Gone Baby Gone 2007
The source material for this movie was written by the same guy who did Mystic River and if you liked that movie, there is much to be liked here. It is the same basic setting: working class Boston. The cast is again very strong, even though you don’t have Mystic River’s heavyweights. The movie breaks down into several distinct parts, with the first part being about a not all that adept private detective brought in by the family of a cokehead single mother to investigate the kidnapping of her child. Casey Affleck is the detective (his brother Ben directed) and plays a complicated guy pretty well. This isn’t the big acting that someone like Sean Penn would do, but more like something Mark Ruffalo would. I can’t go into too much of what the rest of the movie is about without giving away some things, but I will tell you that as the movie seemed to be coming to an end at the 1-hour mark, I thought it was too early for the movie to be over. And I was right.
What follows is an intricate story that presents the viewer with some real moral dilemmas to think about. Intellectually, the movie is very satisfying, but since it revolves around the abduction of a child, it is also emotionally engaging. It also has the excitement of a crime drama. And, again, the performances are all very good too. This is a more conventional movie than I thought it would be, but there is more to it than I thought.
Written: 07 Aug 2010