That Director Looks Familiar

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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 2½ 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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