DVD Review: Gone, Baby, Gone

In Boston a young child is abducted, the case is red-balled and reporters and police alike swarm the family. After more than 72 hours with no significant leads, the aunt of the missing child reaches out to a team of neighborhood private investigators in hopes that they can question local characters that might otherwise not talk to police. The P.I.s, played by Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan, are partners both professionally and personally. Grudgingly, they take the job and work closely with the primary detectives on the case.

Infant abduction and abuse is the engine that drives Gone Baby Gone. Abuse of children has become a hot-button topic that garners big-time ratings and headlines, so long as the child is white and blond, and in this film the child is indeed white and blond. The topic of child safety drives politicians to scream from their pulpits demanding more funding for ankle bracelets and all sorts of absurd heated promises. Similar to slavery or the Holocaust, making a film about child abuse screams serious picture and demands that people pay attention. Gone Baby Gone is a film that seems focused on attaining the gritty reality of a child abduction investigation in the style of a docu-drama.

The casting department should get special recognition: from the main to the supporting characters, the actors feel like they have grown out of the neighborhood stoops and alleys. Casting by Nadia Aleyd and Donna Morong was spot-on and lent an air of authenticity to the project. Special note should also go out to Carolyn Pickman who is listed as being responsible for location casting in Boston. One of the standout performances was by actor/rapper Slain who seemed to walk right off the streets much the way the characters do in the great HBO series The Wire.

The film starts out sure-footed with strong characters that deliver performances that work tightly within a dark procedural. The language is coarse and the tone fits a story of abduction and loss of innocence - and then something happens. The story steps in and turns the film into an overblown, Hollywood-cop melodrama. The mystery of the film twists and contorts itself into what finally amounts to a pretty irrational plot that when viewed from the inside out (after the scheme and culprits are revealed), seemed destined for failure when a quick call to the DSHS (or at least killing just one other person) would have done a much better job.

The question I was left with at the end of the film was: Who is the intended audience for this film? It's not hard-core fans of procedurals. As mentioned, I was left wide-eyed at the end of the film in much the way I have been when I've attempted a viewing of one of the many CSI or Law and Order: SVU TV shows. So that, I think, is where the film is solidly set, aiming for the SVU market share and throwing in a heaping load of coarse language to convince anyone watching it that it's not a broadcast TV show from one of the big three stations. This film, then, is reality with a limiter. The film gives you some quirky drunks and drug users (all with foul mouths and bad attitudes) wrapped in an unbelievable TV-show package.

In the opening of Roger Ebert's thoughtful and critical review of Blue Velvet, he wrote:

"Blue Velvet" contains scenes of such raw emotional energy that it's easy to understand why some critics have hailed it as a masterpiece. A film this painful and wounding has to be given special consideration. And yet those very scenes of stark sexual despair are the tip-off to what's wrong with the movie. They're so strong that they deserve to be in a movie that is sincere, honest and true."

In a movie that deals so directly with the abuse of children, why drive such a bewilderingly unbelievable story spine through it? It's as if the film didn't want to face the real darkness that it so claimed it was revealing to the audience and instead simply used the shock value of the dead eyes of a child and wrapped it into an unbelievable story.

Within the DVD's bonus features, there's a segment titled "Capturing Authenticity" that goes on to describe how accurately the characters in the film are portrayed, and for the most part, I agree. But it takes more than a great casting director to make an authentic feature, or better yet, an authentic work of art. No, it's not just finding a stellar casting director, slapping characters into a colorful neighborhood, or throwing curse words around like Tabasco sauce. It's about the story and the way people react and respond. And this is where this film gets into trouble - the entire conspiracy built up around this poor child is so overwrought and so rickety that I found it wholly unbelievable.

Gone Baby Gone is based on a novel of the same name written by Dennis Lehane. It is worth mentioning that I have never read Lehane and wonder how closely the movie follows the novel. I would also be interested in hearing from any reader that might know if there's ever been an incident in the U.S. criminal justice system similar to the one described in this film. I'm saying that not only is it wildly improbable, but that I hope if a situation such as this ever did occur, the characters involved were at least smarter about it than the mooks were in this flick.

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