Unlike the Academy’s five nominees of 2007, Gone Baby Gone is a film that from the first to the last frame never forgets what it’s about, and remains unrelentingly faithful to its theme throughout. Director Ben Affleck shows an unerring eye and a concentration of intent that makes this film really special. For one thing, it’s not just about decision-making, but also about the consequences of decisions. Every character in the film makes choices, and the film continually asks whether those choices are what define us or not, and whether they are “real” choices at all, or are already determined by the nature of the chooser, dictated by the choices he didn’t make. In this sense, Gone Baby Gone is a more consciously focused meditation on freedom and determinism than the Coen Brothers’ palimpsest on Cormac McCarthy.
Over the last 15 years, Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson have shown us something about people who lead extraordinary lives, either by choice or through sheer coincidence of birth. One particular subtext in all Anderson-Wilson collaborations recalls the work of Oscar Wilde–that is, life, through the medium of creativity and troubled genius, imitates art. Genius, in their early work, is ineffable, resplendent with the trappings of depressive, rumple-haired Nietzschean eccentricity and Faustian striving and discontent. As of late, Anderson’s idea of the troubled genius has lost its romantic cache. Its integrity as a thing of heroism and beauty has been ostensibly diagnosed.
Folding space consists in bringing two spatial points together by collapsing the space between them, thus eliminating the need to move from one to the other. Dune’s “explanation” of travel without movement, of the folding of space, is a sly announcement of not only the vision but the technique that David Lynch brings to the screenwriter’s and film director’s art.
So early in Lynch’s career, in only his third feature film, we have a pseudo-scientific articulation of the artist’s unique way of seeing the world, and of remaking it. For folding space is a near-perfect metaphor for the way David Lynch makes movies.
The rodent gazed at his blood-covered gloves under the gleaming neon light and wondered what the hell just happened. Only moments ago he had been standing on his renowned pinnacle surrounded by roaring ocean, orchestrating stars, comets, clouds and bolts of lightning across the nocturnal sky. Everything after that was a blur, as if a blind rage had taken possession of his body. Now, here he was: Mickey Mouse, standing on a sidewalk of 42nd street, dwarfed by mighty skyscrapers in the City that Never Sleeps.
Hello reality, or what passed on for it anyway.
But where had all the residents gone? How did he get here? And most of all: Why was there blood on his hands?
Unlike the Academy’s five nominees of 2007, Gone Baby Gone is a film that from the first to the last frame never forgets what it’s about, and remains unrelentingly faithful to its theme throughout. Director Ben Affleck shows an unerring eye and a concentration of intent that makes this film really special. For one thing, it’s not just about decision-making, but also about the consequences of decisions. Every character in the film makes choices, and the film continually asks whether those choices are what define us or not, and whether they are “real” choices at all, or are already determined by the nature of the chooser, dictated by the choices he didn’t make. In this sense, Gone Baby Gone is a more consciously focused meditation on freedom and determinism than the Coen Brothers’ palimpsest on Cormac McCarthy.
