That Director Looks Familiar

By Belinda Luscombe

It's always a little sad to see a true American pastime dying, to know that future generations will not be able to enjoy the simple pleasures that brought so much joy to their forebears' lives. Remember stamp-collecting? Coin-collecting? So it's with a slightly heavy heart that we announce the precarious plight of the national sport of Picking on Ben Affleck.

Oh, come on, you do too remember Ben Affleck. He and then fiance Jennifer Lopez were like the proto-Brangelina, the honey pot upon which the insistent swarm of paparazzi and show-biz magazines feasted in 2003, which, admittedly, in tabloid years is the Paleozoic era. They appeared together in two movies that didn't do well but delighted many in their flopitude. Before that, he was a movie star who commanded millions of dollars for movies that usually co-starred a cataclysmic threat and had names like The Sum of All Fears and Armageddon and I Lost My Memory but I Saved the World (O.K., it was called Paycheck, but you get the idea). He was the outsize personality who checked himself into rehab for alcohol abuse in 2001. He was the cocky Hollywood star who played poker and won big. Mostly, he was the guy who seemed to be squandering all the credibility he had earned for co-writing, co-starring in and winning an Oscar for Good Will Hunting in 1997. Even before that, he was a child star, notably in the TV series The Voyage of the Mimi. In fact, until recently, comparing him with other former child stars was the only way you could conceive of his career as going well since the Bennifer days.

But now Affleck has gone and challenged our neat picture of him as movie-star chump by directing and co-writing a crackling little detective film about child abduction, Gone Baby Gone. In poker, this is known as going all in. First, the movie is an adaptation of a novel by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote Mystic River, which Clint Eastwood put on film to much critical acclaim. Comparisons are inevitable. Second, the movie features imperiled children, spectacularly vulgar language and the urban poor of Boston, none of which scream must-see. Third, he cast his younger brother Casey as the lead, a private detective hired to find the missing child. Unless the kid nails the role, it looks like nepotism. Lastly, if the film does poorly, the title alone will be like headline manna for journalists looking to describe the star's career.

Is Affleck worried? He looks positively pained as he sits in a deserted midtown New York City restaurant in his three-stripe Adidas jacket and heavily pocketed khakis. It turns out he spent the morning at a children's museum, put a little too much enthusiasm into picking up his 22-month-old daughter Violet (with wife Jennifer Garner) and threw out his back. The tenderness is not just around the lumbar region, however. He's cautious. The a!=able, self-deprecating, funny guest of Jay Leno or Jon Stewart is not here today. This is a man who warily repeats questions to himself, starts several answers before finding an avenue he likes and screws up his face and makes careful chopping movements with his hands as he talks in an effort to keep himself on track. Some of his sentences are longer than this paragraph.

"It's not as if I walk around carrying a bunch of regrets," says Affleck about his stint as a tabloid fixture. "There are things that I haven't quite figured out. I don't know enough to say that I've come to any certain conclusions other than that I prefer to be where I am now." Clearly, the public adulation turned savagery that he experienced has left him changed. In a line from the movie that's not in the book, Casey's character, Patrick Kenzie, quotes Matthew 10: 16: "Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves." Jesus is telling his disciples to go and talk about him and, by the way, to expect some push back. "I find that particular section moving," says Affleck. "You're in a world out there that's hostile. Bad things are going to happen to you. You're going to be scorned. How do you reconcile these two sides of yourself? What are you going to do to maintain your innocence? I guess I think it's a hard thing to figure out how to do, being serpents and doves, but I think it's beautiful because you want to be able to do it. It sounds kind of wonderful if you could."

This Weltschmerz and wariness seeps through Gone, from its opening shots of a media maelstrom in a poor part of Affleck's hometown of Boston to its final scene of a man coming to terms with the consequences of decisions he's made. None of the characters are innocent to begin with, but they lose whatever naivete they have in the course of the film. Yet Gone Baby Gone has a lightness and humor to it. At one point, Ed Harris' police detective dismissively suggests that the young-looking Kenzie should forget the case and get back to his Harry Potter book. In another scene, a drug lord points a gun at Kenzie and warns that if he sees him again, he might "be discourteous."

Affleck clearly spent most of the less than $20 million budget on giving the actors plenty of time to perfect their swing rather than on effects or fancy camera shots. Casey indeed nails it as the punk who's always having to punch above his weight, and there's a jaw-dropping performance from the not- well-known Amy Ryan as possibly the coarsest woman on the Eastern seaboard.

In all, the movie is not what one would expect from that former Sexiest Man Alive who didn't marry J. Lo--twice. Or is it? It's axiomatic that those gifts we take for granted are what we most miss when they're gone. Affleck, to all who know or work with him, is bright, hardworking and immensely likable and doesn't take himself too seriously. His willingness to make fun of himself has saved many a dreary Saturday Night Live. "Ben certainly is very intelligent," says Alan Ladd Jr., who produced Gone Baby Gone and knows from up-and-coming directors, since he helped launch the directing careers of Mel Gibson and George Lucas (he green-lighted Braveheart and Star Wars). "And he's a very talented writer."

But perhaps because Affleck took a long time to make a serious movie after Good Will Hunting (while he was saving the world, co-star Matt Damon made The Talented Mr. Ripley), people pegged him as an action star, not a thinker. And when he went gallivanting around in camel-hair coats and Bentleys and had news of his engagement broken on Primetime Live, people figured he was full of himself. It takes only a tiny shift in perception before everything a person does can be misconstrued. Just like that, the assets Affleck had relied on became liabilities. His spirited antics began to look oafish. Instead of being witty and wry, he came across as smug. And all of it became media fodder. In the words of one movie critic (O.K., Time's Richard Corliss), he was "a commodity that gets consumed in checkout lines" rather than in a cinema. Every decision he made appeared to be exactly the wrong one.

Except, of course, to disappear. Before filming his small part in 2008's He's Just Not That Into You, he hadn't acted in a movie for 2 1/2 years. For Hollywoodland, the last movie in which he starred, his role as a faded former icon was a considerable change of pace. Tellingly, his name is not at all prominent on the Gone Baby Gone posters.

Having been outspoken about politics in the past, Affleck is even a little gun-shy on that topic. He's not prepared to say if he will campaign in the next elections, as he did in 2004. He's not prepared to say which candidates have approached him. After our interview, he relents and lets it be known that he will vote for Barack Obama in the California primary and Hillary Clinton if she's the nominee. (Well, there's a shock.) "I think there is a limited role for actors in politics," he says, "or at least for this actor." The fight has not gone out of him, but he's one world-weary 35-year-old guy. "Politics, man. It's so ugly." He shakes his head. "The Internet allows you to completely immerse yourself in the world of politics without ever listening to anyone who has anything to say that might offset at all what you believe. So you can become totally validated all day long. It's become polarized, and it's just money-raising and viciousness. I find it really depressing."

Another thing he finds depressing, to the surprise of no one, is the tabloids. "Maybe you can tell me," he says, eyes ablaze. "Why is it those magazines never have to be right? Is there no accountability? I mean legally, morally, institutionally?" He claims he never reads them. "I'm not interested in people's personal lives--it depresses me--and I don't want to see references to myself," he says. "As a consequence, I'm sometimes out of it on things." This is a far cry from the man who, on mtv, did a hysterical impression of Michael Jackson trying to explain his behavior toward children during the Martin Bashir interview.

Ultimately, Gone Baby Gone is about choices and the consequences of those choices, and that's a subject Affleck is something of an expert in. "I always believed it's what you don't choose that makes you who you are," says Kenzie in another line not in the novel. He's talking about the mean streets the movie's characters inhabit, but Affleck acknowledges it has a more personal mean ing. "I think that's true for me like it is for anybody," he says. "To me the movie's about realizing that becoming an adult is about understanding there's no certainty. I used to think, Maybe there's some kind of answer key that you'll find that says, 'Well, the answer was B.' That doesn't exist. Really, you have to do what Kenzie did--make the decision based on what he believes in. Those decisions have a cost for you and sometimes for other people, and you'll never know really if they were right or if they were wrong. You just have to trust your own judgment and live with the consequences of that and follow through."

In an earlier incarnation, this is where Affleck would have waited a beat and then said, "But I still shouldn't have made Surviving Christmas." That guy's gone now, which is kind of sad, but there is an upside: things look good for those who like interesting movies about Boston. And bad for Daredevil 2.

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