Best Films of 2007 #2: Gone Baby Gone

Ben Affleck's directorial debut is the best private investigator film since Chinatown. I realize this probably doesn't say a lot: the genre has been reduced to self-parody and grotesqueries since Altman made The Long Goodbye. But the film nevertheless carries with it an earnestness in its desire to recover the past -- some past, any past -- and work it into a future that will at least appear less damaged than it really is, and in that sense the film uses its noir origins as a matrix through which to literalize these national concerns about morality and family values as passed down through the generations in terms of an investigation about a desperate junkie's attempts to recover her missing daughter. Like other noir masterpieces which transform national political anxieties into an investigation by seemingly unscrupulous detectives into family affairs (and Chinatown is really the capstone of this tradition), the plot becomes extraordinarily complex, but this narrative noise doesn't sound off at the expense of a more melancholy complexity in how this plot translates into moral grey area of our current political climate.

What makes the film remarkable is how Affleck deftly collapses that moral grey are into the narrative itself, interpreting the screenplay in starkly literal terms that avoids the ham-fisted allegory that could easily have been applied to the story by a lesser director and cast. In this literal-mindedness, the film directly poses these questions constantly in the characters' dialogue. Whereas Zodiac convincingly portrayed a world in which people use their conversations as a way of sidestepping major ideological concerns, this is a film in which the characters realize that the world is too screwed up to take such evasive measures. And each character is played so earnestly by the cast (Casey Affleck and Amy Ryan are absolutely brilliant in the kind of reflective melancholy and indifferent anger they bring to their roles) that the film never feels condescending in the way the characters speak about such large issues (in the way that, for instance, Death Proof sometimes does and The Kingdom always does). This is a difficult film that, even in its apparently climactic moments, doesn't let anyone off easy for the kinds of choices that reverberate for years into the future.