ie:missional teaching. glocalizing. living. serving. repenting. incarnating. loving. repeating.

Friday marked the opening of the second Dennis LeHane book to be made into a major motion picture. Following the Clint Eastwood directed Mystic River comes Gone Baby Gone (see other reviews here), directed co-written by Oscar winning screenwriter (Good Will Hunting), movie actor and tabloid star, Ben Affleck. Affleck, in his first turn in the director’s chair, has given his audiences a remarkably well made film. I can’t remember a single wasted shot or scene and a scant few lines that I thought might have been better written. He is said to have used many locals for bit parts and it would not take much convincing of me to believe the truth of it. There are very few “actor looking” people in this movie.

The central characters of the story are Boston area private investigators Patrick Kenzie (Affleck’s brother, Casey) and Angela Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan), who are called upon to assist the police in finding a missing 4 year old girl, abducted from her bed while her mother visited with a friend next door. Morgan Freeman plays Jack Doyle, Captain of the Missing Children’s Unit, while versatile Ed Harris is ably cast as a Louisiana transplant, Detective Remy Broussant. So well cast is this movie that no part stands head and shoulder above the rest and with each performance being top notch. Freeman (of course he’s played God, so this should have been a piece of cake) in no way overshadows the others, as some might expect, and Casey Affleck (known to moviegoers as one of the “Mormon twins” in the Ocean’s movie franchise) is remarkably good in the primary role. Amy Ryan, as the conflicted, weak mother, with Titus Welliver and Amy Madigan as her brother and sister-in-law, round out the main parts.

To tell any of the story would be to tell all of the story, so I’ll tell none of it. But like the book, the movie deals fully in shades of gray. There is no black and white in the world of LeHane and Ben Affleck, while making a few minor changes in characters and some intricacies of the book, leaves the story a moral mess. Affleck explores the human condition and the emptiness of soul of people who have long since given up any clue about a holy God, choosing instead the full depth of depravity. The Kenzie/Gennaro series of books always leaves one thankful that there is a God who cares, though, apparently, He rarely makes an appearance in New England.

I would recommend this movie to pastors who are spending too much time cloistered away in the ivory towers of sermon preparation and need to be shaken and reminded as to the depth of sin. There is no sex or nudity in the film, but there is graphic violence, a particularly disturbing scene involving a child molester, suspense and pervasive bad language easily earning its “R” rating. Apparently Bostonians are partial to the letter “F” and have become very creative in ways to employ it.

When leaving today, I said to a pastor friend who attended with me, “What did you think?” He replied, “That’s the world we live in.” I did walk away thinking how we live in a world in which there are not always easy answers, everything isn’t always black and white and sometimes our field of vision is a little clouded on the grays around us, yet ever hopeful with the knowledge that the good news of Jesus can cleanse from the most vile evil and wickedness both in and among us.