Gone Baby Gone: A Tragedy in 3 Acts

It seems Dennis Lehane is our era’s Raymond Chandler, creating dark, brooding, atmospheric crime dramas. Only instead of the damp glitz of southern California, his working-class Boston — namely Dorchester — is like the Dublin of James Joyce and Jonathan Swift: a maelstrom of the poor and the poorer, people scrabbling for power, for dignity, and for an ethical stake in a world where there is no right.

Lehane’s Mystic River, brought to film by Clint Eastwood in 2003, was set in a Boston as blue and inky as Gotham, with a slightly muddled storyline and an over-the-top performance by Sean Penn — an actor whom I typically revere. Mystic River was good. This year’s Gone Baby Gone is extraordinary. It’s a classic tragedy staged in three acts, starring superb actors such as Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, and Morgan Freeman, and adapted and directed — unbelievably — by Ben Affleck.

That such a goofball of a performer had the talent to execute this lucid, well-paced script is a one-in-a-million surprise (though, come to think of it, Clint Eastwood had been kissing monkeys before Unforgiven). But this is a movie that seems to unfurl, organically, its story ascending in complexity: from simple crime drama to character sketch to morality play.

The plot focuses on the disappearance of a 4-year-old girl, her slatternly cokehead of a mother, and the P.I. (Casey Affleck, Ben’s brother, and an actor with 20 times the skill) who was brought in by her aunt (Amy Madigan, who has aged with grace and fortitude) to find her. What happens from here is too delicate for me to describe: the film depends upon its viewers shifting allegiances to make its final point. But I will say that in the end, Affleck’s character must make a choice between two evils. And the agony in this is so well-drawn, so real, it leaves viewers conflicted and cowed.

See Gone Baby Gone because it will generate discussion, because it will make you doubt your principles, and because it is a joy to immerse oneself in a story so whole. But watch, too, because the scenes of Dorchester are gritty and almost documentary-like: obese women walking with effort, former gangbangers in wheelchairs, children on bicycles, barflys with harelips, women with chipped fingernail polish and cheaply dyed hair. Yet, there is community in this. A shattered, desperate aunt; a cop from the ‘hood with a diagonal scar across his face; a heroic drug dealer who risks his business trying to save a kid.

"You have to take a side and live with the consequences," Remy (Ed Harris) says at a pivotal point in the movie. "If you take little kids, if you beat little kids, you are not on my side." This is the core of the film, this absolute truth. And yet, questions about right and wrong remain.