By Marc S. Sanders
Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, is crime drama mystery thriller that never offers easy answers and concludes with great debate. You’ll ask yourself if right decisions were made. You will argue with your best friend or significant other about the endings. What’s undeniable though is that the film, adapted from Dennis Lehane’s novel, is full of an array of characters, most operating with the best of intentions, and yet they wind up doing everything wrong or against their sworn principles. In order to work the problem, these people will have to betray themselves.
One of Affleck’s many best decisions was casting his brother Casey Affleck in the lead role of private detective Patrick Kenzie. With his girlfriend, Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan), they specialize in tracking down missing persons in and around the Southeastern Boston area. The brothers’ pairing is especially effective as Boston, Massachusetts is where they were born and raised. They know this setting intimately. Unpolished multi-floored tenement neighborhoods near seedy watering holes are where the crimes of Gone Baby Gone occur. Casey can ensure that his character, Patrick, can speak the slang, use the thick dialect, and feel comfortable amid a crowded and overpopulated area. As director, Ben ensures the setting is captured in great detail from Red Sox caps to beat up cars and dirty unkept apartments and secret hang outs.
In the middle of the night a little girl has gone missing and her deadbeat, drug addicted, careless mother Helene (Amy Ryan) is unmotivated to offer the police much to go on. Helene’s brother and sister-in-law (Titus Weliver, Amy Madigan) take it upon themselves to hire Patrick and Angie to find their niece. The only leads that Patrick, Angie and the police (Ed Harris, John Ashton and occasionally Morgan Freeman) have to go on are Helene’s contacts within the drug peddling underground. Someone within that community might have taken the girl or know someone who did.
Gone Baby Gone may feel like a Law & Order episode where red herrings are offered early and then dismissed for the actual truth. However, Lehane’s story twists much deeper beneath the surface. Not one character is wasted in this film. Each serves a purpose to how and why this crime ever occurred. Mysteries get resolved but the answers are not simple because they are multi-layered with many different people spinning twice as many plates.
Ben Affleck seems nothing like an amateur director here. He does not always rely on dialogue to describe a scenario because he films quite a bit of a disheveled room or kitchen, or an outdoor area. A daylight scene will take place in a darkly lit bar where only people need to hide from their troubles on an ordinary workday, or maybe they are in there to suppress something uglier.
The cast is outstanding. While the characters belonging to Freeman, Harris and Ashton seem familiar from much of their other career films, they look like they lived within this environment of three-story houses bordering the harbor, across town from Fenway. You believe these guys know every alleyway, street corner or contact among the city’s small-time deadbeats.
Amy Ryan was nominated, and perhaps should have won, for her trashy Bostonian performance as Helene, the missing girl’s mother. This actress is buried so deep in this role, from her worn out facial features to her New England dialect that blends so well. She is completely believable, which is why you would not be able to stand sharing the same space with her.
Titus Welliver dons a thick, wide Irish mustache. I read he had to keep it because he was shooting his HBO series, Deadwood, at the same time. Nonetheless, it builds his character into the blue-collar working man whose greatest achievement is getting out of the life of small-time crime in order to put food on the table, while his sister could not. His wife played by the great Amy Madigan, an actress that does not get enough coverage, is perfect. Just her facial expressions with a pale, freckled complexion, tight chin and pinched lips show her biting her tongue while in the same room as her loser sister-in-law. It sickens her that a sweet little girl like her niece is missing. Everything is read on her face. I know Madigan best as Kevin Costner’s midwestern cheerful wife in Field Of Dreams. She played this role almost two decades later and she absolutely hides herself. You forget you are watching her. An outstanding character actress. (I’m glad she’s getting new recognition with 2025’s hit horror movie Weapons.)
Michelle Monaghan as the girlfriend Angie is the sidekick to Casey Affleck’s Patrick. Yet, she makes the horror of this movie convincingly real. Early on, Angie is reluctant to accept the case because she doesn’t “want to find a kid in a dumpster.” Now this isn’t some Dirty Harry or Lethal Weapon cop showcase. It’s not glamourized with Hannibal Lecter glee. This has not become much further materialized. I don’t want to see a horrifying outcome for a child either, but Ben Affleck’s direction does not make any promises. There are some repulsive, scary people in this world, right outside the front doors where people listen to the game on the radio and kids play stickball in the street. Monaghan seems like that young woman who came from another place in the country with a fine upbringing and fell in love with Affleck’s character. With her brains, instincts and empathy, Angie took up the cause as a fellow crusader. None of this is spelled out in the film and I have not read Lehane’s books, but I can see it in Michelle Monaghan’s performance.
Casey Affleck is a perfect surprise. He dons the appearance of a thin, shrimpy kind of kid (supposedly age 31), and yet no matter who he is coming face to face with he never shows any sort of apprehension. I truly believe that Patrick is not afraid of his work or the people he has to confront while trying to solve his various mysteries. If a large gun is introduced into a scene, Patrick’s reaction is an act of “whoa, what’s this?” Another character in another film would tighten up and hold their breath, or they would knock the weapon out of the way for an action scene. Patrick has put this kind of act on before to outlast a situation. Angie has definitely seen it before.
Casey Affleck is great at just listening. Shortly after he accepts the case, Patrick and Angie are in one of these darkened bars trying to collect information. Ben Affleck shoots his camera above Casey sitting in a booth with a beer. The actor keeps his head tilted as if he is listening to nothing spewing from a possible lead sitting across the table. When a gun is pulled though, Casey stands three feet taller than his posture implies and controls the scene. That is Dennis Lehane’s character Patrick Kensie completely defined because Casey Affleck has a full understanding of this guy. Someone like Patrick knew that if he was going to take this kind occupation on full time, he had better be aware he would not survive on brawn that he cannot show. It’s a confidence that has to come through.
Gone Baby Gone is a gripping and engaging thriller shown with varying degrees of light and perfect cinematography to offer genuine on-site locations of Boston and the surrounding areas. Ben Affleck chose not to compromise any of his set pieces. With handheld cameras, when a missing person’s search is happening, it feels like a documentary of procedure is being shown.
The various directions and endings are entirely unexpected and yet very, very plausible. This is a smart, sensational crime drama that deserves a resurgence of attention nearly twenty years after its release.
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 