GONE BABY GONE

           By the time Gigli came along, Ben Affleck’s days as a new Hollywood wonder boy were a distant memory. Gigli was just the coup de grâce, Armageddon, Forces of Nature, Reindeer Games, Pearl Harbor, and a tabloid romance with Jennifer Lopez had already dealt deathly blows. Was this the same young man who had made a promising start not long before with Good Will Hunting? And the over-the-top morbidity of Smokin’ Aces was yet to come!

            Soon after, however, Affleck did what no other movie laughing stock (has-been or otherwise) did before. He turned his career around completely with a single magnificent film. Gone Baby Gone shut down the mockery with one blow and proved Affleck one of the greats without even appearing on screen, but personalizing his directorial debut (not counting the obscure short I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney from 1993. The film was so bad, Affleck disowned, so it seems just to discount it from his oeuvre) as if he had been an auteur for years. And perhaps, in a spiritual sense, he was, since Boston has long been so close to his heart.

            One is tempted to compare him to Clint Eastwood, who was not taken seriously until he took the director’s chair, but what Affleck offers in Gone Baby Gone, and would offer again in The Town, was something that no one, not even his early supporters, foresaw.

            From the opening shots of Gone Baby Gone, spanning the characteristic triple-decker homes of Dorchester, Affleck gives us the first honest unpolished window into a side of Boston only the locals know of. No, not even Good Will Hunting, for all its calculations and involvement of locals, peered this deeply. To be fair, such depths were not to be expected of Good Will Hunting, but no filmmaker has ever looked past Beacon Hill. New York has Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee as alternative to Woody Allen’s elegant vision of the city and Los Angeles has few movie idolizers, but no filmmaker has ever paid attention to the Boston neighborhoods for which Back Bay may as well be part of another city.

            Clint Eastwood took the first step with his excellent Mystic River (also from Dennis Lehane), exploring a hidden world of secret connections and dark secrets, but working-class life in Southie was scrubbed so clean it remained simply an acknowledgement of its existence rather than an exploration, though it was the first step toward a true exposure.          

            Affleck holds nothing back, as though the opening narration by his brother Casey (who took the lead as the detective who knows the block as well as anyone), were his own words (and they are, he wrote the screenplay with Aaron Stockard), sharing his reason for making the movie. He shows us all, the drug addictions, the hushed murders, and robberies that have left a mark in in the history of South Boston. But few outsiders ever see this world and it’s no surprise why. Southie and Dorchester are tight communities that don’t like to share much with strangers. Cops, detectives, and investigators are often told to mind their business and locals who talk to them aren’t easily forgiven. Is it any wonder that Mayor Menino’s attempt to run the “Stop Snitchin’” campaign out of town met with so much resistance? When little Amanda McCready (Madeline O’Brien) goes missing in this neighborhood, Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck), working as a private detective on the streets that raised him, knows how hard it will be to break the silence.

            The first scenes of Gone Baby Gone follow a familiar noir pattern. Patrick and Angie (Michelle Monaghan), his partner and lover, visit the local bars, talk to the local sleaze hounds, and irritate the neighborhood strong-arms who enforce the code of silence.

            Because our attention is not yet turned away to the deeper implications of the mystery, our attention is captivated entirely by Casey Affleck’s superb performance. Having stayed out of the mainstream for much of his early career, he largely dodged the tabloid vultures. But if there was a perfect way to break into the world his older brother occupies, this is it. It’s a tough, sensitive performance. Patrick knows the ways of the neighborhood, its rules and dangers, and many of its secrets. He’s been hardened by life in the block where he was raised, but finds reason to care about the residents who have been less fortunate than he. In South Boston, your neighbors are always your people, no matter what you become. No doubt, this sentiment hits home for the Affleck brothers.

            As the investigation widens, deeper elements come into play, ending the film with a morality question for which there can be no easy answers. Patrick makes a case for what he believes to be the right choice, but whether he did right by taking Amanda from a loving home and back into the arms of her neglectful mother with a seeming affinity for dangerous men because that was the legal thing to do can be endlessly debated.

            Gone Baby Gone offers no easy answers because morality in this neighborhood is relative and everyone who lives there has their own definition of it. Helene (Amy Ryan), Amanda’s addict mother, is who she is and shows little sign of changing up until we last see her. Still, her concern for Amanda seems sincere, even if she is not above compromising her to fulfill a drug deal. Amanda’s Aunt Bea (Amy Madigan) and Uncle Lionel (Titus Welliver) seem to genuinely love her, but her uncle’s resentment of his sister Helene takes precedent over Amanda’s safety. He claims to have done everything he is revealed to have done for her own good, but revenge seems that dominant motive.

            Detective Bressant, a bulldog investigator played by Ed Harris with a strong bite, joins the search and for most of the film we can forgive his hot-headedness and occasional overstepping of bounds because of his concern for children. His past, however, compromises him.

            He’s merciless when dispensing justice against child molesters, but his tactics aren’t always legal or ethical. But does that necessarily mean he is wrong? That’s one of the fundamental conflicts of Gone Baby Gone, what’s legal and what’s “right” and the irreconcilable differences between the two. Bressant’s answer to the charge “murder is always wrong” is, “depends who you do it to.”

            But who is Bressant’s judge? The only clue the movie drops our way is in the way Harris plays Bressant. There is something suspicious about the man from the start, as if he were harboring a deep anger toward a past experience, so much so that his vigilantism seems rooted in something deeper than justice (at least as he defines it) at any cost. It’s a shadow that hangs over Bressant until his final scene, so that his dying words “I love children,” only seem to account for a part of his motivation. More likely, his actions, as they become revealed, are a form of compensation for a past dark moment.

            Patrick has his own rule of thumb. “Shame is God’s way of telling you what you did was wrong,” he says. For everyone else, the answers aren’t so easily identified. The struggle between what’s right and what ‘s right and what’s just continue tugging at each other, becoming increasingly tense, until culminating in the final twist when Amanda is found alive and well living with Police Captain Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman). It’s a twist not only in the common sense (one of the supposed good guys turns out to be a mole), but also a turn in the film’s direction. Up to then, Captain Doyle was the single beacon of morality in the film. Having lost a daughter himself to a killer, he made it his personal crusade to rescue lost children before it’s too late. He operates by the book and enforces protocol. But to what extent does he take his cause to rescue children? As far as kidnapping Amanda and taking her to his cabin by the lake.

            Affleck films Doyle’s cabin and its surroundings in idyllic natural beauty, tranquility, and bright natural colors; a stark contrast to the urban jungle seen through most of the film. It’s a great place to raise a child, away from noise, pollution, and crime. But is it legal? Well, no, but to understand why that would matter to Patrick is to understand his respect for his community. As unfit a mother as Helene is, Amanda is her kid and, as Helene’s neighbor, Patrick owes her the safe return of Amanda. But would Patrick have been wrong to let Amanda stay with the Doyles in a place where she was loved and cared for? It’s a complicated enough question and Affleck makes it harder by making a responsible and level-headed persona like Angie support that option. Patrick decides to go the other route and calls the cops on Doyle, cutting his relationship with Angie as a result. His choice was the legally correct one, but that’s hard to remember as we see Doyle’s wife in tears as the police pull Amanda from her arms; she is losing her second daughter.

            But Gone Baby Gone paints a world in which right and wrong have no visible boundaries. Some people do the wrong thing for right reasons, and others do wrong by trying to do right. There isn’t a way to satisfy everyone. Not surprisingly, those caught up in this endless shade of gray are law enforcement officials honoring their commitment to the community but also bound by the regulations of law. Take, for instance, Patrick’s impulse killing of a child molester when he finds a dead seven-year-old boy in his bathtub. He is haunted by his action almost immediately after. There is really no reason he should be except for the fact that it wasn’t the legal thing to do. His decision to call the police on Doyle was his way of making amends, by doing what was the legal thing to do. But, once more, did he do the wrong thing ethically to compensate for having done the right illegal thing?

            Given the difficulty in deciding what’s right, the easiest characters to trust are those operating outside of the law for their own purposes if only because there is never a question about where to stand with them. Cheese (Edi Gathegi) is a drug-dealing thug, simple as that, and the bar punks are little more than the neighborhood muscle. Maybe because their intentions and motivations are so obvious, they are easily manipulated and used by the alleged forces of good to accomplish their own ends. Cheese, for one, is essentially sacrificed after his use as a stooge runs its course.

            Gone Baby Gone is one of the best written thrillers of recent years, unfolding like a first-rate detective story with many unforgettable moments that verge between the comical and bizarrely creepy, something that may become Affleck’s signature after the ghastly nun-robbery in The Town. But the suspense and horror comes packaged with loaded questions, creating one of the decade’s most thought-provoking films. In a blink it turned reinvented Affleck’s career, pointing it in the right direction and was the second brought Casey Affleck, one of our finest actors, into the mainstream. Surprisingly, and this is something that even Affleck found astounding, the entire cast is in tune with the unseen side of Boston that only true Bostonians like the Affleck brothers know so well, except for Morgan Freeman who was likely cast simply because he is a great actor to cast in any role. But his detachment from his surroundings makes sense once we learn Doyle’s secret. To do what he did, Doyle had to think of Dorchester and the neighboring boroughs as a hopeless wasteland where no child can stand a chance for a good life. The question of Gone Baby Gone is not who Doyle is to make such a judgment but, rather, is he right in doing what he does about it.