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Gone Baby Gone

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Lost in Gone Baby Gone

 

Question time: detectives Nick Poole (John Ashton, left) and Remy Bressant (Ed Harris) interrogate Helene McCready (Amy Ryan)

On the case: Casey Affleck plays a young private eye

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Assuming Ben Affleck has finally decided that the best place for him is behind rather than in front of the cameras, he has already learned one good lesson. And in his debut as director he has grasped another one, too: that the best thrillers use rather than abuse the genre and push it towards examining important issues.

In Gone Baby Gone, postponed in this country for fear of causing distress while the Madeleine McCann case was still making headline news, a young child is kidnapped and possibly killed. Two young private investigators (Ben’s brother, Casey Affleck, and Michelle Monaghan) are hired by the aunt and uncle of the missing girl to augment the police enquiries.

The scene is the poor, blue-collar area of Dorchester in South Boston. The drug-addicted mother (Amy Ryan) seems beyond help and simply shouts at everyone. She didn’t maltreat her child but could hardly have been called a good mother, and the father is nowhere to be found.

The police, led by a captain (Morgan Freeman) and a detective (Ed Harris), doubt the point of hiring further aid. They resent the inexperienced youngsters — the police detectives know that of the 2,000 children reported missing every day of every week in America those not found within two days are almost always never found at all.

The young investigators don’t share their pessimism and as all of them progress through the murky chain of drug-dealers, ex-cons and child abusers within Dorchester’s darkest corners, they find a possible clue. But when a breakthrough finally comes, the opposite of what the investigators expect is revealed.

The resolution, and even the main thrust of the film’s argument, can’t be revealed without spoiling it, but suffice to say Ben Affleck, who adapted the script from a novel by Dennis Lehane — who also wrote Mystic River — does a terrific job in setting the grimy, poverty-stricken and downtrodden scene.

Here is that part of society who would laugh bitterly at the old adage that everyone in America has a chance to break out of their background, however unfortunate. Most of these people are hopelessly trapped and expect nothing from anyone, least of all the possibly corrupt police.

Affleck is aided not only by an excellent cinematographer in John Toll and production designer in Sharon Seymour — both make Dorchester seem real as the tra g edy assumes newsworthy proportions — but by a performance from Ryan as the hapless mother that is by far the best thing she has given us on the screen.

Freeman, too, is at his watchable best, while Casey Affleck, so good in The Assassination of Jesse James, and Monaghan do everything required of them. There are times, however, when subtitles would have been useful to decipher the mumbled lines.

I am not wholly convinced by the veracity of the last third of the plot, even if its argument is provocative and relevant. But this is undoubtedly a well-made thriller, refusing sentiment and harshly evocative when traversing its working-class milieu.

Affleck hasn’t made a perfect first feature but there is little doubt that this is one of the best films to be seen in London at the moment, if not one that will send anyone cheerfully out of the cinema singing in the rain.

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