Mean Streets

Gone Baby Gone Directed by Ben Affleck

Like some unholy combination of The Departed and Mystic River, Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, squints a jaundiced eye at criminal-class life in Boston’s Irish Dorchester section. Not working-class life, since it’s implied that only the police actually work, but the 6 o’Clock News world of drug addicts, alcoholics, thugs, whores, ex-cons, murderers and kidnappers—Hollywood’s idea of the commonweal.

Affleck goes for the same sham realism that won acclaim for Scorsese and Eastwood. It has something to do with privileged filmmakers’ disdain toward urban America and, at the same time, uses a generic plot that condescends to folk who suffer the social misery they have escaped. That’s why Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan play local private detective team Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro; they’re a ghetto Nick and Nora Charles—inexperienced strivers with heart, who sympathize with an Irish-Catholic grandmother (sour-puss Amy Madigan) who pleads for them to help find her missing granddaughter.

Patrick and Angie share class guilt similar to that in Michael Clayton but this plot also recalls Richard Price’s contrived Freedomland, another overwrought saga of urban American hysteria and child-napping. Samuel L. Jackson played a black police detective in that film, here Morgan Freeman plays the black police chief, a cliché of Hollywood’s pseudo-tolerance. And Jackson’s outrageous salutation: “Brother…fucker!” could apply to how Affleck depicts the Irish. They’re all stereotype fuck-ups—something between a zoo and Ripley’s Believe It or Not. They even watch The Jerry Springer Show.

So far this year, no other movie has more risible dialogue: “You probably got a fucking ass like a Skippy jar.” “Dave don’t make a martini worth a shit.” “She’s a cunt. God help me it’s true.” And Patrick’s introductory voice-over “I always believed it was the things you don’t choose that make you what you are: like the city you were born in. This city can be haaard.” Movies like Gone Baby Gone, Mystic River and The Departed are galling because they are never about the historical social forces of immiseration, just the sensational, exploitable aspects of meanness and poverty—anything that cues overacting.

I had hoped never to see Casey Affleck in another movie after his whiny turn in Jesse James/Robert Ford, now he’s back—no longer a retard but still whining, still sulky. And this time, he’s morally superior to everyone else. This awful performance confirms the film’s pandering concept. Casey Affleck lacks the working-class passion that Paul Walker conveyed so beautifully in Wayne Kramer’s superior child-hunt movie Running Scared. Here, solving the kidnapping case means Patrick estranges his fiancée and drags through the mud all the other stereotype freaks from a drunken single mother (“She’s got the gene, the disease”) and Ed Harris’ brutal homicide cop to a Friday the Thirteenth-style group of pedophiles and finally Morgan Freeman’s psychopathic Bojangles patriarch.

Director Affleck’s crackpot realism takes short cuts to ethnic authenticity. Project Greenlight’s seams show in his over-edited film noir approach. Except for street profanity, there’s none of the genuine ethnic sympathies found in Michael Patrick MacDonald’s Southie autobiography All Souls. Not even in a black drug-dealer stereotype named Cheese (Edi Gathegi) who utters the film’s title. Affleck’s antipathetic, Hollywoodized view of Irish-American street life should be called All Damned Souls.