There was a time when Ben Affleck was a nobody in the entertainment industry. Then there was a time when he was a wunderkind. Then there was a time when he was box office poison. Now, the director of Academy Award-winning dramas and the latest in a long line of Batmen is damn near king of the mountain, with all the respect and success it would seem that he deserves.
It’s been a long, strange trip for Ben Affleck, full of good movies and bad, so with his latest film The Accountant arriving in theaters this weekend we figured now would be a good time to take a look at his career and ask our panel of critics – Crave’s William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold, and Collider’s Brian Formo – to each pick the one film they believe to be his finest accomplishment. As usual, there isn’t a consensus, but they all seem to agree that broodier Ben Affleck crime dramas are where he seems most comfortable.
Find out what they picked, and come back every single week for an all-new, highly debatable installment of The Best Movie Ever!
Witney Seibold’s Pick: Gone Baby Gone (2007)
Miramax Films
Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms.
Ben Affleck seems to have spent his entire career in a fight for respectability. Even when he won a screenwriting Oscar early in his career, many audiences saw it as something of a joke, and both he and Matt Damon were quickly dismissed as a pair of middlingly talented prettyboys who got lucky. Damon began acting a variety of roles, proving his strength as a performer, while Affleck, the more square-jawed hero-looking one of the two, began appearing in a long string of dumb action blockbusters that likely paid the bills, but didn’t do much to showcase his talents (it’s telling that he appeared in a film that was actually called Paycheck).
It wouldn’t be until 2007, when Affleck made his feature directorial debut, that he would exonerate himself from the Giglis and Pearl Harbors. In 2007 – a banner year for American film – Affleck wrote and directed a complicated, morally sticky, and deeply emotional kidnapping drama called Gone Baby Gone. Set in his beloved Boston, Gone Baby Gone stars Casey Affleck (Ben’s younger brother) as a low-rent private investigator who is hired to find a missing girl, but who eventually becomes embroiled in a plot involving Haitian drug lords, stolen money, child molesters, and all manner of unsavory crimes.
Gone Baby Gone is a terse noir, but, like all the best noir stories, eventually reveals itself to be a careful moral study of the breakdown of the human soul. The answers are not easy coming, and the moral absolutism of most movies gets intentionally mixed and stymied by more complicated questions. Sometimes the wrong thing might be the best for everyone after all. With Gone Baby Gone, Affleck proved that he had more on his mind than action schlock, and that he was a director with a style and a voice. He would go on to direct The Town, another Boston-set crime movie, and the Best Picture winner Argo, a fine film unto itself. And with Batman on his shoulders, Affleck is now something of a Hollywood power player. Sometimes it takes years.
William Bibbiani’s Pick: Gone Baby Gone (2007)
Miramax Films
Ben Affleck, the actor, is a reasonably talented individual, capable of playing an intriguing character if the material is already there (Hollywoodland, Changing Lanes) and incapable of pulling off that feat if the script sucks (Runner Runner, Pearl Harbor). And for a while that seemed like it was destined to be his lot in the motion picture industry, a pretty hit-or-miss actor, inoffensive but unremarkable. But then, in 2007, we were introduced to Ben Affleck, the director, and it turned out however spotty he might be in front of the camera, he was downright uncanny when he stood in behind it.
His second film, The Town, made money and his third, Argo, won Best Picture, and they’re respectable dramas. But go back and watch his debut Gone Baby Gone and you’ll see something truly remarkable. Adapted from the crime novel by Dennis Lehane, the film stars Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan as private investigators whose investigation into a child abduction turns up one uncomfortable truth after another, and gives every actor in the film an opportunity to do their very finest work.
Gone Baby Gone is a grimy film, heavy with dramatic portent, and it stands out not just amongst Ben Affleck’s other movies but most other dramas, period. By the end of Gone Baby Gone your jaw is slack, because you realize that Affleck’s film has posed a moral quandary that you’ve probably never encountered before, and if you’re anything like me you’ll come down on one side of the issue with utmost confidence… only to find that everyone else you know who saw the film has an equally valid but wholly contrary position. It’s a crime thriller that makes the case that we are all villains for doing what we think of as “the right thing,” and that’s a daring – and brilliant – thing to be.
Brian Formo’s Pick: Gone Girl (2014)
20th Century Fox
Somehow Ben Affleck can play Batman—half billionaire playboy, half masked vigilante—and still his actor persona will have an everyman quality. Despite being a handsome fella who’s won two Oscars and had famous romances, he’s still someone who gets really upset that Tom Brady was suspended four games by the NFL and has also lived in the shadow of his famous best friend, Matt Damon, for half of his career. Many men can identify with Affleck as a man they’d like to be friends with, or identify with a feeling that they’ve been overlooked and will also soon receive their proper due.
It’s this everyman quality that makes Gone Girl feel even more perverse and twisted than it already is. For every man in the audience who’s feeling a little disenchanted with his relationship with his wife, girlfriend, boyfriend or husband, David Fincher has plopped down the affable and approachable Affleck as the warning that this scale of revenge could happen to you. Affleck’s dazed husband slightly smiles in a photograph next to a missing poster for his wife because when someone asks you to take a photo you smile in the moment. That’s what people are programed to do. And the media is programmed to spin small moments into even bigger moments and condemning every moment of kindness or awkwardness and demand a specific display (grimacing and sulking) despite how immensely programmed we are to project inner strength.
Fincher’s Gone Girl is about all the things men and women are programmed to do to be more appealing to potential relationship partners. She (Rosamund Pike; absolute perfection) tries to be the “cool girl” who’s open to sex in public places, drinks beer, and does not hold her earning capacity above her husband’s head and makes him feel like the lead in their relationship. In return—once he has control in their relationship—he cheats. Because they are no longer sparring for control, their relationship unravels. And Affleck’s stone-faced shock means it could happen to us.
