Tagline: Everyone wants the truth… Until they find it.
Gone Baby Gone movie storyline. Private investigator Patrick Kenzie and his partner / girlfriend Angie Gennaro witness a televised plea by a woman named Helene McCready for the return of her missing daughter Amanda, who was abducted with her favorite doll “Mirabelle”. Patrick and Angie are then hired by the child’s aunt Beatrice to find Amanda and discover that Helene and her boyfriend “Skinny Ray” had recently stolen money from Cheese, a local Haitian drug lord.
After Ray is murdered, Patrick and Angie join the police detectives investigating the case, Remy Bressant and Nick Poole, to arrange a trade of the money for Amanda. Captain Jack Doyle reads Patrick a telephone transcript of the drug lord setting up an exchange for Amanda. The exchange at a nearby quarry in Quincy is botched and Amanda is believed to have drowned, as her doll is found in the quarry and returned to Helene. Doyle, whose own daughter was killed years before, takes responsibility for the death and goes into early retirement.
Two months later, a seven-year-old boy is abducted in Everett and Patrick receives information that the boy was taken by a known child molester. After entering his house and finding evidence of the abducted boy, Patrick returns with Remy and Nick to rescue him. They are seen by the residents and Nick is shot. Patrick enters the house during the shootout and finds one of the residents dead. He retreats into the child molester’s room, where he finds the boy’s dead body; he then shoots the child molester in the back of the head in a fit of rage.
Nick later dies of his wounds. Trying to alleviate Patrick’s guilt over the events at the house, Remy unthinkingly confides that he once planted evidence on someone with the help of “Skinny Ray” — whom he had initially told Patrick he didn’t know. After Nick’s funeral, Patrick speaks to a police officer, who tells him that Remy had been asking about the drug lord’s stolen money before the drug lord knew it was missing.
Patrick then questions Beatrice’s husband Lionel in a bar and pieces together that Lionel and Remy had conspired to stage a fake kidnapping in order to take the drug money for themselves and to save Amanda from her mother’s neglectful parenting. At that point, Remy (trying to cover for his earlier mistake) enters the bar, while wearing a latex mask and holding a shotgun, and stages a robbery. He points the shotgun at Lionel’s head, but the bartender shoots Remy twice in the back. Remy flees and is pursued by Patrick to the rooftop of a nearby building.
“Gone, Baby, Gone,” Academy Award-winner Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, stars Casey Affleck (“Ocean’s Eleven”), Michelle Monaghan (“Mission: Impossible III”), Academy Award-winner Morgan Freeman and Academy Award-nominee Ed Harris. Based on the novel by Dennis Lehane (“Mystic River”) and adapted for the screen by Affleck and Aaron Stockard, the film tells the story of two private investigators hunting for an abducted 4-year-old girl in the seamiest side of Boston’s underworld.
Film Review for Gone Baby Gone
Boston seems like the most forbidding city in crime movies. There are lots of movies about criminals in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and points between, but somehow in Boston the wounds cut deeper, the characters are angrier, their resentments bleed, their grudges never die, and they all know everybody else’s business. The novelist Dennis Lehane captured that dour gloom in his books inspiring “Mystic River” and now “Gone Baby Gone.” What would it take to make his characters happy?
This is his fourth story involving Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan), lovers and business partners, who are private investigators specializing in tracking down deadbeats. Approached by clients who have deadly matters on their mind, Patrick and Angie protest that they’re just garden-variety PIs, don’t carry guns, aren’t looking for heavy lifting. Then somehow they end up with crucifixion murders, kidnapped babies and, as always, people who are not who, or what, they seem.
This could become a franchise, if we didn’t start grinning at their claims to be basically amateurs. In “Gone Baby Gone,” Ben Affleck, making his debut as a director, assumes we haven’t read the four novels, approaches Patrick and Angie head on and surrounds them with a gallery of very, very intriguing characters. He has his brother Casey and Monaghan play babes in the deep, dark woods, their youth and inexperience working for them as they wonder about what veteran cops don’t question. The result is a superior police procedural, and something more — a study in devious human nature.
I know, the title sounds like the movie should star Bill Haley and the Comets. But there is a rough authenticity from the first shots, especially when we meet a woman named Bea McCready (Amy Madigan) and her husband Lionel (Titus Welliver), who don’t think the cops are doing enough to track down her 4-year-old niece. They think people who know the neighborhood and don’t wear badges might find out more. They’re right.
The police investigation is being led by Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman) of the Crimes Against Children police task force, who unlike a standard movie cop, doesn’t resent these outsiders but suggests they work with his men Remy Bressant (Ed Harris) and Nick Poole (John Ashton). Not likely, but good for the story, as the trail begins in the wreckage of a life being lived by the little girl’s single mother, Helene (Amy Ryan). She is deep into drugs, which she takes whenever she can sober up enough, and there seems to be a connection between her supplier and a recent heist of a pile of drug money.
Enough about the plot. What I like about the movie is the way Ben Affleck and his brother, both lifelong Bostonians, understand the rhythm of a society in which people not only live in one another’s pockets but are trying to slash their way out. This movie and the recent “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” announce Casey’s maturation as an actor, and it also proves, after her film “The Heartbreak Kid,” (2007) that Michelle Monaghan should not be blamed for the sins of others. And when you assemble Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, Amy Madigan and Amy Ryan as sidemen, the star soloists can go out for a cigarette, and the show goes right on. One reason crime movies tend to be intrinsically interesting is that the supporting characters have to be riveting. How far would Jason Bourne get in a one-man show?
There are some secrets and concealed motives in “Gone Baby Gone,” but there always are, in any crime movie without nametags saying Good Guy and Bad Guy. What distinguishes the screenplay by Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard, which departs from the novel in several ways, is (a) how well-concealed the secrets are, and (b) how much perfect sense they make when they’re revealed. I am grateful when a movie springs something on me, and I feel rewarded, not tricked.
I also like the way that certain clues are planted in plain view. We can see or hear them just fine. It’s that we don’t know they’re clues. No glowering closeups or characters skulking in a corner to give the game away. That’s a tribute to the writing — and the acting, which doesn’t telegraph anything. Actors talk about how well they like to get to know their characters. Sometimes it’s better if they take them at face value and find out more about them along with the rest of us.
There are dark regions below the surface of the story. Was the child taken by a pedophile? There’s a suspect, all right, but maybe he’s too obvious. Certainly Helene, the mother, is no help. She’s so battered by drugs and drink that she’s hardly quite sure if a conversation is taking place. It’s amazing the little girl made it to 4; her aunt and uncle must have had a lot to do with that. The unspoken assumption is that somewhere a clock is ticking, and the longer the child remains missing, the more likely she will never be found or be found dead. And here are these two kids, skip tracers who have lives and destinies depending on them.
Gone Baby Gone (2007)
Directed by: Ben Affleck
Starring: Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, Amy Ryan, Amy Madigan, Titus Welliver, John Ashton,
Screenplay by: Ben Affleck, Aaron Stockard
Production Design by: Sharon Seymour
Cinematoga John Toll
Film Editing by: William Goldberg
Costume Design by: Alix Friedberg
Set Decoration by: Kyra Friedman Curcio
Art Direction by: Chris Cornwell
Music by: Harry Gregson-Williams
MPAA Rating: R for violence, drug content and pervasive language.
Studio: Miramax Films
Release Date: October 19, 2007
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