Gone Baby Gone

“Gone Baby Gone” tells the story of Patrick (Casey Affleck), a Boston private detective, who along with his partner Angie (Michelle Monaghan), get hired to find a missing child. But nothing is ever simple, and decisions always have to be made.

Ben Affleck, undoubtedly silencing many of his critics, directs a masterful story that questions the possibility of ever making a right decision. The film begins with Patrick and Angie being approached by the uncle and aunt of a missing child, who want them to use their connections with the community to find out what the police can’t. “Gone Baby Gone” encapsulates Boston’s seedy underworld, where Patrick and Angie confront an alcohol and drug riddled mother they have been paid to help, and must prove themselves against people never fully willing to cooperate. The film constructs the Boston slang and mentality perfectly, rough and threatening underneath the media saturated news story that the girl’s kidnapping is presented as. The Boston accents ring mean and sultry in a way that make the plight and conflicts of the characters only more heart-rending as they are forced to deal with complicating truths.

Ben Affleck co-wrote the screenplay with Aaron Stockhard, adapted from Denis Lehane’s novel –who also wrote Mystic River- and they portray a keen sense of the world they are presenting, having grown up in such deprived, working class Boston neighbourhoods. As a result “Gone Baby Gone” manages to sustain a gritty realism that takes in deception, lies and human greed.

Casey Affleck and Ed Harris in particular give noteworthy and intense performances. Harris plays Remy, the police detective that Patrick must work with, and their relationship becomes decidedly more complicated as the characters lose themselves in an effort to do the right thing. Such a decision becomes highly questionable as the labyrinth of the narrative progresses, and more and more is revealed about the reasons behind the kidnapping; the film leading to a shattering conclusion.

“Gone Baby Gone” exceeds its police/private-eye thriller by beginning to morph into a more complex and demanding moral dilemma, which documents the complexity of human choices. For, as one character asserts: ‘We all see out of our own window’.

Sophie Petrie