Going, Going.... to Gone

Sunday night, I caught the new movie Gone Baby Gone at the local theater. I was worried that I was heading into it with expectations too high. It had been getting almost universally positive reviews. A co-worker told me that the book on which it's based is one of his favorite books ever. Sounds like a recipe for failure, right?

Well, it's not top 100 material or anything. But it is a very fine movie.

In addition to it being Ben Affleck's first full-length film as a director, it's also the first time in a while he's returned to writing, sharing credit with someone in adapting the screenplay. In this latter role, he is getting back to the thing he's best at, in my opinion. Writing is what he won the Oscar for, remember. All those times in movie trailers (most recently, Hollywoodland) where they say "starring Academy Award winner, Ben Affleck"? Yeah, he didn't win it for acting, you disingenuous disembodied voice.

Without being able to compare and contrast to the book, I can only say that I think it's a very good script. It pulls you in and pulls you along. It surprises you at times. The ending is horrible and wrong... in a good way. By which I mean that it really eats at you, but is crafted to do so. And it's the correct ending, true to character, and makes you reflect all the way back to the main character's opening monologue of the movie to realize "he was telling us who he was to explain the choices he was ultimately going to make."

As a director, Ben Affleck does a pretty damn good job too. We've seen the "run-down parts of Boston" in more than a few movies (hell, even in Good Will Hunting), but it still doesn't feel cliche here, and is really used well as a backdrop for the tale. The staging and presentation helps build dramatic tension.

And he gets great performances from his actors. Now, granted, we're talking about Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman among them, and perhaps getting a good performance from them is little more than getting out of their way... but if so, then Ben Affleck had the good sense to do that and not try to be an artiste to mold the movie and those performances in inauthentic ways.

Anyway, more on the acting. Ed Harris is always great, as I hinted, but I feel like this is really one of his career best performances here. It's not as flashy or showy as some other roles he's had, but it feels really true. Morgan Freeman is also very strong in his role, though admittedly it doesn't stray far from characters we've seen him play before. More unexpectedly, though, are the two actors in the major roles, Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan. He's not just in it because he's Ben's little brother, and she's not just in it because she's a pretty face. They both bring some real meat to their scenes. A number of other characters are just as well cast, many by "working actors" whose faces you'll recognize from other places (The Wire, Deadwood, and so forth).

It's actually kind of funny.... walking out of the theater, I was thinking to myself, "that was really, really good. Not great, but very good." And yet thinking about it since then, and even writing about it now, I'm having a hard time figuring out just what reservation I might have had about the film. Reading back over what I just wrote, it seems like a gushing review to me. So let me make that official by giving it an A.