Gone Baby Gone (Affleck, 2007)
Today’s post is from the “roughly on this day in history” department, a review I wrote for Capital Times on Wednesday 2 April 2008:
Based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, Gone Baby Gone is set in the same Boston mean streets that Will (from Good Will Hunting) grew up in. If you saw Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River (also from a Lehane story) or Scorsese’s The Departed you’ll be familiar with the geographical territory, but Affleck’s eye is even more highly tuned to the neighbourhood than those masters.
Four year old Amanda has been snatched from her home while her young single mother (sensational Amy Ryan) was getting stoned at a bar. The Police led by Morgan Freeman (himself suffering the loss of a child) are struggling to get traction from a community suspicious of uniforms. Young private investigator Patrick (Casey Affleck) and his partner Angie (Michelle Monaghan) are enlisted by the family to try and tease out some clues that would be unavailable to law enforcement.
And that’s when it gets really interesting – because Affleck chooses to downplay the thriller (or procedural) aspects of the piece in favour of character study and the unveiling of a terrible moral dilemma. And its a dilemma that remains perfectly balanced right to the end where, like Bogart’s Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, our honourable private eye is virtually alone, forced to live with the unending pain of doing the right thing.
Also included in that 2008 column: the US remake of the Thai horror film Shutter, and the Owen Wilson comedy Drillbit Taylor.
Where to watch Gone Baby Gone
Aotearoa: Streaming on Netflix
Australia: Streaming on Stan
Canada: Streaming on Netflix and Hoopla
USA: Streaming on Paramount+ and Hoopla
UK: Streaming on Netflix, Paramount+ and SkyNow
Further reading
A few weeks ago, I recommended the New Zealand true-life drama Out of the Blue here and (coincidentally) not long after I was asked to write an appreciation of the film for NZ On Screen.
I’d love for you to go and check it out as I think it is some of my best work and I’m glad it has found a home at one of the most important culture websites in Aotearoa.
The opening sequence of Rob Sarkies’ Out of the Blue shows a metal detector being waved over a sandy beach. It’s a new day and the sun is shining. Metal detecting is a gesture of hope. After all, you might find some treasure beneath the sand. But you might also reveal an unexploded bomb.
It is this ‘what’s below the surface’ that Out of the Blue is concerned with. On 13 November 1990, the small coastal township of Aramoana, north of Dunedin, discovered that someone in their community was holding a dangerous secret — his own mental fragility and a military-style arsenal — and that bomb was ready to go off. After a minor argument with a neighbour, 33-year-old David Gray, prompted by a minor argument with a neighbour, grabbed a semi-automatic rifle from his collection and went on a rampage that resulted in the deaths of 14 people — four of them children, one of them Gray himself.
