCM format.

The extras are interesting, informative, and better than average. There are deleted scenes you’ll wish could have been included (for example, a few that establish an intimacy between Patrick and Angie that was lacking in the film), a short feature on shooting in Dorchester and another on casting there, and finally an audio commentary by director Affleck and fellow screenwriter Aaron Stockard about their decisions and misjudgments, scene by scene.

The list of awards this film has won includes the same name over and over, Amy Ryan. She won over a dozen awards and an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her very authentic performance as Helene, the negligent, coarse, self-involved but somehow endearing mother of the abducted child. And hers is only one of many excellent performances in this film. Gone Baby Gone is also a fine directorial debut film for Ben Affleck.

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