Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
A
Grim Tale from the Brothers Affleck
(Gone Baby Gone, 11/5/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Don't
look now, but with its second World Series win in four years and a growing
list of Hollywood movies (e.g., The Departed, Mystic River )
set in its grittier precincts, Boston is the new New York. Or at least
the new Brooklyn—a place close to the center of power, but that
might as well be a million miles away for the hard-boiled provincials.
Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone, a policier with a fine sense
of its setting, is the latest entry in the Beantown canon.
True, this writer initially wasn't
so keen on the premise screenwriters Affleck and Aaron Stockard choose
to explore: the kind of missing-child story already CSI-ed and
Cold Cased to death on TV. If there's any cheaper way of generating
instant empathy than a vanished kid, it must involve a victim with fur,
wagging tail, and a wet nose. But Gone is no TV-movie: Affleck
and Co. have instead tell a story with a confident sense of place, and
with a keen sense of its own moral complexities, that we're glad to
forget Affleck's old sins (remember "Bennifer"? Pearl Harbor?
Gigli?) For the first time in ten years, how this guy managed
to co-write Good Will Hunting doesn't seem like such a mystery.
Where Hunting launched Affleck's
virtual brother to Matt Damon to stardom, here Affleck casts an actual
blood relation, little brother Casey, in the lead. It's a wise choice.
Casey plays Patrick Kenzie, half of a duo of private detectives who
usually specialize in skip-tracing, not lost kids. Patrick and gal partner
Angie (Michelle Monaghan) are hired this time not necessarily for their
forensic skills, but to play the bottom-feeders in the investigation,
using their personal connections in the neighborhood to tap sources
the cops (Ed Harris and John Ashton) can't. There's probably no mystery
to divulge that their search for little lost Ashley (Madeline O'Brien)ultimately
leads them far beyond the dingy walk-ups and cheap lounges haunted by
the usual suspects.
With this role and that of the "coward"
Robert Ford in The Assassination of Jesse James , Casey Affleck
has established for himself a unique onscreen presence. The characters
share a kind of whiny mumble that makes them easy to (as George Bush
is wont to say) "misunderestimate" them. But where Ford gains
heft by suffering for his ambition, Patrick is given a hard, moralistic
core beyond which he won't budge. The private detective who does the
right thing comes off far more heartless than the murderer green with
envy.
With its dead-on authenticity and
air of noir-ish sophistication, it's hard to imagine that Gone
will ultimately go off the rails. Sadly, writers Affleck and Stockard
resolve the mystery with an ending that verges on the preposterous.
Indeed, it involves Morgan Freeman, a guy who hardly ever seems to put
a step wrong, as a retired hero-cop with more than a casual interest
in the girl's disappearance. Freeman brings something to every role—even
in comedies where he's asked to play nothing more than a genial authority
figure (such as God in Bruce Almighty and Evan Almighty).
But here he seems to be just plugged into the proceedings, as if he
was the fourth choice on a list of veterans that must have included
Robert Duvall, Harvey Keitel, and Tommy Lee Jones. Even in south Boston,
that's no way to treat God, is it?
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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