Gone Baby Gone vs A Perfect World

I’m just gonna rip the Band-aid off in one clean, painful swipe here: Ben Affleck has directed one of the year’s best movies.

Not that I’m shocked, but that seems to be the tone of what I’ve heard about Gone Baby Gone. Things along the lines of Affleck finally did something right. That’s kind of unnecessary, really, since a. Ben Affleck has done quite a few right things in his career in the past decade or so, and b. Casey Affleck is the star of Gone Baby Gone. And as we’ve seen over the years, Casey Affleck has excellent taste in scripts. Any career that starts with To Die For, has Ocean’s Eleven as a midpoint, and winds up at Gone Baby Gone is all right by me. So by Casey Affleck association alone, Gone Baby Gone was at least going to be worth a look.

Casey Affleck is Patrick Kenzie, a Boston private investigator specializing in missing persons. Patrick’s job, he claims, normally consists of finding people who owe money, and not people who have, say, kidnapped a child. But a young girl nearby has gone missing, and her aunt and uncle have arrived in Patrick’s living room, so soon he and his girlfriend/partner Angie (Michelle Monaghan) are working on the case. The idea is that the neighborhood, which is full of drugs and the people who love them, might not be that open to interrogation from cops, but maybe someone will open up to these two young locals and they’ll get a break in the case.

It works a little too well. Patrick and Angie find themselves in some dicey situations: a locked pool hall full of huge, pissed locals; a house that Jame Gum would pass on for being too depressing; a flooded quarry in the middle of the night. But they ask the right questions, and follow the right hunches, and with the help of two city cops (Ed Harris and John Ashton, both of whom answer to Morgan Freeman), our young heroes seem to be making progress on the case. But it’s a little more complicated than that.

Gone Baby Gone might sound like a standard procedural. Sort of a serious Moonlighting for moviegoers, or a hipper Law and Order. It is those things, honestly, but in the best way. I was riveted by the case in Gone Baby Gone, but more so by the richness of the characters. The script (by Affleck and Aaron Stoddard) is based on a book by the author of Mystic River, so it should come as no surprise that the characters have secrets, everyone’s connected in some way, and the crime is secondary to the storyline. And like the film version of Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone has been directed by an actor who knows his stuff behind the camera (maybe more than in front of it?). The earliest scenes of Gone Baby Gone reminded me of Spike Lee films, with almost documentary-style camera work up and down city streets, with what looks to be real locals, with real faces and bodies (you will see types in Gone Baby Gone that you see every day in real life, but almost never in movies), with graffiti, crumbling architecture and abandoned storefronts as their backdrop. Affleck isn’t making fun of anyone; he’s just shooting a city he loves and the people who live there.

And more importantly, Affleck isn’t pandering for our emotions, in terms of the thrills or the tragedy of Gone Baby Gone. A lot of the mistakes Patrick makes in his investigation are from his own naiveté and cockiness, and the worried mother of the missing girl is a shallow, obnoxious drug addict. She’s played by Amy Ryan in one of those performances that makes you wonder for a second if it’s being given by a real actor, or just a person asked to be herself on camera and wear her own trashy clothes, and maybe come to work drunk. Oh, and to bring an even trashier and more real girlfriend to sit on the couch and be even more of a vile eye-rolling smartass. Nope. She’s an actor, and she rocks Gone Baby Gone. Maybe she’ll slip through the cracks some, and we’ll see her from time to time in great, small roles. Or maybe Amy Ryan’s making a play for some of those smart Frances McDormand parts. Maybe split the difference?

I really hope Ben Affleck’s directing career is more prolific than his screenwriting career (although he just one-upped Matt Damon; raise your hand if you saw that coming, and if you’re a stinking liar.) Like Clint Eastwood, he knows how to handle actors, and when to stage his movie in big ways (Ed Harris’ performance is one of those all-up-in-another-actor’s-face hissers that I’m sure his costars hate but that Ben Affleck obviously has no problem with. I’m with Affleck), and in small (a potentially exploitative scene in a child molester’s bathroom is mostly silent and has the screen solid black at just the right moments.)

And so, until there’s another movie directed by Ben Affleck, I think a good follow-up to Gone Baby Gone is a film by Clint Eastwood. Mystic River is the obvious choice, but that’s been covered here already, and there’s actually another Eastwood movie that I value almost as much. I’m afraid I might be alone.

I’m not quite sure why A Perfect World didn’t connect more with audiences. Maybe it came out at a time when viewers were uncomfortable with Kevin Costner as a villain. Maybe it was that the movie takes a few larger-than-life elements (big movie stars, the film roadtrip, a manhunt), but then makes us, you know, think about them.

Kevin Costner plays Butch, a villain in any other movie, but here somewhat of a hero. It’s hard to call a murderer, thief, kidnapper and all-around jackass a hero, but he gains our sympathy quickly enough through his sense of humor and his backwards affection toward the boy he’s kidnapped. It’s not quite love, but it’s protection, and Butch actually seems to like the kid. He’s obviously seeing himself in the boy; whether it’s from his own childhood or his present state of mind is up for debate. As they drive cross-country, Butch and the kid bond, kind of, while running from the law and meting out Butch’s warped sense of justice to anyone he sees fit.

The law’s close behind, of course, in the form of Chief Red Garrett (Clint Eastwood). Red is traveling in a huge trailer, state of the art for its time (A Perfect World is set in the 1960s). He’s got a partner in Sally (Laura Dern), a young expert in criminal behavior. She’s there to speculate on what Butch’s next move might be, why he’s making it, and how it fits a pattern in his life. It’s all a bit of mumbo-jumbo to Red, who doesn’t know that in thirty years every TV cop will owe a debt to Sally and her criminal profiling. Like Butch, Red is traveling with a younger model of himself, trying to figure out a way to stop old mistakes from resurfacing. And as you might have guessed, Red and Butch have a connection beyond that.

A Perfect World is a fine movie. It’s a movie for adults, which is my way of saying that anyone who told you it’s too long is maybe a little on the stupid side. Like Gone Baby Gone, it takes the way we view violence, parenting, and the law, and tilts it just slightly, so that we see a bit of humanity we don’t often find at the movies. Sometimes it helps to put an actor behind the camera.

Gone Baby Gone: A

A Perfect World: A-