Gone baby gone: A moral dilemma movie
By
Saul Landau Read Spanish Version
Progressives
refer to the class Marx believed would transform capitalism into
socialism, a historical era of flourishing human spirit, rid of the
chains that tied creativity and imagination to the grind of factory
labor and triviality of commerce.
Such
utopian concepts dissolve when 4-year-old Amanda disappears with her
favorite doll. A montage of decaying working class culture opens the
setting. The dilapidating houses, streets, and bars remain, but a
missing child provides a clue to the diseased moral essence of a
South Boston neighborhood, once home to factories and factory
workers.
Ben
Affleck’s “Gone Baby Gone” based on Dennis (“Mystic River”)
Lehane’s novel takes a police story and converts it into an
examination of layers of evil and ethics. In modern working class
Boston, the foundations of “good” have eroded with “competition,”
which Bush claims “brings out the best in everybody.” This has
meant union busting and withdrawal of government services and
regulatory agencies that once checked corporate irresponsibility.
The
film draws a fine line between “absolute sin” and “ethical
miscalculations” in an age where millions have begun to find
morality an elusive value.
A
familiar opening scene shows media blanketing the vicinity of
Amanda’s house, ubiquitous cops standing around. Neighbors —
actual residents of Dorchester — grab their moments of immortality
before the TV cameras. The disappearance of the adored kid has given
rebirth — so it appears — to neighborhood solidarity. But heat does
not lead to progress. So, Aunt Bea (Amy Madigan) hires a local PI,
Patrick Kenzie, (Casey Affleck, the director’s younger brother.)
The skinny but explosive man with a baby face and a large gun also
grew up in the hood.
Amanda’s
mother, Helene, (Amy Ryan) reveals herself as a poster girl for unfit
mothers. Once, a solid set of values might have knitted this family
together — maybe as late as the 1970s. But whatever set of ethics
that once held working class families together has dissolved along
with the work discipline of factories, mines and mills. The
transformation of productive union workers into non-union service
personnel without benefit of collective representation coincided with
the mushrooming of shopping malls, the availability of drugs and the
ethic of ever quicker gratification. Whatever virtues regarding
solidarity and family bonding — even myths of virtues — might have
once existed in such neighborhoods evaporated during the Reagan and
post Reagan years.
Helene
possesses no visible redeeming graces or support. She spends her
welfare check on booze and coke –- which she also “mules” —
and leaves her four year old unsupervised. When she opens her mouth
acid spews forth, her words made even sourer by her Southie accent,
which doesn’t vary as do her moods and lame excuses and lies.
Patrick connects the missing child with Helene’s drugs and loose
lifestyle. You see him making an attempt not to despise Helene, but
his partner girlfriend Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) cannot
suppress her disgust for the amoral degeneracy of a coke whore and
hopeless mother. Angie rejects the notion of investigating the girl’s
disappearance — let the cops do it — but agrees when she sees Aunt
Bea suffering over the missing child. In the process of their
discovery, the audience peeks into the hearts and minds of the
flotsam and jetsam that remain in the neighborhood tough bars. As
Patrick looks for motive inside this druggy, boozy, criminal culture,
he finds that crime goes with addiction as white goes with rice.
Patrick
and Angie visit the grubby bar where Helene and her worthless — also
drug mule — boyfriend drank and snorted lines. The barflies range
from large and ugly to medium large and very ugly. In the novel,
Dennis Lehane described "a woman [Angie] with intelligence,
pride, and beauty enters a place like this and the men get a glimpse
of all they’ve been missing, all they can never have. They’re forced
to confront all the deficiencies of character that drove them to a
dump like this in the first place. Hate, envy, and regret all smash
through their stunted brains at once. And they decide to make the
woman regret, too — regret her intelligence, her beauty, and,
especially, her pride."
Patrick
must confront these despicable emotions, the remnants of class hatred
transformed into envy and loathing for those who have better —
looks, things, possibilities. Only violence can result from the cast
of characters — two serious investigators on a quest — and a room
of gruesome losers. Still in the neighborhood and street smart, he
stays in touch with high school buddies and swaps curses and
profanities with them. Some have become thugs, but Patrick maintains
a quiet dignity, he accepts them and doesn’t judge — outwardly —
while constantly calculating how they might figure into solving the
case.
Director
Affleck (also co-author with Aaron Stockard of the screenplay) makes
the neighborhood heavies advance the plot, while planting the seeds
of an ethical dilemma. Likewise, he uses Lionel (Titus Welliver)
Helene’s angry, un-articulate, recovering alcoholic brother, and
Dotty (Jill Quigg), Helene’s central casting skanky friend to add
powerful seasoning to the decaying neighborhood aroma.
Boston
rapper Slaine, (drug dealing honcho, Cheese) leads Patrick to the
apparent solution; but not quite. The mystery remains. Is the kid
alive or dead? Patrick senses that something about the confluence of
cops, family and criminal does not make sense, that the child’s
disappearance may not have any relationship to a specific crime, but
rather to something more arcane, larger than crime — something that
he cannot easily place into a simple right-wrong, good-evil context.
The camera establishes the context for moral decision by hanging on
the poor posture of the neighbors, the pain in their faces, the
corroding steps and stoops of the block as if to say: look at the
pitiful grandchildren of a once proud working class. Look how far
they have fallen!
Ed
Harris, the apparently corrupt and explosive detective, plays second
to Morgan Freeman who heads the department’s missing-children
division. Freeman brings up the issue of sins against children,
having lost a child of his own. Harris talks about cops being at war
“and we’re not sinning.” The war is about values, or their
death at the hands of a cruel culture. The cops who witnessed what
humans do to each other begin to worship a new god: the innocent
child, for whom they will make appropriate sacrifices.
“Gone
Baby Gone” presents pictures and sounds of human suffering without
showing puddles of blood in every other scene. I involuntarily shook
my head over the apparent hopelessness of despair and addiction —
the twin plagues of burnt out classes in an atmosphere of commercial
blare.
Angie’s
relationship with Patrick, however, depends on honesty. In their
detectives’ world of dubious moral crevices, they could easily lose
their own ethical center. Her grip on reality checks his dangerous
impulses. He needs her to stay whole. But between them, almost
buried, there exists an ethical gap. Patrick faces the dilemma:
what’s correct and what’s humane?
After
a shootout at a house where a child molester has just murdered a
small boy, Patrick reflects. He had held his gun to the pervert’s
head, deciding: Should he have this miserable freak arrested? Then
wait until he gets out of prison to repeat his crime, or save the
system money and the life of some kid in the future?
Patrick
makes his decision and then regrets it. He does not buy the logic of
the cop, Remy (Ed Harris), who admits to having planted evidence on
bad guys to insure their conviction. Patrick — his Catholic
education? — cringes at such “situational ethics.” In the “good
old days” nonconformists to church rules made you a heretic — at
best. In the 21st
Century, secular culture brands such absolutists as hopelessly
reactionary or downright dysfunctional.
Since
he does not trust the instincts of Angie, who reacts properly when
she risks her life to save the child earlier in the film, Patrick
faces yet another moral dilemma. Does a child belong with its mother,
even if she’s a crack whore? Or has “Nature” become corrupted
by malodorous customs in which rigid rules make little sense?
Conservatism confronts Liberalism. Old religion vies with secular
humanism. The absolutes of the past versus the changing and rapidly
decomposing world! Who and what will stop the erosion other than
rigid insistence on the venerable values of centuries, the ones
Patrick learned in church?
Patrick
goes by the book. His conscience costs him his relationship. The
film’s last shot provides a chilling reminder for all who seek to
settle ethical questions without collective responsibility. The most
moral people in the sick society accept responsibility for their
behavior and take the consequences, no matter how unpleasant. The
lingering final shot presents the audience with an American dilemma,
one that begs for a social order where people will not have to make
such catastrophic personal decisions, where good deeds will not
collide with the vestigial rules of church and state.
Saul
Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow and author of A
BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD.
His new award winning film, WE
DON’T PLAY GOLF HERE,
is available on DVD. Write roundworldproductions@gmail.com
