Gone Baby Gone (2007, Ben Affleck)

Adapted from the (very good) novel by Dennis Lehane, "Gone Baby Gone" is a powerhouse of a directorial debut from Ben Affleck, and is an unexpectedly excellent, powerful crime drama with, thankfully, a sense of realism and authenticity required not only for the film to be good but for the subject matter to feel deserving of dramatization as opposed to ending up as mere sensationalism.

Although Dennis Lehane is quite a talented author I find much of his work suffers from long passages of prose which ultimately prove to be purely masturbatory and do nothing to enhance the novel. If you're going to do that sort of thing you better be darn good at it but a lot of his work ends up coming off as sub-Elmore Leonard. On the other hand he can boast a brilliant sense of character, setting, pace, and the ability to write stunningly realistic and involving dialogue. One doesn't need to look past his episodes for television masterwork "The Wire" to see this. All that's needed to adapt one of his novels well for the screen is a talented, intelligent screenwriter and as much as "Mystic River" was praised to the high heavens, and as much as I love Clint Eastwood's work as director, "Mystic River" was simply a flat, bland screenplay filled with flat, bland characters which was adapted from a novel with nothing but involving, interesting characters. Do Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard succeed in not only staying true to the novel in style and sensibility, but bringing the characters, the dialogue, the sense of authenticity to the screen?

Yes, they do. This screenplay is a triumph. It's about as good as it possibly could have been, and considering the subject matter and all that could have gone wrong, how much of it could have felt sensationalist, how the twists and turns in the tale could have felt like a cheap soap opera rather than proper drama, it's just an incredibly intelligent and tasteful script. Similarly Ben Affleck's debut effort as director (er... not counting a certain short from the early 90's...) is quite excellent, showing not only the quality handling of actors which you might expect from an actor-turned-director, but a wonderful ability to use shots to their full effect, a real sense of position and narrative place, a real sort of naturalistic style. There's one wide, far-away shot late in the film, coming after an especially claustrophobic scene, which is just beautifully-shot.

The Kinzie/Gennaro novels are Lehane's attempt at hardboiled genre fiction. They usually contain more humor, more self-conscious style, and more general light-heartedness than "Gone Baby Gone" did. Lehane successfully created a hardboiled crime novel which dealt with very touchy subject matter (an investigation into the potential abduction/molestation of a child) but never felt like a genre piece unworthy of its subject matter. It never felt sensationalist, and being Ben Affleck's favorite novel it's not all that surprising that he manages to bring the same sort of sensibility to the film version of the story- it's both a tremendously effective genre piece and a powerful piece of drama. This is genuinely good, exceptionally well-acted stuff, featuring one of two excellent Casey Affleck performances from 2007.