What I Watched -- Gone Baby Gone

As you know, I recently watched The Town.  And since that was Ben Affleck's sophomore effort at directing a feature film, I thought I should check out the original.

Unlike The Town, Gone Baby Gone does not star the director himself.  The main character is played by his brother Casey, who is frankly a better actor.  He plays Patrick, a private investigator hired by the aunt of a missing girl to help the police in their search.  When the search wraps up 45 minutes into the movie with no sign of the little girl, you know something's up, and you can see Patrick getting sucked into it all: "He lied to me.  I can't think of one reason big enough for him to lie that's small enough not to matter."  And, he's in.

The movie is about deciding what the right thing to do is; the topics are serious, and the questions aren't subtle.  Sometimes they're even the overt topic of discussion:
Patrick: "Murder's a sin."
Remy: "Depends on who you do it to."

The gray moral ground is supported by fuzzy camera shots and dull coloring, which really add to the overall sense of ambiguity.  The star-studded cast includes Amy Ryan (The Wire) as the girl's mother, Amy Madigan (Field of Dreams, among many other things) as the girl's aunt, Titus Welliver (Lost and lots of other TV shows) as the uncle, Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman as cops, and Michael K. Williams (The Wire) in a bit part.

Bottom line: better than The Town.  It's worth watching the younger Affleck struggle with his conscience, and learn to live with the choices he made.