Film: Gone Baby Gone

Director Ben Affleck. With: Casey Affleck, Morgan Freeman.
Released June 6

When it came out in the US last October, Gone Baby Gone received blanket critical acclaim. But it took a long time to secure a release date in the UK, and there were doubts about whether it would be shown here at all. Just a few minutes into the film, the reasons for these doubts become clear.

Based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, Gone Baby Gone is a bleak detective mystery starring Casey Affleck (younger brother of the film's director, Ben) as private investigator Patrick Kenzie, who is hired to scour Boston's back streets for an abducted four-year-old girl. The girl, as seen in the film's missing-person posters, bears a spooky resemblance to Madeleine McCann, while other parts of the story are reminiscent of the recent case of Shannon Matthews, the missing nine-year-old who was eventually discovered inside a divan bed. For some viewers, Gone Baby Gone might be a bit too close to the real world for comfort.

But it would be a pity if these coincidences overshadowed a gutsy work, which deserves to be one of the most talked-about thrillers since Silence of the Lambs. More of a why-dunnit than a who-dunnit, it's a film in which the motives of everyone encountered by Kenzie and his partner Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) are more complicated than they first appear. The boundaries between good and evil are increasingly blurred, and the film leaves all sorts of moral questions in your head. Gone Baby Gone is Ben Affleck's directorial debut, and he also co-wrote the script. He may have won an Oscar for co-writing 1997's Good Will Hunting in 1997, but he went on to become a Hollywood punchline, thanks to the two dreadful films he made with Jennifer Lopez and the half-dozen dreadful ones he made without her. But he's bounced back at last by returning to his home turf, shooting Gone Baby Gone on location in Boston—where he grew up, and where Good Will Hunting was set—and investing every scene with grimy authenticity.

His little brother Casey may be a bit too fresh-faced and slender to play a two-fisted private eye on such mean streets, and he's unlikely to have been cast if it weren't for his surname. But he does have the raw intensity and the drawling Massachusetts vowels to hold his own against Morgan Freeman's embittered police chief and Ed Harris's explosive, tough-as-leather cop.

With his performance in Gone Baby Gone on top of his Oscar-nominated supporting role in last year's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, there's no doubt that it's the younger Affleck who has the most talent in front of the camera. The big surprise is that the older one, on his debut, has enough talent behind the camera to match him.

Nicholas Barber