Gone Baby Gone

GONE BABY GONE           B            

USA  (114 mi)  2007  d:  Ben Affleck 

I always thought it was the things you don’t choose that makes you who you are. 

—Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck)

A surprisingly complex film that isn’t over when it’s over, that leaves you wondering how you got from point A to point B when so much in between seemed ridiculously contrived, almost defying belief, yet somehow in the end, there’s still plenty to like about this film, much of it from going against the grain.  First of all there’s Casey Affleck (Patrick Kenzie), absolutely nobody’s version of a hero, especially fresh off his performance where the title of the film outright calls his character a coward, THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD (2007), recalled awhile back as one of the crazy lunkheads in Gus van Sant’s GERRY (2002), who now appears as one of the strangest leading characters, as he could just as easily be anyone, the kind of guy who disappears unnoticed in a crowd.  But here he’s Patrick Kenzie, a private eye with a gun and a beautiful babe (Michelle Monaghan), a short-fused badass who stands up to punks on the street as well as thugs in all walks of life, keeping his brain on alert while the world is spinning out of control all around him.  This is as improbable as Elliot Gould playing a mumbling Philip Marlowe in a sun tinged take on Raymond Chandler’s film noir world in Robert Altman’s THE LONG GOODBYE (1973), which by the way also caught us off guard, but worked.  Second of all there’s the man behind the camera, a former tabloid king whose acting career and reputation have fizzled to record lows, as he’s become an easy target, routine fodder for jokes condemning him as a lamebrain to the second hand bin.  What’s he trying to do here, take on the persona of George Clooney as a clever mastermind behind the camera?  And third there’s Morgan Freeman, a man whose reputation is rock solid in his role as chief of police, a man’s man, a leader of men, the kind of guy you would want to have in your corner in a time of trouble, as he’s wise enough to pass for several men.  And finally there’s Amy Ryan (at the time of the release, who?), as unsympathetic a character as the screen has seen in ages, and yet it is this director who remains undaunted by her scandalous behavior, who by the end of this film makes us all question ourselves, like who are we to judge?  Yet judgments are made throughout this film, most with enormous consequences, which makes this a highly provocative crime thriller about a stolen baby, where a private eye and his good looking partner are called upon to look through the cracks and scour the dregs of what the police usually overlook or can’t see. 

Opening in first person narration, this initially has the feel of a literary warhorse like SOPHIE’S CHOICE (1982), where the poetic thoughts invoke something outside our comprehension, beyond our grasp, yet then veers into the working class neighborhoods of Boston in a completely unpretentious view of the world, where a baby has gone missing and a distraught family is on the news begging for her safe return.  Suspicious of the police, the family hires this improbable young couple, hoping they know people who don’t talk to the police.  Into the seedy underworld they go, with the beautiful girl following his every move into the gutter, through back room bars, into the homes of crack dealers, where we learn that the foul-mouthed crackhead mother (Amy Ryan) with the missing girl moves within these circles, a mother who may have put her own daughter at risk just for a chance to get high.  Eventually the private eyes team up with a couple of veteran detectives (Ed Harris and Nick Poole), an unsavory relationship from the outset, each openly suspicious of the other, where Kenzie is told to “Go back to your Harry Potter books.”  What’s most surprising perhaps to the viewer is Affleck’s immediate ascension to lead man on the case, where he appears more like a cop than a cop, yet he’s not supposed to be a cop, just a guy from the neighborhood.  This is the first of a series of improbable occurrences that stretch one’s credulity, but Affleck makes it work with his profanity laced chutzpah, standing up to thugs and hoods like he’s been doing it all his life, showing the kind of balls that gains immediate acceptance into a cop’s world.  As the danger mounts, so do the unsavory characters.  The division between male and female is tested, as they’re challenged in very different ways.  The tense atmosphere makes it hard to separate the good guys from the bad, as they’re continuously interwoven into each other’s lives, mirror reflections of this kind of sick underworld where intense flare ups are routine, where staring down the barrel of a gun becomes the measure of a man, not the kind of world most of us would choose to enter, which makes it all the more intriguing when we witness moral leaps of faith.

This brooding contemplative thriller is a series of mood swings that moves like a chessboard across this murky landscape, where every action causes an unexpected reaction, with inexplicable consequences that only grow darker as the film progresses.  Monaghan is overly pretty and never feels right when the going gets rough, but the rest of the cast has a hard edge that’s been through tough times.  Written by MYSTIC RIVER (2003) novelist Dennis Lehane, we’re once again asked to examine modern day morals under siege, where there’s a thick layer of grime like quicksand just under the surface pulling us all too easily into this morass of moral ambiguity where it’s much simpler to look the other way, and righteous indignity has a youthful, idealist resemblance to Crusader Rabbit with a witty arcane charm that feels instantly outdated and out of place.  Despite some off-the-rails plot twists, this is a film of ideas where the believability of the actors makes all the difference in the world and the strong performances are supported by the weight of the film, a surprisingly strong effort that never bows to the outsider money interests of happy endings commercialism and maintains its integrity right through to the end in a shot that visually recalls the final shot of Ryan Gosling in HALF NELSON (2006), but offers a bleaker ray of hope.      

Source Code

SOURCE CODE                     B                     

USA  France  (93 mi)  2011  d:  Duncan Jones 

“The source code is a gift.  Don't squander it by thinking.” 
—Dr. Walter Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright)

An efficiently directed film about disorientation, one that keeps the characters in the film as well as the audience in the dark for as long as possible before small bits and pieces of well placed reality creep in, like clues in the dark.  Directed by Duncan Jones, David Bowie’s son, whose previous sci-fi film MOON (2009) lingered in theaters well beyond the entire summer.  This is something of a mind-bender as well, like an expanded version of a Twilight Zone episode where a character has to re-live the exact same experience that leads up to the precise moment of their death, only for it to happen again and again.  The twist here is that the subject, Jake Gyllenhaall as Captain Colter Stevens, is being programmed by some high risk military experiment where his brain has somehow been implanted into another man’s body, but only for the last 8 minutes of his life, where his mission is to find an explosive device on a fast moving commuter train to downtown Chicago within 8 minutes of detonation when all the passengers die.  What’s especially amusing is that the subject knows no more about this experiment than the audience does, so we learn as he does, and in this case, the Captain is a quick learner, as he’s a well-trained helicopter pilot used to carrying out combat missions in Afghanistan.  The set up always begins as he’s sitting on the train across from an especially attractive woman, Michelle Monaghan as Christine, who engages him in the same conversation.  The intrigue is he is sent on multiple missions, each time his only means of contact afterwards is with the face of Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) projected on a computer screen, who asks him to remember pertinent details, like where is the bomb, who is the bomber, before sending him back in again to figure it all out in another 8 minutes before the train explodes. 

Despite the déjà vu repetition, each sequence is slightly altered based on his knowledge learned in the previous incident, but it’s always the same faces, the same seating arrangement, and the same activity on the train except for his actions and words which are subject to his own instincts.  Stevens easily holds the audience’s rapt attention as he’s a study in intensity and military precision, but his instincts are amazingly human, where he wants to speak to his father on the phone, and he asks about the men on his last combat mission, where his curiosity is exactly what the audience relates to, but Goodwin’s mission instructions continually remind him that his personal inquiries are unnecessary, as he’s wasting time, because this one terrorist act is just the first of several in succession, where the military is pinning their hopes that if they can catch the first guy, the world will be spared the subsequent terror.  This extra pressure of fate only adds to the tension Stevens is facing, as he’s always under the clock, eventually becoming more and more frustrated with the same inevitable outcome.  The other is his interest in Christine, who is positively aglow with an intoxicating charm, where the idea of losing her each time just as he is initially introduced to her is rattling his desperate-minded soul, growing ever more weary at the mounting losses of lives that he can’t seem to be able to save, where everyone at some point comes under suspicion, yet all but one remain cloaked in innocence. 

The interplay between Gyllenhaal and Monaghan seals the deal, as the sincerity of their flirtatious romanticism is reminiscent of the opening moments in Powell and Pressburger’s A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946), where David Niven is a British WWII air force pilot whose plane has been hit, who deliriously utters what he thinks are his last words to an American WAC air traffic controller, Kim Hunter, instantly declaring his love before he leaps without a parachute to certain death.  There are moments of poignancy in this film that seem to come out of nowhere, especially in an explosives film, but Gyllenhaal’s performance generates plenty of hard earned sympathy, as he’s genuinely a man on a mission, apparently stuck alone inside a time traveling capsule of some kind, where his inability to escape his hellish fate feels like Sartre’s No Exit, a punishing world where man’s existence is doomed, like being locked in a room together for eternity with no escape.  But Stevens is certain he holds the key to a way out, even as his superiors on the outside keep reminding him of the limits of his mission, urging him not to reach too far, not to expect too much, that his role is like an apparition, where the source code is like a shadow life that allows scientists to re-enter existence before it dies, where only his ingenuity, if he sticks to the mission at hand, can possibly save future lives.  Of course, in heroic fashion, he can’t expect to save his own, as his fate is sealed, which is why he was chosen for such a delicate mission.  He is only living on borrowed time, never exceeding 8 minutes, like reliving the same dream, always with the same outcome, hoping to spare others from ever having to endure the same experience.  This film is smart, well acted, tautly suspenseful and surprisingly inventive, with a kind of sci-fi twist that keeps the action moving, with a lightness of touch that actually engages the audience.