Gone Baby Gone

Saw Gone Baby Gone.  This was some surprise to me since I intended to watch Gone Girl but could not remember the name.  I knew Ben Affleck was involved and saw he directed Gone Baby Gone and decided that must be it.  You can understand my mistake, surely.  So I watched this waiting for a wily wife to be kidnapped and though there's kidnapping in this film and wives, it is not Gone Girl.  It's not a bad movie though, so I stuck through it.

So this film is about a husband-wife detective team investigating the abduction of a young girl.  The girl's mother seems to know something, there's Drugs involved and ransoms and such.  The main character is realistically portrayed as just some jerk who has no authority whatsoever.  The cops regard him as a semi-entertaining nuisance and the non-cops regard him with overt suspicion and hostility.  I literally cant imagine how being a private investigator works in this modern age.  Apparently they use Facebook a lot?

Anyway, the film has a grungy, Harmony Korine-like aesthetic, full of warping clapboard and ragged, toy-strewn lawns.  The Affleckian obsession with Boston is here too and that is where this film is emphatically set.  It's good fun, don't get me wrong, just very easy to snark on.  I more or less enjoyed the movie and enjoyed seeing the mystery unfold, knot by knot.  Not bad.