Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone Is Tough, Impressive

It's obvious how hard it is to make a good big-budget movie as a first-time director (too many cooks). What Ben Affleck has done with Gone Baby Gone--and the ease is no doubt deceptive--is make it look easy to do a low-budget movie very well. "There's no training wheels," he told a cineaste audience at last night's screening of the film (co-sponsored by the American Film Institute and the SAG Indie arm of the Screen Actors Guild. Adopting a line used by one of his characters who's just taken two slugs through the thorax, he added, "I wasn't kidding. I went and found the best actor I could."

That actor happened to be his younger brother Casey, recently drawing good notices for his work as the titular villain of The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford. It's only too easy to see every bony-jawed, querulous newcomer as a kind of Montgomery Clift, but brother Ben, working from another gritty Boston novel from Mystic River's Dennis Lehane, has set him up for the comparison with a movie that's densely plotted but uses the complexities to make its bigger questions resonate as they pound down on Casey's private investigator Patrick.

"I can't play moral ambiguity," said actress Amy Ryan regarding her troubled Helene character, and that's true. But she's clearly a whip-smart performer who knew she had something to sink her teeth in portraying someone "This vicious, this hilarious, this brave, this uneducated..."

Helene has had her young daughter kidnapped, and at the urging of her brother (Titus Welliver, in a subdued, letter-perfect performance) accedes to the hiring of Affleck and his girlfriend Angie (Michelle Monaghan, whose resolute stare makes us believe in her character's extraordinary physical courage). Ed Harris, who's always had an interesting face that grows exponentially more so with each passing year, gets the flourishes and repeatedly scores. Morgan Freeman is on hand, being Morgan Freeman--in this film, someone had to be.

SAG Indie's Darrien Michele Gipson spoke before the screening to laud the film's exemplary use of the guild's four qualifying "protected groups"--actors over 60, or of color, or female or disabled--and pointed out the ample discounts SAG grants for the minimum fees charged against a film as diverse as Affleck's in that regard. There's no vanity here--Affleck lets cinematographer John Toll shoot his featured players, plus an eye-goggling array of grotesques, in the kind of probing shafts of light that bucket-of- blood Boston bars always seem to feature.

For those who have charted Affleck's growth into someone subtle enough to illuminate Hollywoodland, this can't really be counted as a stunning debut--it's a natural enough bend in the road. But it's a picture that deserves to be compared to Scorsese's The Departed for many more reasons than a certain geographical (and thematic) overlap. You can throw in State of Grace, Taxi Driver and a number of 70's films, including a couple cited by Affleck as sharing this film's "granularity"--Dog Day Afternoon and The Verdict.

Even opening this month in a season of unapologetically tough (meaning both tough- minded, and tough viewer sledding) films, Affleck's debut should not go unremarked. It's definitely an arrival, the result of a series of very smart creative choices by a directing talent to watch for. More from the filmmakers' interview tomorrow.