Entertainment, Movies - Air Force Times

Affleck brothers make good as star, director in ‘Gone Baby Gone’

Ben Affleck has shown beyond a reasonable doubt that he’s a wooden dud in front of the camera. So it’s not a stretch to think he’d also have a hard time producing any sizzle behind it.

But Hollywood has a long history of surprising career turns that defy logic and expectations. And whaddaya know, Affleck’s directorial debut, “Gone Baby Gone,” strongly suggests that he may have found his true calling.

In splashing this adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s grit-filled novel onto film, Affleck (who also co-wrote the script with Aaron Stockard) doesn’t overreach; he succeeds mostly by not getting in his own way and occasionally delivering a solid gut punch that helps propel the screen version of the book past some of its more flagrant quirks.

Chief among these quirks is the casting of Affleck’s kid brother, Casey, in the starring role as Patrick Kenzie, a 31-year-old South Bah-stahn private detective who specializes in tracking nonviolent missing persons.

It’s not that the younger Affleck can’t act. Quite the opposite— he shows far more promise than his brother, outshining even Brad Pitt in the recent “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.”

But in “Gone Baby Gone,” Casey Affleck, with his reedy voice, baby face and physique that approaches Orlando Bloom levels of waifishness, delivers verbal and physical smackdowns to muscleheaded mooks two and three time his size, and somehow ends up walking away with all his limbs intact.

It’s a bit tough to swallow at first, but darned if he doesn’t pull it off, growing into the character over the course of the movie and pulling you in with him.

Kenzie has lived his entire life in a beaten-down neighborhood that seems just a block or two over from the beaten-down neighborhood in “Mystic River” (another Lehane novel adapted for the screen). It’s a place where even 7-year-olds tell you to go bleep your mother, the kind of place where dreams die fast and hard — if they’re ever born at all.

Patrick and his personal and professional partner, Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan), are sucked into the kidnapping of a 4-year-old girl from their neighborhood at the behest of the girl’s aunt, Bea McCready (Amy Madigan), and her hubby, Lionel (Titus Welliver), who think the cops aren’t up to the job.

The story quickly accelerates as the leads pile up, starting with the little girl’s alcoholic cokehead mother, Helene (Amy Ryan), and leading to some of the roughest local thugs, including a scary Haitian coke and heroin peddler (Edi Gathegi) who would just as soon gut you as look at you, mon.

Things get more tangled when Patrick and Angie join forces with local cops Remy Bressant (Ed Harris) and Nick Poole (John Ashton), under the stern eye of Capt. Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman), who runs the Crimes Against Children unit and suffered the murder of his own 12-year-old child years before.

After little more than an hour, the film reaches what seems like its natural end — but there are still 45 minutes to go, and things are just warming up.

The story twists through several more surprises before hitting a climax that, like the recent “Michael Clayton,” puts its protagonist in the grip of a moral dilemma that will shape the rest of his life, for better or worse.

Ben Affleck, who grew up in Massachusetts, does a fine job of capturing the local atmosphere of the story’s setting, and he gets plenty of support from his veteran cast. He also shows that he can pull off an action scene: a dead-of-night gunfight in a dingy, dilapidated house pitting Patrick, Remy and Nick against two whacked-out cokeheads and an unhinged pedophile is a cool rush.

Most important, in ceding the spotlight to his more talented kid brother and sparing us another of his own mopey screen turns, he’s given us a win-win gift.