Gone Baby Gone

Yesterday, Gretchen and I went to see Gone Baby Gone. I am always hesitant to see movie adaptations of books that I've really liked. Some times they get it right and sometimes they don't. LA Confidential was terrific while Black Dahlia was terrible.

I'm a huge fan of Dennis Lehane's Patrick Kenzie and Angie Genarro books. They're some of the finest private eye fiction ever written and I'd be willing to say finest fiction ever written. I maintain that the second book in the series, Darkness, Take My Hand was the best mystery of the 1990s and while Mystic River was a great book by any standards, it is Lehane's third best, after Darkness and Gone. But the reviews have been so lavish that I needed to see it.

In many ways, it is a very honest and true adaptation. It has all of the major plot points of the book, and nearly all of the major characters. The acting is superb Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan are very good as Patrick and Angie and the always stellar Ed Harris, John Ashton and Morgan Freeman are stellar as the cops in the case. None of the acting is half-way. The film is both beautiful and heartbreaking in it's images and the city, a major character, compliments the story and the acting.

I had recently re-read the book because of the hoo-hah about the movie, so I was ready for it - and maybe that makes me unobjective.

But this was a movie that cried out to be a 13 part 'series' on cable. There is no way anyone could have done justice to the story in two or even three hours. I hope the DVD has scenes that were cut, scenes that will smooth it out and keep the story in the movie from being abrupt. It tended to jump a bit, making leaps from one scene to another. I understood what was going on but I'm not sure the average viewer will.

I understand that there must be changes to the story to make it fit the screen, but there were a few changes that made no sense to me. In an interview, Ben Affleck said he had to alter Patrick's age from around 40 to around 30 to make his brother fit the role better. OK, not a huge deal. But at the start of the movie, Patrick and Angie come off as beginners, with their licenses in their living room. No office in the belfry. Patrick seems hesitant and a bit shy. By the end of the movie, he's figuring out things that no one else can. Why make it seem as if they're novice private eyes? No reason for it.

Michelle Monaghan's Angie is reduced to be little more than a girlfriend, instead of a partner and just as canny a PI as Patrick. Why? No reason other than to give more weight to Casey Affleck's screen time, I suppose. In the book, it is Angie who can't let go of the case; in the movie, it is hard to tell, but she is far less a co-actor in the plot than she is in the book. And Angie is a GREAT character! She's in people's faces as much as Patrick. Both of them are confident, professional PIs and neither is the shrinking violets portrayed in the movie. When either of them do take a stand in the film, it feels out of place, something forced onto the characters instead of their actual characteristics. Maybe in the director's cut...

Another small detail is Bubba and the child molesters. In the book, Bubba takes Patrick on a delivery run to sell some guns. In the movie, it's drugs. The only reason that it matters is that when Patrick and Poole and Broussard return to look for the missing little boy, you know that they're well armed in the book. You know it is going to end badly and the dramatic tension is stronger. In the movie, you know that they're armed, but not with the firepower the book gives them. And, Bubba isn't really explained - who he is and how edgy he is. He seems far less dangerous in the movie than in the books and, I think, part of that is making him a drug dealer instead of an arms dealer.

My biggest criticism is how the plot is compacted towards the end. While the book's story does move along quickly once the pieces begin to fall into place, in the movie they feel slammed into place artificially. Here, I think, it comes down to this inane belief in our culture that long is bad. I'm so tired of hearing critics harp about how long the movie was, how it needed to be cut back to two hours or less. I grew up when movies were often long enough to require intermissions. The Godfather, in the theatre, had an intermission! [And with movie prices being as outrageous as they are (we went to a matinee and paid $6.50 a ticket - full price would have been $9.25! Insane!), we better have a long movie to make the outlay worth the price.  But that is an entirely different screed... ] There is nothing wrong with long and, in the case of Gone Baby Gone, the movie is too short for it's story.

Which leads me to my biggest point: the British will take a great mystery and do justice with it by making it into a mini-series. What a book like Gone Baby Gone needed was that sort of treatment - 8 weeks on PBS, 13 weeks on HBO, a treatment that could stretch out and really use the subtleties of Lehane's novel. For instance, in the book, there is a major and pivotal scene at a water-filled quarry at night. It is supposed to be an exchange of money for the missing little girl. In the book, it involves multiple police agencies and it is approached as a minor military affair in an attempt to catch the kidnappers. It is very atmospheric and convoluted with the outcome uncertain and confusing, as is the case itself. In the movie, it is dealt with in a few minutes and then they're off to other scenes. In the book, part of the story is a possible power play by one of the criminal's underlings. He's in prison and these guys on the outside may have gotten involved in the kidnapping as part of a play to take over his empire. In the book, the criminal is not in prison and the power-play angle is dropped. One of the dynamic aspects of the book is that the plot is confusing as is real life. It is all explained and resolved as well as real life is, but the movie felt simplified to me. That wouldn't have to be in a stretched out version.

Last week, at home we watched the first season of Dexter on DVD. We don't have that particular cable channel and, anyway, we're fans of renting a season and watching two or three episodes a night instead of one a week. What could have been done with Gone Baby Gone in 12 'hour' episodes instead of 2 hours makes my mouth water. So, I have to say that the movie Gone Baby Gone was good, but it could have been so much more. It was a good adaptation of the book, but it was little more than a Cliff Notes version of the book.

If you're a fan of the books, you'll like it. If you see the movie before reading the book, the book will explain so much more about what went on. If you've not read the books, read them. Start with his first novel, the first of the Patrick and Angie books, A Drink Before the War, and you'll be hooked.

Promise.

- JB