Wellington Leg: Ben Affleck is bringing Dennis Lehane’s GONE BABY GONE to the screen this summer. It’s an interesting choice from the five Kinsey-Gennaro novels that helped light the fire under crime fiction during the reign of William knight errant of Arkansas. GONE BABY GONE might be the book that bridged Lehane to MYSTIC RIVER given the sprawling ambition of the story, the lurid aspect of child abduction and prose Pat Conroy could love.
Complexity and Hollywood are strange bedfellows but the New England connection helps here. Life among the three deckers of Dorchester creates a literary tradition closer to Dickens than Chandler; Lehane understands the class warfare and honor tradition of the blue collar families: poor by birth, poor by fiat, proud of the survival skills honed in the struggle of daily life. I don’t know what the filmmakers plan to do with the story elements in GONE BABY GONE, but I salute them for tackling this one.
Lehane has always struck me as a student of the game, a writer who moved away from the laconic PI motif after A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR. GONE BABY GONE is not my favorite of the Kinsey-Gennaro novels because we’re chasing too many points of view. The Pat Conroy analogy holds for me, the progression from the simple THE GREAT SANTINI to the sprawling LORDS OF DISCIPLINE was not necessarily progress, but it wasn’t bad either.
I look forward to the film. Hollywood making a movie more complex than SPIDERMAN is like watching kids playing with matches but, hey, sometimes there’s fireworks.