Skyfall

Once More into the Security Breach, Dear Friends...
or
"Old Dog.  New Tricks."

Bond is back, as promised, a longer wait than usual.  But with the Bond series (this is the 23rd "official" film from EON), that's usually a good thing.  After 50 years, there have been enough of the slap-dash ones that have been sub-par in order to get "product" into the theaters every biennium.  The Bond films have always been best when Cubby Broccoli's kids take a couple years to plan, take a breath and then throw themselves pell-mell into a fury of film-making that lasts less than a year, but creates something above and beyond what has been done in the past, both within the series and by its competitors.  Those interruptions usually occur with a change-over of studio or lead actor.  In this case, M-G-M's past financial cliff (if we want to be current) gave a couple more years distance between this one and its predecessor, Quantum of Solace—which entered production with an unfinished script, an overcompensation of chase scenes, and a misguided editorial effort to make the Bond series re-Bourne.  It was a decided stumble, after the brilliant series re-boot in Casino Royale, which tossed aside the easy laughs that were purloined for the "Austin Powers" movies and went back to Fleming's book (written in 1954) and found ways to make it work in a 21st Century without jet-packs.

EON should take all the time it wants if something like Skyfall is the result.  Based on a story outline by Peter Morgan (The Queen), then fleshed out and re-tinkered by series regulars Purvis and Wade, and polished by John Logan, the script is a fine thriller in the odd "out-there" Bond tradition, while also making comments about the series and its relevance in the world.  And as directed by Craig-pick Sam Mendes (they'd worked together on Road to Perdition), photographed by Roger Deakins, and edited by Stuart Baird, it takes the Bond series to stylish heights it hasn't achieved in years.  This one is sumptuous, looks great, has great dialogue, and isn't one long chase from start to finish.  This one is decidedly old-school, God save the Queen.

Somebody had better save her, and if Her Majesty isn't directly in danger, her stand-in, head of the Her Majesty's Secret Service, will serve.  An assassin has swiped a hard-drive with the names of embedded agents in terrorist organizations.  Two agents are dead.  One's dying, and Bond (Daniel Craig) tries to staunch his bleeding, but is rebuffed by his boss "M" (Dame Judi Dench, again) over his head-set: "Leave him."  And with a curt "Yes, mum"  Bond abandons the dying agent, miffed, but in pursuit, throughout the bazaars, streets and railways of Istanbul, with the aid of a female operative named Eve (Naomie Harris, a fine addition to the cast). It's a rough-and-tumble, messy fight with a lot of improvisation, a lot of destruction to property, old and new, and a last minute attempt by Eve to try to take out the assassin (Ola Rapace) before the train disappears into a tunnel.  But she hesitates, fearing she'll hit Bond.  "Take the bloody shot!" barks "M" and she fires, and Bond is hit, knocked off the train and falls hundreds of feet into a river, where his body is swept away.  The assassin and hard drive are gone, and so is Bond, sinking into a particularly macabre title sequence by Daniel Kleinman to Adele's defiantly melancholy title song. 

Wow.  But, we've seen this before.  Bond died (surreptitiously) in You Only Live Twice, and Fleming's novel of the same name had Bond lost in a mission,* only to have him return in the next novel "The Man with the Golden Gun," brainwashed by Soviet agents to attack MI6 headquarters and kill his boss.  That doesn't happen here, but the outcome—"M" sending 007 on a mission somewhat ill-prepared to either prove himself or die in battle—does.   As far as "M" is concerned, she's on the way out anyway, a victim of the botched operation and its ramifications in what the Minister of Intelligence (Ralph Fiennes) euphemistically calls "retirement planning."

Seems that hard-drive has fallen into the wrong hands, a particularly misguided hacker named Silva (Javier Bardem), with a score to settle with MI6, exposing its agents and doing as much damage to the organization and Lady "M" as possible.  Britain's spy network is in retreat, ironically having to go to ground and reorganize with means both high-tech and historical to gain the upper hand.

Roger Deakins' cinematography is, at times, breath-taking.

That's the first 15 minutes or so of Skyfall, and one is loathe to reveal much else, even though, for a series that has depended on formula story-telling for so long, there is much that is surprising and different about this chapter.  For instance, despite the film being (as it always is) about Bond, there is much more supporting cast here with more to do than previous films in the series, more humor than previous Craig films (and not the kind of low-pun stuff that passed as humor—and writing—during the Moore and Brosnan years) with nice jabbing dialogue that doesn't just reveal plot, but attitude and character.  For instance, an MI6 analyst doing a perfunctory word-analysis on Bond (we've seen a bit of it in trailers) is a fine examination of 007's sophistication, wit and grit.  And when, later he's grilled by Silva about his hobbies, Bond says one word: "Resurrection."

Apt answer, that, but one can apply it to the entire series, as well.  Whenever the movies push the envelope on outlandishness (You Only Live Twice, Moonraker, Die Another Day) the production team steps back, takes a breather, and takes Bond back to his roots creating better than average entries (On Her Majesty's Secret Service, For Your Eyes Only, Casino Royale) and reinvigorates the possibilities of where the character and the movies can go, usually falling back on Fleming for a guide.

But the Fleming titles are gone (except for three odd ones), the stories (mostly) filmed, so Skyfall only takes inspiration from the author, specifically the novel version of "Golden Gun," and instead of the film having Bond "go rogue," this time, he does just the opposite, coming back to the fold in a time of crisis, tossed out on his mission by "M" to prove himself and the viability of the secret service and its methods.

The results are extraordinarily good, making this the best of the original movie stories not directly linked to Fleming and depending less on protracted action scenes, but emphasizing suspense and crackling good dialogue.  As "M" speechifies in her competency hearing, the targets are smaller, more dangerous, less predictable, and no longer tied to nation-states that can be manipulated by politics.  Now, it's individuals with access to disrupting vulnerable infrastructures that hold societies together and who will cause damage just to make a point.  One can draw parallels to Julian Assange (Silva uses YouTube to identify agents) and his unquestioning devotion to exposing anything and anyone—as long as it's not himself.

The cast, as it has been for awhile, is uniformly excellent.  Craig's Bond is just as steely, just as obstinate, but the actor enjoys playing him as a bit of a wreck, physically and mentally.  His Bond, after a time away, is not the man he was, and he goes through the film slightly hampered, his eyes hooded and bleary, his appearance often haggard and mussed, his demeanor prickly and defiant.  Dench has far more to do than any "M," and any past tremulousness is gone, and she's excellent in every way.  Ralph Fiennes plays his role quietly and competently with a heavy gravitas—he's a fine addition to the cast.  The Bond women, this time out, are very interesting and not just decorative: field operative Eve is cheeky and gives as good as she gets (that'll become important later), and as the femme fatale of the piece, Bérèniece Marlohe has a brief, but well-played expertise—her Severine has a dragon lady's cool, with a sex-worker's high-contrast too-bright smile that droops with a crash, revealing a trapped animal.  Ben Whishaw's "Q" is a contrast to what has gone before, far younger, far more tart than Desmond Llewelyn's court-jester toy-maker, but a whipper-snapper computer whiz.  Albert Finney has a small, pertinent role (that could have easily gone to Sean Connery, but it was thought he'd be too 'distracting," according to Mendes).  And Bardem makes his villain creepy-scary in the best tradition of the series, jolly in his evil, but believably so, cracked from his past and with an atypical physical deformity (as Fleming was wont to endow) that feels right given the context and is the stuff of nightmares.

After a high-powered finale—yes, things blow up as they do in Bond films, but not the way one expects—and by the end, Bond truly has gone back to his roots, as anyone who's looked at  the early Bonds will be able to tell, with ghosts left behind, family in place, and tradition—the old ways—firmly established.  Bond is back, and will be back.  With pleasure.

Can't wait.

Skyfall is a Full-Price Ticket.

"...the things we do for England..."

* Fleming killed Bond off twice...at least left readers on the edge of their last pages—in "From Russia With Love" and "You Only Live Twice," and one suspects he had the same love/hate relationship with his character as Arthur Conan Doyle did with Sherlock Holmes, killing him off over the Reichenberg Falls, then returning him years later, at readers' request.

The Entertainer (1960)

The Entertainer (Tony Richardson, 1960) One thing about Laurence Olivier, he was an actor for all genres.  Yes, he was primarily known as a stage and film Shakespearean, probably the greatest, but he also did light comedies, thrillers, period dramas, horror films, the occasional cheese-fest...everything...including the kitchen sink.  Kitchen sink dramas, that is. 

In My Week With Marilyn—the fictionalized telling of the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl—Kenneth Branagh's Olivier announces he's done with directing (after his on-set tussles with Monroe and finding out she's incandescent on-screen, anyway, despite his direction) and is going back to the stage to do a John Osbourne piece.  That would be "The Entertainer," the play on which this film is based.  On stage, it vacillated between life on-stage for Archie Rice (Olivier), and at home, where...well, he's never really OFF-stage, a needy vaudevillian with an alcoholic second wife (Brenda De Banzie), three kids (Albert Finney, Alan Bates, and Joan Plowright—who would become the last Lady Olivier), and a slightly more talented, but no more wiser live-in Da (Roger Livesey).

For now, Archie is scraping by, as star/producer of a boardwalk diversion at a seaside holiday camp, in the perfect venue—an old, faded theater, where the air is as stale as his material.  His day is only vital in the afternoons and early evenings in the bustling chaos of on-stage and backstage.  The rest is the drummest of hums—wife in her cups, son off to war in the Suez, youngest son helping Dad in the dive, and daughter teaches art to a bunch of barely interested teddy-boys and girls.  She goes to the seaside, seeking out Father, looking for some form of stability before settling into a perfunctory marriage.

She should have gone somewhere else.  Archie is only accessible on-stage, and when off, he's trying to hustle another season, another venue, another donor, another prospective starlet.  Life just isn't good enough for him if a limelight isn't on him and the money's starting to run out to pay the electric bill. Much was made of the play as a comment for the fading empiricism of Great Britain, as personified by the propped-up jolly-good Archie, for whom the show must go on, despite not having any juice in it for years, surviving with a heavy layer of rouge and grease-paint to give the long-distance impression of vitality and youth, blithely ignoring the march of time and pasting it over with the false grin of performance, no matter how desperate it may come across.

Richardson's film opens the play up, puts instance on Archie's transgressions on-screen instead of just being talked about and blubbered over, and Olivier sticks out like a sore thumb—rightly so—apart from the rest of the cast.  Where Livesey is old-school formal and the kids are new-broom casual, Olivier sticks to his guns with a theatrical performance which feels appropriately, desperately false, which benefits the film while also making the character of Archie a complete outsider, a role he no doubt relishes.  There's only one star in this "revue," everybody else is a bit player.

For Olivier, it must have fulfilled some need—to slum, maybe, or to reach out to the new material being generated by Osbourne, Richardson and others in the new school of British rebellion.  Maybe, after his long string of kings, princes and noblemen, he wanted to explore the has-been's and ignoble men, to cultivate portraits of characters of a more stratified than rarefied stripe.  There's also an element that Olivier might have been familiar with—the performer's ennui, bordering on contempt for his audience.  At this stage in his career, Archie is performing for himself—the money's not great, the material stale, and any creative collaboration is non-existent—the most intimate relationship he has is with his make-up mirror and even that is betraying him.  Olivier is not above showing bitterness—he was particularly adept at tartly spitting out the ironic put-down in the guise of civility.  And he was acknowledging his age (he was a very old Hamlet in his film of it) and the potential for failure, by portraying it, challenging it, mocking it, waving a red cape at it, maybe exorcising it.  It was a brave interesting role for Britain's leading thespian.

Olivier as Archie Rice: "The Roar of the Greasepaint"

The Bourne Legacy

Baby, We Were Bourne To Run
Or
Pursued By Our Inner Damons

The "Bourne" series laterals the ball to another player in The Bourne Legacy, the fourth film of the series, which, by now, has nothing to do with the Robert Ludlum books on which they are titularly based (which is fine, as I read the first one decades ago and found it one of the worst reads ever).

When last we left Jason Bourne, he'd jumped into the East River to make a desperate escape from his pursuer/handlers, a nice turnaround from when the series started with him being fished out of the water with no clue as to his identity.  We start there again, but this time, we're Bourne again in another body of water with Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) on a training mission way out in nowhere, Alaska (all the better to see Russia, apparently), while the events of the previous Bourne trilogy play out in the States, sending a panic through the intelligence community and an order to purge the Treadstone Project (or is it Operation Outcome...or Operation Blackbriar...only Tom Clancy could keep track of this...and then he'd start a book-series (ghost-written) on each one!).  Whichever project is being scorched to the Earth, the talents from the previous movies (Scott Glenn, Joan Allen, David Straithairn) are dealing with the ramifications of Bourne's re-appearance, another intelligence head* (Stacy Keach-welcome back, sir) puts another middle-management type (Edward Norton) in charge of damage control (an impossible task in any recent spy film).**

As it becomes readily apparent on Renner's training mission, we didn't know diddly about the Bourne project (whatever name it was), as there are other agents like him, who are not only trained, but drugged to enhance their physical endurance, but also mental faculties (take the green and blue pills, but the yellow one you should really take with water or it gets stuck in your throat, evidently).  Just as Cross is about to rotate stateside, he and another agent get a drone-launched nasty-gram stating unequivocally that the mission is over.

That's how it starts, and goes all over the world, subsequently, even while it doesn't really go anywhere.  Oh, things happen, and things explode and people run around a lot (Rachel Weisz is a really good runner, by the way), but it's mostly just movement without any story momentum.  Most movies have a beginning a middle and an end, but this one is content to merely have a beginning, a middle and a chase.  

Tony Gilroy (who cracked the code for the first film—taking the germ of the idea and stream-lining it into a bare essentials man-on-the-run movie—directed the brilliant Michael Clayton and the disappointing Duplicity, one of those "I-get-the-drift-but-it-doesn't-work" movies) co-wrote this one and directed, employing the same kind of Paul Greengrass "run and shoot" style, but taming it down a bit, so it can be followed, as opposed to experienced in barely discernible flashes.***  It's a risk because the Greengrass adrenaline-fueled style keeps one from asking too many questions about the slowing-down factor of injuries and leaps in story-logic.  All well and good, I suppose, but one still gets the sense that Legacy is half-baked, with the kernel of an idea, some complications to keep things from getting too stale and large holes in the script filled with "a fight breaks out," "a chase happens," and "hero jumps from a fire escape into a window."  These all happened in the previous films, but I'll be damned if I can remember which specific ones—I suspect the answer is: "All of them."  They all blur together as the most memorable things are the action sequences, and there's a remarkable...uh...consistency to them.  The stakes are only the agent's own and most of the film's have very little resolution to them.  Legacy has none.  It just ends.

While one can admire the proficiency with which it is done, there's nothing all that memorable about this one...or the last one.  Even with fresh faces and a new idea of two, it's the same old thing, hardly worth being "Bourne" at all.

The Bourne Legacy is a Rental

  * You know, one could make a case for the excesses of "Big Gov'mint" just by noting the cast of good character actors in the "Bourne" series and all the different intelligence branches and mid-levels.

** Who fixes things in these films-and why haven't the unemployment rates dropped as a result?

*** This helped by a change in the style of Dan Bradley, who seems to have taken a film directing class in the interim, because his second unit direction in the chase sequences actually have some shots that feature relationship perspective going so far as to even including both participants in the chase in the same frame.  That's some kind of break-through after his disastrous work on Quantum of Solace.

Amazing Grace

"Amazing Grace" (Michael Apted, 2006) Anyone who has seen Michael Apted's continuing series of "Up" documentaries (starting with "7 Up" and continuing every seven years to the latest installment "49 Up") has experienced Apted's best work. His series examining the lives of British citizens of different classes over the course of their lives is an amazing cross-section of life and the versatility and resiliency of the human psyche. That so many of the participants chose to continue having Apted film them through their disappointmnets and middle years is a credit to his abilities as a film-maker, interviewer, and a human being.

Okay. Having said that, it's a quite different matter when dealing with Apted's "fiction films." More often than not, he takes on dramatized versions of real events and tries to convey a sense of "what it was like." At the same time, his fascination with other cultures and portraying them have been his strong suit. You look at his films and it's very diverse: upper-crust British society and a culture clash with American sensibilities in "Agatha," the portrayal of life in Appalachia in "Coal Miner's Daughter," Native American conflicts with the Modern Age in "Thunderheart," City versus Country in "Continental Divide," American Capitalism versus Communist bureacracy in "Gorky Park," a look at a feral child in "Nell," or the great-ape community of "Gorillas in the Mist: The Story of Dian Fossey." He even took time out to look at the effect of industrialization on a Kazakstanian country in "The World Is Not Enough."

The trouble is he tends to look at these clashes and communities as if he were filming it through a microscope rather than a camera. The approach is clinical and devoid of the particulars of film-language to convey attitude or nuance. So, his movies are usually very "chilly," and their success rides on the abilities of the actors to bleed life and human passion into the lab environment. So, "Coal Miner's Daughter" with the phenomenal casting of Sissy Spacek, Tommy Lee Jones, Levon Helm, and (eerily) Beverly D'Angelo as Patsy Cline is still his best film. The weak script of "Gorillas in the Mist" scuttled one of Sigourney Weaver's best performances and the life-like make-up work of Rick Baker. His Bond film, "The World Is Not Enough" tried to be too many things to seem coherent.

And so, "Amazing Grace." If it were a document applying William Wilberforce for saint-hood, I might understand. But, instead it's a motion picture that is easy on the conflict in order to soft-peddle the conversion of Parliament to an anti-slavery vote. The drama is so bloodless that even Albert Finney can't eke out any tears for his performance. And despite the presence of Ciarán Hinds and Toby Jones as the respectful (too respectful) opposition, one is left pondering why, when telling a story of the evils of slavery, we have to watch two hours of white guys wringing their hands—as if they were the ones who were suffering. The wrong story is being told, even though the story is Wilberforce's. And it's hard to buy into the self-congratulatory mood of the film, knowing that the "freed" slaves were then cast into the lowest rungs of the British Class system. No one invited them to their own celebration.

"Amazing Grace," though sweet a sound, is still preaching to the choir.

Tom Jones

"Tom Jones" (Tony Richardson, 1964) I have been hearing for years and reading in books of the freshness and originality of "Tom Jones," and after seeing it, one wonders what all the fuss was about. Yes, it's fun and frivolous. Yes, it won the Academy award for Best Picture. Finney is marvelous, but one also looks at the techniques used and must admit that it has not aged at all well. One must be careful, though, as a film should be considered as it was of its time. The current discussion (one could hardly call it a controversy) where "The Searchers" is a classic--for the simple reason that its sensibilities are of another time and picture-making makes one wary of arguments like this. I've also had to defend "2001" for being full of cliches--yes 'tis, considering every "space" or sci-fi movie since then has ripped it off--merely because it was of a time and sensibility. To someone growing up on MTV cutting "2001" must look stunningly tame (Be that as it may, I'll bet an MTV movie-goer, would still be affected by "long-take" syndrome, where the longer a film-scene goes on, the more nervous-making it becomes.

They'd never have that problem with "Tom Jones." But after sitting on it a week, dissipating the expectations and prejudices and going in for another viewing, one has found the context: the past is not a pageant. Historical dramas before it, were as stiff as the multi-layered costumes and as formal as a ball-waltz. "Tom Jones" got rid of the tracking camera and the stately walks, and made the 2-dimensional costume-fillers 3-dimensional people, and did so with a markedly ribald sense of humor, and the understanding that what drove them, drives us. Since then, Richard Lester and Ridley Scott (and Merchant/Ivory and everybody else making historical dramas of classic novels) has taken Richardson's path and taken the "hit-the-marks" formalism out, and lensed with a satirical eye to show us the past and how we repeat it. "Tom Jones" bursting on the scene must have felt as relieving as removing a whale-bone corset!

The Complex Art of Film Noir: Winter 2007

I: "Before The Devil Knows You're Dead"*

In Broad Daylight

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Just ask Andy and Hank Hanson. They both need money because they want to do right by their families: Andy, so he can get out of debt and maybe move with his depressed wife to Rio De Janeiro; Hank, because he's a few months late in child support, and he wants to do right by his daughter...oh, and his mistress, and ...well, all of Hank's dreams are short-term.

But Andy has a plan that's fool-proof: a robbery. "No one gets hurt. It's perfect." Trouble is, Hank's a fool, and he agrees before he knows all that it entails. Andrew, a real estate accountant, gives him a down-payment. "There's $2,000. See what that does for you. Imagine the rest."

They can't imagine. Because, as they say in the magazine-shows, things go "horribly, horribly wrong."

"Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" might belong to that sub-genre of comedy films called "The Incredible Mess," where seemingly simple plans go increasingly awry, but it's no comedy, except in the perverse way perfect disasters pile upon perfect disasters. But I would contend that the movie, as written by Kelly Masterson, is a film noir, that species of film where the world maliciously has it in for an honest man, and corruption runs so deep that it's manifested in a shade of fathomless blackness--"where the world is dark with something more than night," as the saying goes. One of the laureates of the proto-noir story was Raymond Chandler, who laid out the ground-rules for his brand of detective fiction in an essay titled "The Simple Art of Murder," first published in 1944, and quoted extensively below.** In it, he railed against the "drawing room" brand of of detective fiction as weak and unrealistic, and that a detective-hero must try and find Truth in a fabric of deception, obfuscation, and agendas so thick it's like wading through a cess-pool. "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" is so steeped in layers of corruption that any transgression amplifies to the worst possible conclusion, and by chain reaction drags the innocent down as well as the guilty in a tragedy of Shakespearean consequences. No one is immune from the veil of evil. The world of "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" is so corrupt, there is no hero. And it all happens in broadest daylight.

There's been "daylight-noirs" before, like "Gun-Crazy," and, of course, "Chinatown" takes place in sun-blasted L.A. But "Devil" takes place in New York, and mostly gentrified New York at that. New York, because the director is Sidney Lumet, who quite rarely makes a movie anywhere else. Lumet's an odd choice for a noir film, although he's made many films in the squalor of New York--"Serpico," "The Pawnbroker," "Prince of the City," "Q & A," and he's made many movies that intertwine family and crime--"Dog Day Afternoon," "Murder on the Orient Express," and "Family Business." As a director, he's not very stylish, and is, in fact, pretty clunky, as in "Twelve Angry Men," and "Fail-Safe," or, dare I mention it, "The Wiz." Lumet expends his energy on performance, rather than construction. In fact, Lumet has rarely risen above his roots as a director of live television: a master shot, the occasional close-up, and that's about it. His camera work is utilitarian, at its best, sometimes inelegant, brightly lit, nothing fancy. He tends to using film scores, thinking them too pervasive and detracting from a scene's manufactured reality. When he does try something different (in other films, it was crudely distorting lenses) it's always in your face. Here, it's an editing transition that flashes forward and back three to four times, similar to the "druggy" transitions in "Easy Rider," but with an annoying clacking noise at each edit. The story-telling technique employed is similar to that of another noir, Stanley Kubrick's "The Killing," where the actual caper is viewed from one character's point of view, then rewinds back to another participant's during the same time period and beyond. The plot advances and coalesces in increments until the inevitable end-game where all stories come together. And "Devil" ends in the only way this noir-in-daylight could end.

Because it's Lumet, it's the performances where the movie shines: Philip Seymour Hoffman is all sweating self-pity as Andrew, Ethan Hawke is Hank, a pitiful train-wreck doing a poor job of trying to appear together, Albert Finney goes a bit over the top as their father Charles, and Marisa Tomei shows the promise that her early Oscar win belied as Andrew's wife, caught in the middle. But the smaller performances of minor characters like Michael Shannon and Aleksa Palladino stand out as well. It's a blackly depressing film that owes whatever greatness it achieves to the writing and performances.

"Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" is a cheap (and sleazy) matinee.

II: "Gone Baby Gone"

That, in All Things

Now walk down these mean streets a little further--all the way to Boston. Here you'll find private detective Patrick Kenzie, the very definition of the term John D. MacDonald used to describe Raymond Chandler. "He writes," said MacDonald "like a slumming angel." Kenzie knows the back-alleys, the crack-dens, the gang-bangers, the dealers, the dive bars and the angles and he knows how to handle them with a cock-suredness that belies his years.*** But that street cred only takes you so far, because although he's lived in Boston his entire life, New Orleans transplant detective Remy Bressant (Ed Harris--extraordinarily good) tells him "I've been here longer than you've been alive." And Bressant has seen the long continuous story of those places Kenzie merely visits. But if Bressant knows more, nobody tops Captain Doyle (Morgan Freeman, completely dominating the three scenes he's in), whose daughter was kidnapped and killed, and has dedicated his life to making sure it doesn't happen again on his watch. 4 1/2 year old Amanda McCready has gone missing from the neglectful eye of her good-for-nothing mother and Kenzie and his partner Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) have been hired by an aunt to find her, however reluctant they are to take the case. Within 24 hours, there's a good chance they can find her alive and unharmed. She's been gone, now, for 60.

And soon, after all the slumming and the chance-taking, the compromises with the police and the stake-outs gone bad, the case comes to a dissatisfying end, and like any good noir dick, that's just not good enough for Kenzie. He has to keep pushing for Truth, no matter how hidden, no matter the consequences. But the Truth hurts and can lead to decisions made for the best of reasons but the worst of consequences. And this "slumming angel," this noir-hero by Chandler's precise description, will suffer the consequnces for his decision, both personal and professional. But because he is the hero, he must fight that corruption even if the result is not a more perfect world, but the same tainted world as when he began. And maybe, even one that's worse.

As it happens, there is no moral high ground here. There is no "right" and "wrong" for the situation is too far out of control for there to be a "right" and a "wrong" and the two step over each other's line as often as a police tape is crossed. The resolution of the story, the choices made can be argued for days, and the last shot of the movie damns even as it takes the film to a logical conclusion.

This has been a great year for Casey Affleck. First, he stepped out of the star-crush to become more than a glorified extra in "Ocean's 13," carried the bulk of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," and now holds his own against Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris at the heighth of their powers. His performance in "Gone Baby Gone" shows great versatility and an amazing range. But if Casey's potential has come to fruition, the emergence of Ben Affleck as a director is nothing short of revelatory. Here he shows a command of time and place, and a wonderful eye for faces that lend authenticity to the grime of the surroundings. An action scene at night may not be as focussed and suspenseful as it should be, but the rest of the movie is assured, and negotiates moral discussions without getting bogged down in high-handedness or slowing the movie down. That fine directorial touch extends all the way to the wickedly oblique final shot that will creep on you days after the fade to black. Given this auspicious debut, one looks forward to the next film featuring Ben Affleck behind the camera.

"Gone Baby Gone" is an impressively full-price ticket

* After the Irish toast: May you have food and raiment, a soft pillow for your head. May you be forty years in heaven before the devil knows you’re dead.

** Raymond Chandler, perfectly describing the fetid world of "noir" in "The Simple Art of Murder:"

"The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of moneymaking, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practising; a world where you may witness a hold-up in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the hold-up men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge.

It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it. It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization."


*** Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder" again, describing the detective hero:

"In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.

If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in."