Review of Gone Baby Gone

It took me like two weeks or something to write this review and the more I look back on the movie, the worse it seems. I actually don't blame Ben Affleck for any lack in this case; he did the best he could with his first directing experience. It seems that this was just an impossible story to adapt into film and strange plot shifts and embarrassing acting doomed the project from the start.

Gone Baby Gone takes place in America's capital of crime, white trash, and nerve-racking baseball. Revolving around a brotherhood of Bostonians, including Ben and Casey Affleck, avid Boston crime writer, Dennis Lehane, and even a Wahlberg brother, Robert, the storyline is based on one (or two) child abduction(s) (or murders). Basically, a little girl named Amanda McCready (played by a mostly absent Madeline O'Brien) is kidnapped from her neglectful mother, Helene (Amy Ryan). Helene's motherly, though childless, sister-in-law hires private detective Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and his burdensome assistant, Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan), who I will talk more about later, to augment the police investigation.

After a series of mostly fruitless interrogations with drunks and drug lords (all of whom Patrick Kenzie went to high school with), the kidnapping is pinned on a black immigrant named Cheese. Typical. The movie then climaxes and ends. Kind of.

For some reason, one of Kenzie's druggie ex-school-mates turns out to be the only hero in the film and takes Patrick on a drug deal to a house of child molesters and ex-cons, apparently under the assumption that the experience could lead to some resolution. No such luck. A second climax occurs, more people get shot, and the movie winds into a shallowly introspective journey involving Kenzie and a police detective from the McCready case, Remy Bressant (Ed Harris).

After talking with a drunken Bressant, Kenzie starts to question some of the details of Amanda McCready's disappearance and undertakes a sort of renegade investigation, receiving a badly-delivered line of disapproval from his unsupportive assistant/girlfriend.

It becomes clear that the plots which have thus far developed and concluded throughout the movie were mainly distractions. Or really drawn-out, roundabout ways of presenting one fact that might be important an hour later when the movie has become so clogged with crimes and culprits and motives that any explanation, no matter how outrageous, would be acceptable.

There is simply too much of Dennis Lehane's story to fit into two hours of celluloid. I think Gone Baby Gone is comparable to what would have happened had David Lynch tried to make Twin Peaks into a movie. There are too many plot twists, too many partially-relevant character side stories, and too many red herrings (a term I learned from the Hanna-Barbera cartoon, A Pup Named Scooby-Doo) to make a coherent storyline, let alone a succinct movie. It's hard for me to imagine even the novel this movie was adapted from being engaging. After the first pseudo-conclusion in the film, I wasn't too interested in seeing any more. I was satisfied with thinking the case had closed accurately and Ben Affleck just didn't know how to end a movie.

Convoluted plot line aside, Gone Baby Gone also sucked because of the ineptitude of every actor to be convincing (or to ennunciate). In fact, for me, the movie was ruined within the first 15 minutes because of Michelle Monaghan. With the alien-like collagen lips and eye area of Teri Hatcher and Ellen Pompeo (of Grey's Anatomy), Monaghan plays a pointless character who criticizes people who weren't fortunate enough to have a boyfriend who will give them a steady, respectable job. Delivering obvious lines with little emotion, Monaghan lets the audience know she disapproves of people who leave their kids in cars. Her character, Angie, is also a real downer for her boyfriend, Kenzie. More of an encumbering sidekick than a loving girlfriend, Angie makes hazardous comments to dangerous criminals, challenges Kenzie's ethics, and even tries to dissuade the McCready family from utilizing the couple's detective services. Way to keep the man who supports you from making money, judgemental bitch.

Casey Affleck is also disappointing, but probably only because I was so impressed with him in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. I guess he really does as good a job as anyone would have in that role. His emotions aren't really strong enough to overshadow the ubiquitous semi-important details of the plot, but I am uncertain whether that is good or bad. The main problems I have with the younger Affleck are his tendency to mumble all of his lines and his inconsistent and kind of hard-to-buy Boston accent, which I don't understand since he is a native of that city.

Morgan Freeman is in the movie, too, by the way. I honestly can't remember him showing one emotion throughout the entire film. Ed Harris is bland as well but manages to yell angrily on two occasions. The other actors are alright, though certainly not memorable. The only things I appreciated about the movie were the opening scene of streets in Dorchester and Amy Ryan, who, had she not been weighed down so heavily by sub-par co-stars and messy plot transitions, would have single-handedly made this movie worthwhile. Her portrayal of the working class druggie mother of an abducted girl is unfalteringly believable and it depresses me to think that she may not receive the accolades she deserves because of weaknesses in every other aspect of the film. It also depresses me to think that every other actor could still be so lackluster despite witnessing her obvious conviction.

Gone Baby Gone isn't poorly directed, necessarily. The writing is bad, but I blame that on the book being hard to adapt. Plot lines are connected only by brief, passing statements. Crimes are solved through unreasonable coincidences. Characters pass in and out of importance, and then back in. Without more of an emotional base (and I credit this deficit mostly to the actors and somewhat to the screenwriting), the film can only rely on a plot that can never be strong enough to engage audiences on its own.

I didn't completely dislike the movie. There were a few powerful scenes, some suspense, and one good actor, but overall, this story should never have been translated to film. For fans of Boston, complicated crimes, and decisions of unclear morality, read the Dennis Lehane novel. Or better yet, spend a few nights in Southie.

Review of The Darjeeling Limited

Wes Anderson's magical and idiosyncratic films rely on endearing eccentricities, humorously misdirected conversations, and meticulously placed details to draw audiences into worlds both awkwardly familiar and surreally pristine. The Darjeeling Limited is no exception to this style, despite the addition of both Roman Coppola (son of Francis Ford) and Jason Schwartzman to the writing staff.

Anderson crafts a colorful world in which three brothers, Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody), and Jack (Schwartzman), attempt to reconnect and find spiritual tranquility. Traveling by train through India, the brothers take part in religious rituals, bicker, and drink cough syrup. The plot becomes more substantial when Francis reveals that the trip's true intent is to track down their mother (Angelica Huston), who has become a nun in the countryside and was absent at their father's recent funeral.

After releasing a deadly snake in their compartment and attacking each other with pepper spray, the brothers are kicked off the train, ending a pseudo-romantic relationship between Jack and a stewardess. Without means of transportation, the brothers camp out, drag their load of excessive luggage around, and end up jumping into a river to rescue three drowning boys. The ensuing events have a deep effect on Peter and after spending some potentially enlightening time in a small Indian village, the brothers decide to return home without visiting their mother.

At this point, the movie takes a turn into an ineffective 20-minute attempt at extraneous resolution. The brothers again ask questions, ponder answers, and are left ultimately empty-handed. However, after the numerous adventures, disasters, and disappointments that have befallen them, Francis, Peter, and Jack finally seem to trust and understand one another.

The Darjeeling Limited is not as sharp and decisive as Anderson's masterpiece The Royal Tenenbaums, but it follows along the same clever, quirky, and strangely poignant track that Anderson fans love (with the possibility of attracting a wider audience based on an extended scene involving Natalie Portman partially nude). For a film dealing with the broad meaning of brotherhood and the vibrant culture of India , it is a mark of true brilliance that the charm of The Darjeeling Limited lies mostly in subtleties.

Review of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Jesse James is often remembered as a rowdy, wild, charismatic, and unpredictable hero, fighting against the stuffy, haughty lawmen and railroad executives who would have otherwise bitterly stifled his fun. Brad Pitt, who has, for almost two decades, played characters with a similar reckless good nature (Thelma & Louise, A River Runs Through It, Fight Club, Snatch, Ocean's Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, etc., etc.), seemed an apt choice to portray the fabled outlaw. However, Brad Pitt's Jesse James isn't so much of a rambunctious rebel as a paranoid manic-depressive who falls between fits of boundless, savage anger and stretches of hopeless, vapid resignation.

While Jesse chases down the potentially menacing ghosts of his past, the movie centers on other characters from his now-defunct gang. Director Andrew Dominik builds each of these historic ruffians into intensely humanized men who, as Jesse's distrust grows, evoke sympathy at the fear of their former gang leader. Tense interplays between the volatile James and the friends he fears may turn him in for reward money pepper the film along with abrupt gunshots that emerge from masterfully suspenseful editing.

Strangely, one of the men Jesse chooses to trust, albeit in an agitated and fickle way, is Bob Ford (Casey Affleck), who grew up daydreaming of the James Gang's adventures. Bob's delusioned glances, obsessive mannerisms, and encyclopedic knowledge of James is disturbing even to Jesse, but the two repeatedly cross paths and Jesse agrees to take him on as a sidekick in an alleged train-robbing scheme.

Casey Affleck's portrayal of Robert Ford is flawless, enacting perfectly Ford's awkwardly articulated boyish hopes and thinly-veiled rages, as well as his later, more well-adjusted personage that becomes an almost tragic figure. Alongside Affleck is Sam Rockwell, who plays Bob's older brother, Charley. Rockwell is solid through his character's layered emotions of fear and convincingly-feigned dumb good humor.

The real roots of this movie lie not in a fantastic reshaping of Jesse James' adventures, but in a more realistic image of the people who knew, in the last years of his life, a man who was feared even by his friends. Amid a wilderness both arrestingly beautiful and intensely terrifying, Jesse goes on seemingly fated journeys and eventually loses the ability to differentiate between legitimate suspicion and indelible paranoia. To those around him he is god-like: enigmatic, unpredictable, wrathful, distant. But to Bob Ford, who once worshipped him as a legend, he becomes "just a man."

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a refreshing change from other, often shabbily-executed, films about outlaw heroes. There are no myths built around Jesse or the desperate and deluded Bob Ford. There are no cheap shoot-outs, no glorification of the rustic lives of train robbers. And for Bob Ford, there are no childhood misconceptions, even in the wake of James' murder, about greatness or fame, or trust, or heroes.

Jesse James is peacefully paced, sometimes alarming, and always engaging. Headed by an impressive cast and artful director, this film is both crisp and classic.