Or even maybe for society in general? Ben Affleck's 2007 directorial effort, Gone Baby Gone, starts with a child abduction case that gets some attention from the local media... it's a Boston story, by the way. You can tell from the severely Boston-local actors and actresses that David O. Russell would later try to get for his 2010 feature, The Fighter.
Well, the first half of the feature starts off promisingly enough. We have the inherent conflict of some private detectives being called in by members of the grieving family, even though every cop in the city seems to be working on the case. Morgan Freeman gets wind of this, and goes to see the two detectives himself. He lists some grim child abduction statistics and... hey! That would be so perfect for the trailer! Then he says that he doesn't care who cracks the case, just as long as it gets done. Perhaps in a case as grim-looking as this one is turning out to be, some outside help would be just the thing, for the police in general, and for everyone more specifically... something like that. Casey Affleck, Ben's younger, and now Oscar (TM) (C) (R)-winning brother, is one of those detectives. Michelle Monaghan is his partner-in-crime... solving crime, so to speak. This seems like the start to a Luc Besson pic to me, for some reason. Also, I know I should like Michelle Monaghan... I'll get there eventually, just give me time to catch up.
Well, this crack team of
As you would expect from a crackling mystery yarn, there's more to the story than what's merely on the surface. In this case, the general ennui of Boston seems to be covering the list of suspects in this child kidnapping case, but once that's peeled back, and once they more or less nail down the whereabouts of the young girl who was kidnapped, it's not hard to have some suspects to point to. It's about a medium-sized list of suspects in this story. Sometimes everyone's a suspect, sometimes it's just a stranger or a coincidence, but... needles to say, a rather un-matronly picture is painted of the mother whose child was kidnapped. And I'll confess it, I think I even said out loud that the daughter was probably in a better place! But it was said in the comfort of my own home, mind you. Then we find out that, not only is the mother a bit of a cokehead, but she brings her daughter along sometimes when she's running drugs for the local Haitian drug kingpin, and... time out for a second. Isn't all that, um... extremely illegal in this society? Even in Boston? Don't people go away for life for that? Aren't there still people serving rather ungodly sentences for much less involving pot? As Sonny Valerio once quipped, am I dreamin' here or what? (...go to the bottom of the page. Alas, someone hasn't made that billion dollars yet, coming up with a system for hyperlinks that will take you to a specific centimeter on a page. But it's coming! And they'll announce their IPO on Colbert when it happens, trust me.) But it is worth it for the joke. Did you hear about the cokehead mother who took her child along with her on a drug run? You know, transporting drugs for the local drug lord, so she says "What am I supposed to do? Leave her at the day care like an idiot?" Of course, detective-for-hire Kenzie isn't too far removed from the drug lords himself. He's familiar with "Cheese," and this other wicked fat dude named... I think it's the Bubba Rogowski character. Somehow I missed that, even though the Closed Captioning is always on in our house now. Reminds me of that old Brian DePalma comedy Wise Guys... damn, they don't have it on the IMDb "Quotes" page. Some old chestnut about how organized crime is the fourth biggest employer in New Jersey, something like that. Gotta hand it to that Brian DePalma: he was there to fix the first Star Wars early on, sure, but he has the ability to take any genre and not quite do it right.
Anyway, so this Bubba Rogowski ends up doing some detective work for Kenzie. Long story short, Bubba ends up tracking down some rather seedy characters we're introduced to early thanks to Poole and Bressant... my faithful viewing companion didn't even stop to notice that one of them was Hector Salamanca! Well, he was a little bit younger back then. Anyway, long story short... I know, a bit too late for that... Kenzie's second stop at the House of Usher is with the two detectives. One gets caught in some crossfire, the source of which is never found. They apparently never determined exactly how many people were in the house to begin with. But Kenzie eventually stumbles upon the big moment of truth. Spoiler Alert. I mean, this is what we're building up to, really. No amount of warning might be able to fully heal us afterwards. Violence against children. How grim is this going to get? We get into that room, there's a sink with some blood in it and a pair of underwear, we're treated to a mercifully short shot of a dead child, we have an accused child molester saying "It was an accident." It's the kind of thing a really hip critic might refer to today as "tragedy porn" or some word other than tragedy. Long story short, Kenzie shoots the child molester in the head. Time for the second act of the film.
And it's at this point that, I don't know... I mean, things were starting to break down already, but depending on your mood, then they really start to go South. Not for critics of the time of the film's initial release, apparently! Hailed as a classic, but not really hoisted on the shoulders of the moviegoing public that much. I mean, it broke even, and Affleck directed again and all that. And even though Detective Kenzie did what anyone else would do in a similar situation, and it's an unusual situation... at least, one would hope. I mean, there's a gun, a dead child, and a guy saying "It was an accident". One might not want to wait for the cops to show up. However, Kenzie seems to regret his decision made in haste, but he's not exactly repenting in leisure for the rest of the movie. Now the movie enters either Serpico territory, or The Verdict / ...And Justice for All territory, taking on the system as a whole. I mean, if you're going to tackle corruption, why not aim for the stars?
No one is spared. Well, Ed Harris's... I mean, Bressant's final gesture is kind of funny. What starts out as a simple robbery of a bar quickly turns into harassment of a very specific witness who's not very good at keeping his mouth shut. Also, there's something about that Boston air. I mean, a guy gets shot in the chest twice, yet is able to run to the tallest building in town? Sure, the guy ends up dying, but... I mean, man! What an epic shot! Could've ended the movie on that shot! And a hundred lesser movies would have, but this is not your average movie.
I'll try to tiptoe around the ending as best I can. I mean, there are spoilers and there are spoilers. But consider the grim statistics. That they're on the film's IMDb Quotes page certainly helps: half of all the children in (abduction) cases are killed flat out, and if the abductor isn't caught on Day One, only about ten percent of the cases are solved. But how about the statistics on films about child abductions? Do you recall a film about a child abduction in which the child isn't returned? In the original Ransom! from 1956, the abductors of the child aren't even shown! That's how horrible the crime is. As of this writing, there are almost 9,000 films and or TV shows with the keyword "kidnapping" associated with it... The Green Mile? Shows you how good my memory is. I thought it was just a boring, 3-hour prison film. Anyway, despite the pleadings of Detective Gennaro, who takes the side of the status-quo, so to speak, Detective Kenzie busts the case wide open. When will the fools ever learn? It's not the child kidnapping that gets you, it's the cover-up! A similar argument is made in Win-Win, that even though the mother's a bit of a trainwreck, she's still a mother and we need to respect that... ooh! Amy Ryan's in that one too! She goes the opposite way, if memory serves, in terms of character. Affleck and Oscar-winning cinematographer John Toll, a long way from Braveheart and Legends of the Fall, breathe new life into that old visual cliché of a bunch of cop cars coming up, their lights blaring, as if to say that justice is indeed being served. I look at it a little differently now, now that I just saw it last night. It seems like the film wants to have it both ways. We have the gruesome murder of a (different) child, then the tonic to make the pain of that go away. If that's the case, maybe they should've opened with the murdered child, then have two hours of tonic. Similar to how Spike Lee's Clockers opens with grisly crime-scene photos... that's all of that I've seen, I can't vouch for the rest.
**1/2
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan
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