Gone Baby Gone

Ben Affleck captures a lot of local Boston color in his first directorial effort, and his younger brother Casey is surprisingly convincing as a juvenile-looking but tough-minded private detective. And Michelle Monaghan also comes through, as his rather implausible partner. Ed Harris is reliably powerful as the police detective they team up with, to search for an abducted 4-year-old girl. Amy Ryan earned her best supporting actress nod as the girl’s dissolute mom, quite a contrast to the saintly Beadie she plays on The Wire. Morgan Freeman, however, is fatally misused in a small but pivotal role as a police captain. The film has an odd structure in that it seems to end at the midpoint and start over, but I could buy that. What I couldn’t buy was its resolution of the moral conundrum it propounds. The choices made are far from satisfying, and the film itself doesn’t seem to know which side to take. It owes a lot to Mystic River, including the writer of the source novel, Dennis Lehane, but here the ambiguities are crippling. Just call it flavorful but flawed. (2007, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-72.)