“Good art doesn’t give answers it just asks the right 
questions”, so says novelist Dennis Lehane, best known as the author of ‘Mystic River’.
I’ve just seen the impressive movie adaptation of Lehane’s ‘Gone Baby Gone’ directed by Ben Affleck. Among the questions it asks are: ‘Is it right to carry out a summary execution on a paedophile and child killer or do such ‘monsters’ have a right to a fair trial?; ‘If a mother is a crack head, is it right to take her child from her without following legal procedures?’ ‘Is it ok to plant evidence to ensure you get a guilty verdict?’
A strength of the movie, and I assume also the book (which I haven’t read), is that it raises these moral dilemmas without trying to give glib solutions.Unusually, for a work of popular cinema, it leaves the audience to decide.
The performances here are all first rate,both from the professional actors and from the cast of local Bostonian citizens enrolled from the streets to give the right edge of gritty reality.You could have predicted Ed Harris to play the tough cop and Morgan Freeman as the apparently incorruptible commander- in-chief, but I wouldn’t have guessed Casey Affleck would be so convincing as the fresh-faced but hard as nails private investigator.
His big brother has also really gone up in my estimations after creating such an authentic world. The bleakness of some of the settings looks depressingly realistic and entirely convincing. It clearly helps that the Afflecks are from Boston as they get the locations and characterisation spot on.
The location is different, but I’d say Affleck took a few tips from HBO’s ‘The Wire’ in getting the sense of place right. Lehane wrote for that groundbreaking series and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the actors who played ‘Beadie’ and Omar have roles here (Amy Ryan & Michael K. Williams respectively). That was TV (Art) of the highest quality and , like this fine movie, it wasn’t afraid the leave loose ends dangling.
