30 for 30: 2007 — "Gone Baby Gone"
"I mean, kids forgive. Kids don't judge. Kids turn the other cheek. What do they get for it?"
What’s this all about? I turn 30 on Sept. 26, 30 days from the start of this series. To celebrate, I’m going to watch one movie a day for 30 days and spend 30 minutes writing about each one. This post is about 2007. Click here for the original newsletter in the series. Other entries: 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006
I first saw “Gone Baby Gone” on accident, with my mom, of all people. We misread the movie times at the theater and looked at the summary for this one and thought, “Yeah, a whodunit movie, that would be a good way to pass the time.”
We were not prepared.
Ben Affleck’s directorial debut is a bleak, heavy noir mystery that follows Boston private investigators Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) as they investigate the kidnapping of 4-year-old Amanda McCready. Their investigation puts them in competition/cooperation with the Boston police (Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris), who can’t reach the criminal underworld in the ways Patrick and Angie can.
Affleck and screenwriter Aaron Stockard adapted Boston writer Dennis Lehane’s noir novel of the same name (the book keeps the commas: “Gone, Baby, Gone”), leaving all of the book’s grit and world-weariness fully intact.
This makes sense as a directorial debut for Affleck. It’s a Boston story, written by a Boston author, starring Affleck’s younger brother in the lead role. It’s a “gritty” movie, all the better to prove he’s a serious artist who has something to say.
But I wasn’t prepared for just how brutal this movie is. The movie’s essential question comes down to: What happens if the mother of a kidnapped kid is widely regarded as a deadbeat who would be better off not being a mother? And if they find the kid, does the kid need to stay with the mother or go with the state? That’s not to mention the very real ways in which society and the cops fail missing kids all the time when it’s often only the missing white kids that get found.
Every character in Affleck’s film, and, to a greater extent, Lehane’s novel, grapples with these questions. The pull quote in the subhead above is from Ed Harris’ character, who describes planting evidence on a low-end drug dealer in the ‘90s to ensure that the kid they found living in his crack den would go on to have a better life. Almost everyone in this movie at some point does the wrong thing for the seemingly right reasons. It was one of the first movies I saw that made me look at and grapple with how the world is grey in a lot of ways, and you have to hold two things at the same time.
I won’t spoil the whole ending, but it’s one of the most defeating things I’ve ever seen. Amanda is found, and she’s reunited with her mother (Amy Ryan, who also started her run on “The Office” later this year and who garnered this movie’s only Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actress…the range) who wants nothing to do with her daughter as she prepares to go on a date. She asks Patrick to watch Amanda for a few hours. We learn with one quiet line — the only line that Amanda ever speaks in the movie — that Amanda’s mother never even knew the name of her kid’s doll that she went missing with. Patrick, ever the in-over-his-head noir protagonist, just sits there and thinks about what happened, and the credits start to roll.
I didn’t know movies could just end like that, and I remember walking out of the theater with my mom feeling deflated at how bleak the ending was but also feeling like I had just discovered a new way to look at art. I found the rest of Lehane’s work a few years later and have since read everything he’s written. ( “Mystic River” is his most well-known book; “The Given Day” is his best.) And then I started looking more into noir detective books and movies and fell in love with that genre, too.
I think as we walked out of the theater my mom told me something like “If you were ever kidnapped I promise I would actually look for you,” which she didn’t need to say, because she’s a good mom, but that ending clearly left an impact on both of us. While I recommend this movie, I know it’s a heavy watch, but I think it’s worth it.
Up next: 2008’s “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” the perfect alchemy of raunch and heart.
Letter of Recommendation
For some levity: Here’s Casey Affleck’s “Dunkin” sketch from “SNL” a few years ago.
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