Photo Courtesy of Miramax Films

Gone Baby Gone: Not in like Clint.

Directed by Ben Affleck. Screenplay by Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane. With Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman and Amy Ryan. (R)

America's disturbing obsession with child abduction gets another go-round in Gone Baby Gone, in which two romantically involved private investigators (Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan) search for a missing girl taken from her coke-addicted mother in the rancid armpit of South Boston. Ben Affleck makes his directorial debut with this film of a novel by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River) and, well, Clint Eastwood has nothing to worry about. With his film's abrupt shifts in mood and jumble of acting styles, Affleck appears to have had little control of either his medium or his cast. The ensemble ranges from Ed Harris, giving his usual galvanizing performance, to Amy Madigan (Mrs. Ed Harris), who seems to be playing a witness on a late-season Law and Order. Amy Ryan (The Wire), as the mother of the missing girl, and Titus Welliver (Deadwood), as an uncle, seem to be auditioning for My Name is Earl.

But Affleck and co-screenwriter Aaron Stockard's script, which is marked with unexpected humor, does them no favors. It's hard to care about people who are initially played for laughs. Affleck has also larded this white-trash wallow with locals cast for their morbid obesity, tracheotomies and facial deformities. This is not, as Affleck has spun it, a shout-out to the hometown crowd. This is a freak show.

Nepotism or not, Ben's little brother Casey is just fine as the baby-faced detective, while Monaghan is given little to do while she waits to be the next Sandra Bullock. But even with Casey's Boston accent and tracksuit jackets, these two seem like commuters from some nice suburb. Perhaps in an attempt to integrate the locus of the '70s anti-busing protests, Affleck has turned a 400-pound blond Scandinavian into a Haitian, and child abduction specialist Lieutenant Jack Doyle is played by Morgan Freeman; both characters could have used name changes. But disbelief must be suspended to accept the story's many insane turns. And its final moral dilemma, which the film treats with solemn profundity, is really hypothetical; in a case this highly publicized, social services would have already intervened.

*** Why Did I Get Married?
Written and directed by Tyler Perry. With Tyler Perry, Janet Jackson, Jill Scott, Sharon Leal, Malik Yoba, Richard T. Jones, Tasha Smith, Michael J. White and Lamman Rucker. (PG-13)

Tyler Perry first made his name in a housedress as the pistol-packing granny Madea, avenging women against the men who have done them wrong by, say, taking a chainsaw to the Steinway. In his second movie without Madea, Perry is still sticking up for women. In this film of his play about four couples reexamining their marriages, the husbands talk about their relationships even when the wives aren't there. At the opposite end of the spectrum from Judd Apatow's trash-talking man-children, these men take their relationships with women with utter gravity. Perry may be giving women what they want, but in the current climate of juvenile misogyny, it's a breath of fresh air.

Janet Jackson, her brow knit with concern, plays the best-selling author of the title book. She joins her college friends on their annual retreat to a remote cabin in Colorado, where one of the husbands (Richard T. Jones) has brought along his girlfriend (Denise Boutte). His cruelty may have nothing on the monstrous husband in Perry's Diary of a Mad Black Woman, who callously replaces his wife's clothes with his mistress's (the wife thinks he's bought her a whole new wardrobe), but Perry takes the casual misogyny of recent Hollywood comedies—or classic French farce, for that matter—and plays it absolutely straight, consequences included. As the self-abnegating wife, the singer Jill Scott gives a heart-wrenching performance that would earn her Jennifer Hudson-level hype in a mainstream film. Also stealing a good deal of the show is Tasha Smith as a ball-busting hair care tycoon whose short fuse conceals insecurities of her own.

Why Did I Get Married is still very much a play—its second act drifts as the couples try to repair the damage done, and Perry's blocking and dialogue remain stagy. But it's also Perry's most mainstream film, heralded by Michael Bublé singing "L-O-V-E" over the opening credits. In jettisoning the drag act and the abrupt shifts between high melodrama and low comedy, Perry loses something of what made his work unique. But you can't blame him for wanting as broad an audience as possible, and it would be nice if someday his distributors had enough faith in his work to screen it for the press before it hits theaters.

DocuWeek

Chops
Directed by Bruce Broder. (NR)

A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman
Directed by Peter Raymont. (NR)

* 1/2 Nanking
Written and directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, based on The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang. (NR)

** 1/2 The Price of Sugar
Directed by Bill Haney. Written by Bill Haney and Peter Rhodes. (NR)

* Larry Flynt: The Right to be Left Alone
Directed by Joan Brooker-Marks.

Protagonist
Written and directed by Jessica Yu. (R)

DocuWeek comes to Hartford's Real Art Ways this week with something for just about everyone. The package of films is drawn from the International Documentary Association's larger DocuWeek program in Los Angeles, which helps documentaries get the one-week theatrical run they need to qualify for Oscar nominations.

The muckraking Price of Sugar will certainly make you think twice about what you put in your coffee. Bill Haney's documentary uncovers the deplorable conditions in the Dominican Republic's bateyes, or shantytowns, where Haitian workers cut sugar cane under armed guard for 90 cents a day. Or that is, they used to—The Price of Sugar is one of the recent genre of bait-and-switch documentaries that sets out to anger you about some terrible situation, only to tell you at the end that it's all over now. Well, the guards may be gone, but working conditions probably remain lousy on the Vicini family's plantation—they've hired a Washington law firm to block the release of the film. The Price of Sugar is still an intriguing portrait of Father Christopher Hartley, a priest organizing the workers to the dismay of the native Dominicans.

Ready for PBS is the ultra-slick Nanking, in which Woody Harrelson, Mariel Hemingway and other actors read letters and diaries documenting the 1937 invasion of Nanking by the Japanese and the Western missionaries and businessmen who provided shelter and aid. Its chief interest lies in its interviews with Japanese veterans who may have committed the atrocities described in the letters, and who seem not the least bit remorseful.

Ready for the bottom of the cut-out bin is the hagiographic Larry Flynt: The Right to be Left Alone. If you've been wondering what Flynt has been up to during the Bush administration, this slap-dash doc will fill you in, while presenting Hustler as The Nation with cartoons.

As for the Docuweek films I was not able to screen in advance, Chops documents a high school jazz band competition in the vein of Mad Hot Ballroom. A Promise to the Dead, in which filmmaker Peter Raymont follows writer Ariel Dorfman on his return to post-Pinochet Chile, sounds exactly like the director's rather sluggish Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire. My sight-unseen pick would be Jessica Yu's Protagonist, in which a bank robber, a German terrorist, a martial artist and an ex-gay evangelist ascend to the status of Euripidean tragic heroes. Yu's Henry Darger doc In the Realm of the Unreal animated the outsider artist's epic paintings to charming effect; this one has marionettes by experimental filmmaker Janie Geiser. Fast, Cheap and Out of Control with puppets. What more could you want?

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