Gone Baby Gone

So, the long awaited directorial debut by Ben Affleck (who was waiting?  Some people were. Yes, it’s true) finally arrived.  Based upon a novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River) the film arrives suitably gritty, twisty, and right at home in Boston.  The film centers on Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) as partners in business as well as everything else.  While watching news coverage of a young girl’s kidnapping, their private investigation skills (and status as a neighborhood boy) are requested in talking with the locals to try and get information that the police can’t get. And off we go into a tour of the neighborhood (and these bit parts are obviously played by actual people from the area, Affleck’s nod to his hometown) where everyone seems to know something and of course, nothing is what it seems.  This is where we meet Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman), head of the task force to stop violence against children, and Detective Remy Brassant (Ed Harris, the watchdog assigned to follow Patrick around. I enjoyed the movie, but it felt a little choppy.  The first half is a frantic search for a little girl that suddenly becomes about something completely different.  Trying to see how it all ties up in the end is a little difficult.  I don’t know whether to attribute this to Affleck’s novice directorial skills or to a story that was so large it couldn’t be contained smoothly within two hours.  Other than the strange flow of the story, the twists were interesting if not entirely realistic. I believe I’ve waited almost long enough to write this for it to be available on DVD by now, so stop and pick it up or catch in theaters while you can.