City Of Lost Children

[October 17th, 2007]

What’s with all the dead babies in Boston?

That may not be the most delicate way to pose the question, but on the other hand there’s something distinctly crude about the simultaneous arrival of two new movies—Gone Baby Gone and Reservation Road —that focus on slain children and bereaved parents. Neither of the movies is exactly offensive in its approach (one of them is even intermittently good), but there’s something distasteful about how closely they’re modeled after earlier, successful New England-set films about slain offspring: Mystic River and In the Bedroom , respectively. What previously looked like a coincidence—it’s fall, the leaves are turning, kids are dying—is starting to resemble a formula.

The only surprise offered by these recurrences is that the far superior one is directed by Ben Affleck. Gone Baby Gone suffers from any number of problems, not the least of which is that Ben has tried to establish his brother Casey as a viable tough guy. Investigating the kidnapping of a little Southside girl, Casey Affleck makes his way into several hostile barrooms, where the regulars take one glance at him and appear to consider whether they should bend him in half and use him as a toothpick. The actor’s plausibility isn’t helped by having to star alongside Morgan Freeman as a police chief of the highest rectitude. This is the sort of role Freeman is regularly described as being able to perform in his sleep; the trouble is that he might actually be taking this as advice.

But the movie works around Casey Affleck’s shortcomings and in spite of Freeman’s. It’s based on a Dennis Lehane novel—yes, the same guy who wrote Mystic River —and it shares and even exceeds the earlier film’s sense of place. Credit the Afflecks’ Boston origins—but give at least as much acknowledgement to Amy Ryan (The Wire ), who delivers a knockout performance as the world’s least sympathetic mother. She abandons her kid for hours to snort coke, and when the child turns up missing she’s less concerned for her child’s safety than her own. She only looks worried at press conferences—while Ryan never discards the integrity of her portrayal to seek an audience’s pity.

All the characters in Reservation Road , conversely, are as likable as can be. Joaquin Phoenix loses his son in a Connecticut hit-and-run accident and grows increasingly obsessed with finding the driver. Jennifer Connelly worries about her husband’s brooding. Mark Ruffalo, who was driving the fatal vehicle, just wants to watch the end of the Boston Red Sox’s World Series triumph with his own son before turning himself in. (This actually strikes me as the one plausible motivation in the movie; that championship was a pretty big deal.) Not a single character diverges from the inexorable path to tragic confrontation—precisely the same tragic confrontation we remember from In the Bedroom ! What makes Reservation Road so dreadful is that its protagonists don’t act like real people in dire circumstances; they act according to the example of characters from an earlier film. Little wonder the movie feels dead.