Lo and behold, Ben Affleck has remembered (or discovered, depending on your perspective) how to make good movies. In his mainstream directorial debut, Affleck has crafted a compelling tale about a missing girl in
It’s strangely paced – for one, there’s a rising action, climax, and resolution all within the first hour. My friend and I thought the movie was almost over until we noticed that just an hour had passed since the beginning – from there, it goes through several more plots, with several more climaxes. It builds up slow, but wraps up nicely – I was compelled for the entirety of the movie, even if some of it was a little dry.
More impressive is how great Affleck the elder is at creating tense situations – there are at least half a dozen scenes in the movie that had me and my Beantown buddy (who loved the movie, by the way – no surprise there) wide-eyed and open-mouthed. For the action scenes, Affleck switches to handheld cameras that are carried without a steady arm in order for maximum chaos to be communicated to the audience. This is where the movie excels – these scenes propel the movie from “entertaining” to “Oscar contender”.
There are some weak points. Michelle Monaghan is particularly useless as Casey’s girlfriend/business partner, and I’m not sure what Morgan Freeman added to his role other than being Morgan Freeman. But Ed Harris is great as a cocky policeman, and Amy Ryan is amazing as the missing girl’s coked out mother. I don’t know if Gone Baby Gone will get nominated for Best Picture, but I’d be surprised if Ryan was left out of the Supporting Actress category. The film ends on a morally ambiguous note, and the viewer is left to decide whether or not Affleck made the right decisions along the way. It’s a film worth seeing at least one.
Better than: Anything Affleck has done in the last half-decade
Worse than: The Departed
No comments:
Post a Comment