Gone Baby Gone: DVD, Blu-ray Movie Review (2008)

Ben Affleck, redeemed.

The actor’s solid directorial debut is a mature, engrossing drama that finds Affleck and cinematographer John Toll working hard to capture a working-class section of Boston that reeks of havoc, desperation, drug use and danger.

Affleck’s brother, Casey, is Patrick Kenzie, a private investigator living with his girlfriend and business partner, Angie (Michelle Monaghan), in Dorchester, Mass., when into their lives comes a business opportunity in the wake of a 4-year-old girl’s abduction.

Though the girl’s cocaine- and heroin-addicted mother (Amy Ryan, outstanding in an Academy Award-nominated performance) has all but shut down, her brother (Titus Welliver) and sister-in-law (Amy Madigan) want that baby back, and they’re willing to pay for outsiders to glean the sort of inside information they know the locals won’t share with the police.

Taking the case means working the living rooms, backrooms and sleazy bars in the surrounding area. The police aren’t happy about it, but Patrick and Angie do their best to navigate the head of the missing-person’s unit (Morgan Freeman) and two sketchy detectives (Ed Harris and John Ashton), while also trying to obtain information from the difficult denizens of Dorchester themselves, who in this movie are as hard-core as they come.

Beyond the excellent performances and the way the movie hooks into a noirish series of twists and surprises toward the end, what’s so satisfying about Affleck’s film is how authentic it feels.

The director knows this neighborhood —he grew up not far from it —and he doesn’t cheat it by making it something it isn’t.

In this way, he recalls something of a young Spike Lee.

He isn’t afraid to come home and tell the truth about these people in ways that nobody will mistake for flattery. Going there takes respect for a place and its people, but it also takes guts, which, when Affleck isn’t spilling them on the floor as the investigation mounts, the director proves he has in spades.

Rated R. Grade: B+

Read the full review here.

See the trailer below: