Affleck Steps Behind the Camera for Gone Baby Gone

There are legions of actors who have stepped behind the camera, but few who have done so successfully. The latest, and with very favorable results, is Ben Affleck, directing his own brother, Casey Affleck (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), in a taut and tense detective yarn.

Set in the Afflecks’ hometown of Boston, Gone Baby Gone is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River, also made into a movie directed by an actor-turned-director, and shares some similar themes. In this outing, Lehane’s recurring private detective Patrick Kenzie (Affleck) and girlfriend/sidekick Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) reluctantly accept a job to investigate the disappearance of 6-year-old Amanda McCready, which immerses them into the sleazy world of Amanda’s heroin-addicted mother (Amy Ryan) and raises the possibility that Amanda’s abduction may not have been random.

Patrick and Angie meet creepy neighbors, drug dealers and pedophiles as their investigation is dogged by police detectives (Ed Harris and John Ashton) who either know more than Patrick and Angie, or less, all overseen by a police captain (Morgan Freeman) still haunted by the kidnapping and murder of his own daughter years before. The only thing Patrick and Angie can be sure of is that nothing is exactly what it seems.

There’s a lot of Catholic imagery and enough guilt to go around the table several times, but Affleck the director coaxes a riveting performance from his brother, indeed from all his actors. Audiences may recall that Ben co-starred with Freeman in The Sum of All Fears, and here Freeman gets a performance that makes up for the indignity he had to endure for Evan Almighty. Harris (A History of Violence) can virtually do no wrong, Ryan (Capote) is handed a breakout role as the addicted mom, and Monaghan’s character gets my award as Heroine of the Year, more than making up for the embarrassment of The Heartbreak Kid.

But what I really like is the moral ambiguity that Patrick and Angie are faced with as they try to determine if Amanda’s unknown fate is the result of a pedophilic abduction or something even more sinister. Affleck slaps them hard with an ethical decision that stuns the characters and the audience along with them. I applaud a movie, and a director, that can leave me wondering hours after the lights come up what I would have done in the same situation. I still don’t know. Maybe I don’t want to.

Via free-times