Good ol’ Bah­stuhn Cahtholick Ben Affleck is an all grown-up, big-boy direc­tor now, and lookit, he made him­self a pretty decent movie. That said, Gone Baby Gone is a big plate of grim, with side order of depressing.

Affleck makes excel­lent use of loca­tion footage and local color. And not sur­pris­ing for a movie directed by an actor (like Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in Paris and George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck), Affleck priv­i­leges the char­ac­ters and per­for­mances over the plot. We also see plenty of B-roll footage of the faces and voices of Boston­ers on the streets, in the bars, and on local TV screens.

How many times I gotta tell you, bro? I pahked the cahr down on the yahds

Gone Baby Gone is one of the first movies to poach some of the excel­lent act­ing tal­ent pre­miered in HBO’s superb series The Wire. Doubt­less by acci­dent, Michael Ken­neth Williams and Amy Ryan both play char­ac­ters dia­met­ri­cally opposed to their TV coun­ter­parts; Williams is a sar­donic po-lice resolved to the cor­rup­tion around him (com­pare and con­trast with The Wire’s Omar, a par­a­site that feeds on the drug trade), and Ryan plays a coked-out win­ner of bad-mother-of-the-year, the exact oppo­site in every way (includ­ing accent) of her salt-of-the-earth B’more Port Author­ity po-lice on The Wire.

Pay no atten­tion to my rug

The few bad points to men­tion (other than the afore­men­tioned per­va­sive grim tone), are Ed Har­ris’ incon­sis­tent rug and a mid­dle sec­tion papered over almost entirely by voiceover narration.

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Offi­cial movie site: www.gonebabygone-themovie.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to me.

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