Gone Baby Gone.

"[A]s a crime picture, Gone Baby Gone is a big success - well-plotted, engrossing, and full of tangy, grimy details of life in lower-class Boston, land of meth addicts, white-trash thugs and terrible housekeepers," writes Paul Matwychuk.

"[T]his debut marks [Ben] Affleck as a major directorial talent," announces Peter Keough. Also in the Boston Phoenix, Cole Haddon interviews Casey Affleck.

"In his strikingly downbeat directorial debut, Affleck has created something of a blue-moon rarity: an American movie of genuine moral complexity," writes Jim Ridley in the Voice.

Updated through 10/23.

"So how did Ben Affleck learn enough about directing to get a curmudgeon like me - who had no fucking use for him even in his widely lauded cred-grabbing performance in last year's Hollywoodland - to break out the purple prose?" asks Bryant Frazer, who gives the film an A-.

"Affleck shot the film in Boston, and he captures the city's unfathomable layout, intense tribalism, and the existential separateness of its neighborhoods better than Scorsese in The Departed," writes David Edelstein in New York. "But his hand is often heavier than it needs to be. He lingers on the mottled, leering visages of the working-class locals, so that the city becomes a circus-freak show. And he lets his actors stride into the minefield that is the fake Boston accent: It's all 'pahk ya cah' and 'fock yah muthah.' The actors are amazing in spite of those accents. Casey Affleck has never had a pedestal like the one his brother provides him, and he earns it."

"[I]f Gone Baby Gone surpasses Mystic River as an adaptation of one of Dennis Lehane's Boston-set novels, it's because debuting director Ben Affleck zeros in on his hometown fiercely, with perverse pride," writes Mark Asch in the L Magazine.

Belinda Luscombe profiles Affleck for Time.

In his profile for the New York Times, Charles McGrath opens by focusing on the mutual love Affleck and Boston have for each other: "The result is one of the most authentic-looking and -sounding movies ever made about this city, which even as it has become a 21st-century financial center has preserved a provincial culture and accent all its own."

Updates, 10/18: A "funny thing happens on the way to the Razzies: [Affleck] generates a film that is taut, thought-provoking and one of this year's best," writes Neil Morris in the Independent Weekly>

"And the film looks great, thanks in part to cinematographer John Toll (Braveheart), who brings a little bit of beauty to a town filled with dirt, steel and sleaze," adds Erik Davis at Cinematical. "It doesn't appear to have enough juice to land a best picture Oscar nod, but it definitely has enough taste to linger in your mouth, heart and mind for a long time to come."

"[D]espite a somewhat predictable preference for giving each of his actors a big, showy speech, [Affleck] otherwise generally displays remarkable discipline and tact in guiding his tale," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "Gone Baby Gone's surprises are somewhat ruined by a familiar casting blunder - namely, the use of A-list thesps (including Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman) for supposedly peripheral parts - but its prickly quandaries remain vigorous, as does Affleck's portrait of a fetid urban landscape where innocence is not only spoiled on a daily basis, but by the very people charged with its protection."

"As a thriller/procedural Gone Baby Gone's predominant tone is lethargic, never clicking into the register Affleck seems to be going for - that of a talky, tense, intricately woven urban opera of greed (both emotional and monetary), ambition and ethical relativism," writes Michelle Orange at the Reeler.

"Affleck goes for the same sham realism that won acclaim for Scorsese and Eastwood," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "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."

"You gotta give it up for Ben Affleck," blogs Jane Hamsher at the Huffington Post. "The guy showed up yesterday for an event with no glitter and glam but a whole lot of people simply trying to better their lives - the healthcare workers at Boston's teaching hospitals who are struggling to get the CEOs of these institutions just to agree to let them have a fair, supervised union election."

Patrick Goldstein has a long talk with Affleck in the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 10/19: "I'm not sure exactly when Casey Affleck became such a good actor," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Most actors want you to love them, but Casey Affleck doesn't seem to know that, or maybe he doesn't care.... [O]ne of the graces of Gone Baby Gone is its sensitivity to real struggle, to the lived-in spaces and worn-out consciences that can come when despair turns into nihilism. [Ben] Affleck doesn't live in these derelict realms, but, for the most part, he earns the right to visit."

"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," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. He finds this one "a superior police procedural, and something more - a study in devious human nature."

"Ben Affleck is smart about setting the scene - he's even better at it than Clint Eastwood was in another Lehane adaptation, Mystic River," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "But he's less adept at defining individual personalities, at making us care about the characters who deserve our sympathy - or, maybe more important, the ones who don't."

"Behind the camera, Affleck's presence is as modest and workmanlike as his performances in front of it have often been brash; as a Bostonian and a new father, he has a strong connection to the material that makes itself felt in the well-tended performances and the authentic portrait of working-class Dorchester," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

"Somewhere along the line a perception has arisen that Ben Affleck needs to do something to redeem himself," writes the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle. "I'm not sure what exactly he did wrong or if it's a combination of things or just some lingering Gigli fallout, but if Gone Baby Gone doesn't make the case for Affleck as a genuine talent, nothing will."

For the LA CityBeat's Andy Klein, the "thriller has too much plot for its own good, but the underlying moral issues are handled delicately enough to keep things afloat."

"[B]y and large a notable piece of work," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. That said, "this brooding, somber film is also ragged around the edges and not without problematic aspects. Two shadows from the past hang over it, one affecting the kind of film it is and the other the way we perceive it."

"Gone Baby Gone turns out to be a sure-footed, high-intensity drama, expertly written, expertly played and, yes, expertly directed," writes Bryan Whitefield for Nerve.

Updates, 10/22: "Affleck's movie feels more grounded in the specific geography of Boston than any other major Hollywood production ever has. And more populated by real Bostonians," concedes Patrick Radden Keefe at Slate. "But in striving to capture Boston in all its sordid glory, Affleck overapplies the grit. The problem struck me in an early scene in which the camera lingers on a gaggle of daytime boozers, and I swear, more than one of them has a cleft palate. In an effort to cast aside the Hollywood airbrush, Affleck has zoomed in on the freakish underbelly of Boston and somewhat overstated the case. The result is not so much what Mean Streets did for New York as what Deliverance did for Appalachia."

"George Pelecanos, another crime novelist and Wire writer, recently told the New Yorker, 'If it's not about something more than the mystery, the thriller part, I'm not going to do it. Life's too short.' Dennis Lehane evidently agrees, and with Gone Baby Gone, it's clear that Affleck does, too," writes Justin Stewart at Reverse Shot. "It's when the movie reaches for this 'something more' that it stumbles."

"[M]iraculously enough, Affleck's strengths as a director far outweigh his weaknesses. Gone Baby Gone is a thoughtful, serious film, whose strong moral undercurrents carry it beyond mere genre," writes the New Republic's Christopher Orr.

"I have trouble sitting through reality-TV shows, but I could spend all day watching Amy Ryan (from The Wire) play the world's most awful mother in Gone Baby Gone," writes David Denby in the New Yorker.

Update, 10/23: "Gone Baby Gone proves to be an intense, gritty little thriller that would have made a great discovery if it had played on a double bill with a similar crime film back in the 1970s," writes DK Holm for the Vancouver Voice. "Its cousin, Mystic River, was a dull, slow, plodding, Oscar whoring enterprise with a big cinematic ego. This film is tight, efficient, with an ingenious plot, a good action scene or two, and several great acting turns."

Posted by dwhudson at October 17, 2007 5:16 AM