'I always believed it was the things you don't choose that make you who you are: your city, your neighbourhood, your family.' - Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck)

Ben Affleck's directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, is a powerful study of morality set in the traumatic context of child abduction. It is no surprise that Affleck should eventually step behind the camera, having proved himself as a fine actor over a number of years and having previously earned acclaim for his skills as a screenwriter (in 1997 he shared an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay with Matt Damon for Good Will Hunting).

Gone Baby Gone, which he also scripted with Aaron Stockard is an impressive first film. Based on the novel by Dennis Lehane (the fourth of his five novels about the two protagonists), it is dark, gritty, violent and deeply thoughtful. Affleck's direction is, for the most part, impressively assured. Although the film's final moments are possibly a little too blandly ambivalent, it nevertheless asks tough questions and challenges the audience to reflect on its own answers.

Gone Baby Gone is not a comfortable film to watch, particularly given the high profile of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in 2007 (which is why the release of the film in the UK was delayed by over six months). For most parents, a missing child is an unthinkable horror, but Helene McCready (Amy Ryan) doesn't seem overly distraught when her daughter Amanda (Madeleine O'Brien) disappears from their apartment in a rough neighbourhood of Dorchester, Boston. She makes the usual emotional appeal to the assembled news crews, yet retreats indoors to watch mindless television programmes.

Helene's brother Lionel (Titus Welliver) and his wife Beatrice (Amy Madigan), who share the apartment, are more active. Wanting to exploit every avenue in the search for Amanda, they call on Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angela Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) to ask for their help. Patrick and Angie are private investigators who search for missing people, but Angela is reluctant to take on such a case. She knows that failure, or finding the missing girl dead, would be hard to live with. Bea pleads with them to help, knowing that Patrick is someone who has grown up in the area and that people who won't talk to the police will talk to him.

After talking to Helene, they agree to take on the case. However, the chief of the police unit responsible for finding missing children, Captain Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman), is not pleased at the prospect of them interfering. However, he is legally obliged to cooperate, at least to the extent of having two of his officers, Remy Bressant (Ed Harris) and Nick Poole (John Ashton) brief Patrick and Angela.

Patrick's old school friends soon enlighten him as to the character, irresponsible parenting and drug habits of Helene. It begins to look as though Amanda has been taken in reprisal for Helene's part in stealing money from a drug dealer. The situation is more of a mess than we - or Patrick and Angie - realise for a long time.

It's not until Patrick becomes involved in another abduction case that he realises that Remy has lied to him about something, and the truth begins to be glimpsed. Patrick raises an important question when he reflects, 'I can't think of one thing big enough to make him lie, but small enough not to matter.'

The unravelling of the knot of deception leads to a point at which Patrick must make a huge choice. He can take a principled decision, wrecking the lives of a good-hearted, respectable couple and possibly dooming a young child to a blighted life of neglect in tough surroundings. Or he can focus on the apparent benefits of keeping his mouth shut, allowing the couple the happiness they longed for and giving the child a chance to grow up in a supportive, loving and generous environment.

It is a choice between two of the primary approaches to ethics. Deontological ethics is about making choices on the basis of principles and duty, rather than being concerned about outcomes, whereas consequentialist ethics is all about outcomes, stressing that the right choice is one that has the best results. It's a tough call for Patrick. He wants things to work out well for people, but he wants to do what is right. It creates tension between Patrick and Angie, since she is adamant that the only thing he should be concerned about is the happiness of the people immediately involved.

However, Patrick recognises that the world is not quite so straightforward. Whose happiness should he considering? It's not good enough just to think about the child or the couple because there are other people involved, people whose rights will be ignored and who will be deeply hurt by a consequentialist decision. And how should happiness be properly evaluated?

Patrick can only take a guess at how the future might unfold, and the option that appears to offer happiness may turn out to result in enormous grief. Is happiness about having the right things in our lives, or is it about having good connections with other people, family in particular? And can principles be left on one side? Is Angie right to think that happiness (or potential happiness) trumps justice? How can Patrick balance various human rights that appear, at least at first sight, to be in conflict? Then there's the question of the extent to which the goal justifies the means.

Making the happiness of a few people the governing factor would effectively condone the terrible actions which lead up to this point, many of which have been justified on consequentialist grounds. These are difficult questions, and Gone Baby Gone wrestles with them in an intelligent and challenging way.

It seems that Patrick might particularly struggle with his choice because of an incident earlier in the film. Finding himself confronted by the tragic consequences of a paedophile's actions, Patrick takes the law into his own hands. Everyone praises him for it: Angie tells him that she is proud of him, and Remy Bressant insists that Patrick should be proud of himself.

Many people would agree, and most would at least feel that what he did was entirely understandable given the circumstances. But Patrick is not so sure; he clearly feels bad about what he has done. In reply to Remy's affirmation of him, Patrick says, 'My priest says shame is God telling you you've done something wrong.'

He's right. It is, of course, possible to feel shame simply because we've embarrassed ourselves, or because we've gone against some cultural expectations. But a sense of shame, allied to a well-tuned conscience, is an important indicator that we have not done what is right.

The well-tuned conscience aspect is tricky, though. Many people's consciences are governed by the culture around them, and in a culture that stresses consequentialist ethics, especially utilitarianism, that means fundamental moral principles play only a minor part in shaping the conscience.

Patrick, however, is shaped primarily by a Christian worldview. On two or three occasions he refers to things his priest has said to him. In a voiceover at the beginning of the film, Patrick recalls asking his priest how he could get to heaven without being corrupted by the world, and says, 'He told me what God said to his children: "You are sheep among wolves. Be as wise as serpents and innocent as doves."'[1] This creates an important context for the film, as is Patrick's first comment in the voiceover: 'I always believed it was the things you don't choose that make you who you are: your city, your neighbourhood, your family.' This comment is not revisited in the film, but it's immediately clear that he no longer thinks the same way.

We are partly defined by those things which we cannot choose, but who we really are comes down to the choices we make. Gone Baby Gone is the story of Patrick discovering this the hard way. Along the way he has been very much like a sheep among wolves in the seedy world he inhabits. His desire not to be dirtied by it is commendable, but he fails and, in a sense, loses his innocence. And because his conscience has been trained well by his upbringing, he knows it.

So what hope is there for Patrick now? Innocence, once lost, cannot be regained; there is no way back to how life had been before Bea and Lionel asked for help. Can he make amends by henceforth making decisions based on principles? Important though the priest's advice is, it seems that he doesn't really understand how to get to heaven.

We cannot escape the corruption of this world because we're part of it, and it's part of us. Yet the way to heaven is not closed because it depends entirely on God's mercy and grace, rather than being about how well we balance shrewdness and innocence, or about redeeming ourselves for our failures. That is the central point of the Christian faith: we cannot redeem ourselves; only God can do it through the death and resurrection of his son Jesus Christ.

Patrick cannot regain lost innocence, but he can be made clean. Interestingly, another statement from Patrick's opening voiceover echoes God's concern for human beings: 'I find the people who started in the cracks and then fell down.' In terms of our purity before God, we are all people who have started in the cracks and fallen down further: we all have a history of moral failure, of making choices because they further our self-interest rather than because they are right. And yet, even stronger than Patrick's desire to reunite lost children with their parents, God longs to rescue lost people and reunite us with him, the perfect parent.



This article was first published on Damaris' Culturewatch website (www.culturewatch.org) - used with permission.
© Copyright Tony Watkins (2008)



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[1] A reference to Matthew 10:16.