A lot of movies about children in peril start out with what I call the “good mother” scene. That’s the one where we see the mom (occasionally dad) see the kid off to school or some such and is there mostly to show what a great parent the main character is, and likely to justify mayhem later visited upon the villain. The kid will usually give the parent a deep hug or say “I love you.” But the mother in this story is not a great one, or even a good one, and the first thing we see is the little girl already gone, her aunt and uncle pleading with the TV cameras of Greater Boston for her return.
If the Dennis Lehane (Mystic River) pedigree didn’t already suggest it, you’ll have already figured out that this will be darker and less sensationalistic than a typical crime thriller. Casey Affleck, who is younger brother to the first-time director Ben, plays a private detective who teams with his girlfriend (Michell Monaghan) on small-time missing-persons cases. There’s something appealing about these two, who seem more like college kids than real detectives, but more like real detectives than TV ones. They are neighborhood folks, hired by the aunt and uncle to augment the police efforts. A gray-bearded Ed Harris plays the diffidently cooperative police detective on the case, while Morgan Freeman has a small but key role as his boss.
Ben Affleck,who co-adapted Lehane’s novel, was once a neighborhood guy too, and he has a real eye for the sort of seedy bars and nondescript eateries that make up working-class Boston, although a climactic scene takes place atop a tor outside of town. (The accents are authentic, too, and I missed a bit of the dialogue.) That’s not what makes the movie great, though, nor is it the machinations of the investigations, the quick pacing, the nuanced portrayal of the junkie mother, or the surprising turns of the plot. (If I was going to criticize anything here, it’d be that the kidnapper does not seem to have thought about the practicalities of his plan as much as I’d have thought.) It’s the ethical dilemma that anyone who sees the movie will be talking about.
For all the people who cast Ben Affleck as an acting lightweight, unfairly I think, it’ll be hard to pin that label on him as a director.
IMDB link
reviewed 10/18/07 and 10/19/07
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