Gone Baby Gone: Phantoms Like A Motherfucker!

What a week for comedy writers in America. FEMA makes fake journalists. Dumbledore is gay. Ben Affleck directs a movie starring his little brother. A noir film set in Boston, no less - territory recently owned by Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorcese, who both won Oscars (and so did their films.) Except god damn my children's children if "Gone, Baby, Gone" isn't a real heartwrench trip of a movie. A dirty urban tale wrought with corrupt cops, cokehead mommies, drug lords with Haitian accents and Ed Harris with a serious-looking beard. Put this next to "Michael Clayton" - old-fashioned movies that turn, of all things, on characters making difficult moral decisions. Neither will do good box office. Both will live and breathe on DVD and TBS.

"Gone, Baby, Gone" starts off with hammy-sounding narration and a hammy-looking montage of low-end Boston. A little girl's gone missing; his grieving aunt and mustachioed uncle come and ask Little Affleck, playing a private investigator who looks all of 16, to find her. Yawn. But give the Affleck bros a second. They're just setting the stage, bringing us into their native city, lulling us so we aren't ready for the killer left hook they've got prepared.

Because while you watch this movie, you can see Big Affleck making up for all the dross he put his face on during the first half of the century. There are twists over twists, but what's even better than the story is the acting talent pushing it. Amy Ryan gives a star turn as the girl's mommy, a drunk with a couple dozen drug problems who barely seems to notice her child is gone. Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris could play stern cop authority figures in their sleep - here, in a few key scenes, they get the chance to shade in the gray. And Casey Affleck, in the main role, tricks us with his boyish look - as the plot webs around him, you can see the pain, the depth, and most of all the desperate moral code, that fuels this kid. He's Bogart, basically, unwilling to compromise his values even if it means his soul.

The film's got its flaws. There's an awkward stretch right in the middle where the action shifts forward several months (it's puffed up with unnecessary narration) that probably worked better on the page. Michelle Monaghan isn't quite wasted as Affleck's partner and galpal - she's got a good little speech at the end - but she spends too much of the movie as the cute eye candy next to the brains of the operation. (Can't this girl get a break? After showing comedic chops in "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang," she's been the bland object of Tom Cruise's and Ben Stiller's affection in the worst movies of their careers. Here's your goddamn Wonder Woman, George Miller!)

But those are quibbles. Here's a movie to absorb you, to challenge you. Issues of race and class are bubbling under the surface at all times. This is the first film that can stand next to "The Wire" - no accident, perhaps, that Ryan and supporting star Michael K. Williams are veterans. Critics who compare this to "Mystic River" and "The Departed" are missing the point. "Gone, Baby, Gone" is a movie about a man trying to do the right thing in a city and a world where no one knows or cares about right - this is "The Third Man," in thick Bahstonese.