- I love you, Casey Affleck. I do. I really, really do. 2007 has been a good year for you. You were awesome in The Assassination of Jesse James and you were awesome in this. Sometimes I wish you’d enunciate a bit more, but for the most part you’re wonderful. It’s sometimes hard to see a skinny guy like you as someone who is tough, but you totally proved yourself as someone not to be fucked with and I commend you for that.
- I really disliked the narration, but that’s probably unsurprising since I seem to continually have problems with narration. The narration at the beginning of the film was fine, but it reappeared halfway through the film and cut it neatly in two, as if the first half was one film and the second half was a connected story in the same universe but not necessarily the same movie. A two-parter, really, with something we thought had been resolved — if calling off the search and coming to terms with a lack of resolution could be called resolved — in the first film coming back to play a part in the sequel. Like… Kill Bill, minus the Hatori Hanzo swords. And, like with Kill Bill, I liked the second half better than the first.
- Wow, that mom was cracked out. When people talk about showing people “warts and all”? This is what they mean. There was nothing glossing over this woman’s rough edges.
- I know that “cheddar” is a slang term for money, but it still kills me that this big-time drug dealer was called Cheese.
- I don’t watch horror movies because I’m not into that sort of thing and for the most part thrillers don’t really thrill me, but holy crap was I scared to death when they raided the Coked-Out Paedophilia Shack of Despair and Gloom. Everything really is a million times scarier in the dark; it was like being trapped in Buffalo Bill’s basement without the frightening night-vision goggles factor. And I have to hand it to Ben Affleck, he was really, really deft with this scene. I mean, you knew exactly what Patrick was going to find in that house in the dark the second that poor little seven year-old Jimmy Pietro went missing earlier in the film, and so being able to convey the horror without being explicit or over-the-top requires knowing exactly where to draw the line about how much to show and, more importantly, how to show it. I mean this is a visceral, visceral scene. All it took was two or three shots of certain things in the room and then Patrick’s (literal) gut reaction and that was it, the scene had done it’s job. Well done, Ben Affleck and your editor. Holy crap.
- I haven’t read the book, but I imagine that in a really liberal interpretation of this book where Patrick and Angie are married and have five kids, she would have eventually left him and taken the kids to her mother’s while he continued his Quest for What’s Right despite the fact that his driving sense of morality has clearly broken all his relationships along the way. (By the way, this is seriously one of my favourite plot contrivances ever.) Men with conviction and the women who leave them! Details at 11.
- I’m still wondering how an aged cop close to retirement who has been shot squarely in the chest not once but twice can outrun a kid half his age. Yeah, Patrick had an occasional trail of blood to follow, but you’re going to tell me he couldn’t have caught up to Bressant until the dude had collapsed on the roof? No dice.
- Sorry, WTF at the final plot twist. I seriously thought at first that Doyle had finally succumbed to grief decades after the fact and that’s why he kidnapped the kid, as a surrogate daughter that he was going to rename after his old daughter or something equally insane like that. Turns out he genuinely thought he was doing right by the kid. Sorry, what planet do you live on? I think more confusing is the number of willing accomplices he had. I know these are tough situations these people find themselves in and it’s not always clear what the best choice to make is, but come on, kidnapping rarely falls into the category of “potentially correct life choices”.
- Hahaha, Agent Frank Lazio (a.k.a. Robert Wahlberg, a.k.a. Marky Mark’s and Donnie’s brother) of the FBI was in this. Oh wait, apparently he’s in Mystic River too? I’ll have to re-watch that.
- Greatest facial expression in this movie: when Patrick is being interrogated by the cops about his participation in the conspiracy and suddenly he has the most animated face on the planet, all bug-eyed and raised eyebrows. Hysterical, I wanted to die.
- The final scene is just so tragic. Helene doesn’t realise the error of her ways, doesn’t change one iota; that she’s leaving for a date with a guy who saw her on TV on American Victim speaks volumes about her. The look Patrick gives her when she tells him that if her date doesn’t work out, she’ll just marry him is completely heartbreaking, both in his own complete revulsion at the idea and the fact that she’s just compounding his realisation that she’s just as awful as she was before. So many things just flash across his face in this scene, it’s astounding; you can see that he’s clearly thinking that maybe, just maybe, Amanda would have been better off with the people who kidnapped her, and at the same time you can see him thinking that although the poor kid is in a shitty situation, he still has the power to do something about it in being there for the poor kid when her own mother refuses to take any responsibility for her. What really, really takes the cake, though, is when Patrick is sitting with Amanda on the couch and he asks her “Is that Mirabell?”, Mirabell being the name of her favourite doll, the doll her mother talks about on camera at the start of the film. The kid says “No, this is Annabell.” Well damnit, fuck Patrick sideways if the mother doesn’t know her own daughter’s doll’s name. The look on his face is heartbreaking, holy crap. And that’s how it ends, with the camera slowly backing away from the most miserable and wretched thing I’ve had to witness in a while.
- So basically, ten points to Ben Affleck.
Gone Baby Gone
I think I love Ben Affleck. What.
IMDB Plot Synopsis Two Boston area detectives investigate a little girl's kidnapping, which ultimately turns into a crisis both professionally and personally.