Reviews: "Gone Baby Gone" and "Rendition"

Afflecks Baby Afflecks

Ben Affleck. What can you say about him except that his notorious off screen personality has most of the time eluded an audience from recognizing him as a talented actor. Personally, I don't think Mr. Affleck is all that terrible of an actor, he's just a very limited one. The same thing could be said about Clint Eastwood, whose presence on screen is very defining, but is still plagued with familiarity. But no one knows about that because he has the talents of directing to aid him. Now Ben Affleck has found that niche with this film, marking his directorial debut. And it is a commendable effort.

Taken from the Dennis Lehane novel, who also provided the source material to Eastwood's Mystic River, the film tells the story of a small girl who has been abducted in the middle of the night in her Boston neighborhood, which causes an immediate media frenzy. Ben's bro, Casey Affleck, plays Patrick, a private detective who has been hired by the girl's relatives to hopefully bring in better results that the police could ever do. Patrick and his partner/girlfriend Angie, played by Michelle Monoghan, start their investigation into the dark streets and eventually come to a conclusion that shakes both of them down to their emotional cores.

Everything about this film is good. Not great, mind you, but good. For instance, Casey Affleck glides through this performance with ease, much to the thanking of his big brother's direction, and it easy for us to root for him. It's not a spectacular performance, but it is one that I hope when people see will be reminded of an earlier film he appeared in this year where he truly defined himself as a great screen presence, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The entire supporting players ranging from Michelle Monoghan, Ed Harris, who plays a street detective with a twisted sense of morality, and Morgan Freeman, unusually hidden from off-camera-voice-over-monologues as a police captain, all do their best to give their characters a nice treatment without trying to unjustly steal the spotlight. There is one great thing about the film, and that is Amy Ryan. She plays the mother of the missing child, and she pours her soul into this character. Every questionable decision, every wrong move, and every teary eyed scene feels so authentic that all her scenes will blow you away.

Ben Affleck has already proven himself as a talented writer, and the Oscar winner's screenplay, which he adapted with Aaron Stockard, does its best to successfully display the storylines without getting very preachy. We do get one or two of those moments of inner reflection of the characters, but it generally does a good job of moving the plot along.

Gone Baby Gone isn't a great film, but it is a recommendable one. The performances are good, the story is intriguing, and Affleck's direction is really the part that draws us. Affleck has started off his directorial career on a high note, and I predict a much better, or at least more applauded, career choice behind the camera than in front of it. And while this film will have constant parallels to Mystic River, it still is not. However, one must remember that even Clint Eastwood didn't start his film career with Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby or Letters from Iwo Jima. His directorial debut was 1971's Play Misty for Me, a good film, but not a great film. But four Oscars and thirty-six years later, we think differently. While I don't know if their is a directing Oscar in Affleck's career, and I do believe there is a possibility, I will say the one thing that most people will get upset about, but I don't care: Ben Affleck is just like Clint Eastwood. *** / ****; GRADE: B.

Rendered Helpless

An infectious and dangerous epidemic is running rampant through our movie theatres. The illness: post-9/11 films that attempt to deal with the hot topic issue of battling terrorism. The cause: an abundance of liberal slanted news topics from sources like CNN and MSNBC. The cure: a film that can succeed on some decent level at portraying real human characters in these drastic situations. The closest we had to a cure was Paul Haggis' engaging, yet very flawed, In the Valley of Elah. This film does not turn out to be an alternate medication.

The central storyline of the film takes place in "North Africa" (a country isn't assigned) and it involves the capture and torture of an Egyptian born scientist Anwar El-Ibrahimi, played by Omar Metwally, over information he may have about a recent terrorist attack in the region. Jake Gyllenhaal plays the CIA agent, newly inducted in the ranks, who is sent to oversee the investigation. Back on the homefront, Reese Witherspoon is Anwar's wife who is desperately combing through Washington to find answers surrounding his disappearance. She finds Peter Sarsgaard (a.k.a. Jake's future brother-in-law), a bureaucratic assistant, who finds Alan Arkin, a tired, veteran senator, who then finds Meryl Streep, a cold government official who sees the logic in torturing without publicly saying the United States uses this.

This film suffers from a similar problem that last year's Babel suffered from. There are many interesting stories in this film. The problem does not come from the overtly liberal agenda, nor from the great actors that fill the screen with them. The problem is that there are too many storylines, and what happens is that every actor is given too little time to progress and too much time is then given to stories that do not register as much. As much as I like Gyllenhaal, who would be called an Oscar winner if I had my pick of the bunch in 2005, I feel he is horribly miscast as a novice agent who is trying to decipher the morality issues here. It's not a lack of acting here, it is more a personality problem. His persona just doesn't fit the character here because very little about him is revealed. Witherspoon has a very emotional character, but that is an overdone storyline that is not elevated to anything new in this film. Even Metwally is uncomfortably deadpan in this film, and we as an audience never want to know him.

Two actors that excel in this film are also horribly plagued by limited screen time. Alan Arkin does a wonderful job at portraying an elderly senator who knows the world isn't perfect, but must compromise in order to even keep the position of power that might influence it, and Meryl Streep is absolutely amazing as that cold hand of the government explaining to the liberals why they aren't right. It's a noticeable performance that could have made a better movie had it been expanded.

Director Gavin Hood, most noted for his film Tsotsi which won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2005, does the best he can with the muddled mess of a story. The screenplay by Kelly Sane is a horrible collage of plot holes, confusion and melodramatic ironies. Hood job as director to get all of these things in a cohesive storyline is a failed attempt, but I don't think anybody could have done any better.

What could have been the most provocative and influential films of the year has turned out to be a royal disappointment. While the acting is good, it suffers from a lack of screen presence for its better players, and the film itself is a disaster in its storytelling. I only hope that as the year comes to a close, that maybe Robert Redford's upcoming Lions for Lambs can provide another antidote for a disease that doesn't seem to be subsiding. **1/2 / ****; GRADE: C+.