Gone, Baby, Gone

Set in the coarse and vulgar sprawl of South Boston, Gone Baby Gone is the directorial debut of Southy-native Ben Affleck. Returning to his urban roots, Affleck's script revisits the local jargon and punchy machismo that boosted Good Will Hunting to Oscar-winning infamy.

Affleck's new film, however, is an infinitely darker tale, which scours the soiled underbelly of blue-collar America in a dramatized critique of modern morality.

Casey Affleck plays Patrick Kenzie, a local P.I. hired to investigate the recent disappearance of little Amanda McCready-the angelic daughter of a coke-heroine-alcohol addicted female miscreant. Kenzie and partner/girlfriend Angie (Michelle Monaghan) are made to join forces with questionable Detective Remy Bressant (a grizzled Ed Harris) and Police Captain Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman), whose own child was the victim of brutal murder. What begins as a missing person's case quickly becomes a tangled web of drug abuse, sexual molestation and police corruption.

The less-familiar Affleck imbues Kenzie with a boyish idealism roughened by the nature of his work. What is good and what is ethical is obscured by the perverse circumstances of the base and despicable. As the film moves through the sludge of social depravity, we are faced with characters so degenerate they can only be plucked from real headlines.

Affleck's biting direction forces us to witness the horrifying realities of the criminal. Affleck skillfully elevates the crime drama (adapted from the book by Dennis Lehane, writer of Mystic River) to a complex social criticism, evoking issues from the spectacle of news media to the temptation of vigilantism in the face of an obstructive legal system and a morally infirm society.

At times the film's natural progression is interrupted by a directorial contrivance. A conclusive narration by Kenzie is dropped in the middle of the film-a clever distortion of linearity evoking a passage of time, but awkward nonetheless. Structural issues aside, the film provokes through the talents of a powerhouse cast led by the talented Casey Affleck.

As a social commentary, Gone Baby Gone deals with subject material that is deeply resonant-unmitigated and unresolved. As a cinematic experience, the film is emotionally exhaustive. Affleck's latest endeavor is a challenge, proffering imperfection and cold reality in the hope that we, the audience, might endeavor to rethink our very understanding of what is right and wrong.