What is the moral dilemma in Gone Baby Gone?

Answer 1

Gone Baby Gone is a bleak and gritty film directed by Ben Affleck and starring his brother Casey. On the movie posters to this movie, the tag line read:

"Everyone wants the truth...until they find it"

What truth does the protagonist find? That protagonist is Patrick, (Casey Affleck), who is thrust into the horrifying world of not one, but two child abduction cases. In the opening monologue of the film, we hear the narration of Patrick:

"I've always believed it was things you don't choose that make you who you are...your city, your neighborhood, your family. I took pride in those things, like

they were an accomplishment. Our starting gates...the bodies wrapped around

our souls...the city's wrapped around those. This was a hard place to grow up...

when I was a kid I asked my priest how to be good and still protect myself...He told what God said to his children; 'Though I send you as sheep amongst olves, you must be wise as serpents yet innocent as doves."

The so called "moral dilemmas" Patrick is faced with are basically two events in the film. The first is when faced with an apparent child molester who has seemingly molested a child and then killed that child, Patrick's rage is such that he shoots the suspect in the back of his head, while the suspect is pleading for mercy. The "moral dilemma here is that on the one hand Patrick believes the murder to be just, on the other hand he knows it is wrong to kill an unarmed man who has posed no threat to his life, even in spite of what he may have done. Patrick killed the man in cold blood to satiate his own rage. We sympathize with him because of earlier news he had received, but sympathy is for devils, and his compassion was sorely lacking; Compassion for a child molester? It is not known at the time Patrick kills this man, that he is guilty.

The next "moral dilemma comes in another child abduction case of which Patrick is bound and determined to find the child and return that child to the mother. The mother, however, seems ill equipped to take care of the child, and when Patrick finally finds the kid, she seems to be happy and content in the arms of her abductors who kidnapped her to save the child from her mother. The dilemma lies in his decision to leave the child with her abductors or return her to her mother. This is a dilemma, no doubt, but not a moral one. Patrick was hired to do a job, find an abducted child and return that girl to her mother. Who is better fit to raise that child is not his decision. He wasn't hired to find out if the little girl was all right, he was hired to bring her back. It is the height of folly for Patrick to think he is in a better decision than her own mother to decide what is best for that child. It appears the abductors are loving parents. How does he know they are? It appears the mother is a mess and not much of a mother. How does Patrick know this for sure? Will Patrick spend the rest of his life investigating both parties to make sure the little girl is being raised properly? There just is no moral dilemma here. Does it make us all feel uneasy? Of course it does. The author of the book and screenplay had this to say"

"Its supposed to hurt. It's meant to shake everybody up."

The director Ben Affleck had this to say:

"The right thing is really the difficult thing to do because it has consequences that are unpleasant sometimes. Otherwise, every one would do it."

If doing the right thing were easy, everybody would do it? Eating rice and beans is easy, not everybody, given the choice, does so. Tying our own shoes is easy and even so, some people prefer loafers. As easy as loafers are, some people wouldn't be caught dead in them. No. If doing the right thing were easy, and many times it is, not everybody would do it. There are only two things everybody does, pay taxes and die. Neither is particular easy, yet everybody does it. There is much more to morality than making the hard choices. Morality is the compass by which we use as a guide to help us navigate through the hard choices. Morality is a standard, not some exercise that can be really hard because of all those messy consequences. And, what of bad parents, and the children? This is what the author Dennis Lehane says"

"We have not resolved remotely how to raise and protect children in this society. We're not even in the ball park. So, what became the major

subtext of the book and the film is this sense of; "What are we doing?"

And I don't think good art answers questions, it just asks them."

Really? William Shakespeare didn't create good art? What of Hamlet? Shakespeare not only asks the questions, he answers them. Can a man confront the evil of others without passing judgment? Shakespeare says undeniably, emphatically no. Can true love survive, even after death? In Romeo & Juliet, Shakespeare asks the question and answers it, and his answer is yes. Can unchecked ambition lead to success? In Macbeth, Shakespeare asks the question and insists the answer is no. Does this make those plays just mediocre, because Shakespeare had the temerity to answer his own questions? And what of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables? Many hard questions are asked in this book and each one answered. Jean Val Jean is the iconic hero for the ages and stands as a paragon of moral behavior as contrasted to the gendarme who ruthlessly chased him, obsessed with the rules but not so concerned with morality. Is Les Miserables just more of that simple minded religious mumbo jumbo? Hardly, it is book of great compassion and horrific suffering by a famously liberal Frenchman. His nationality is irrelevant, his politics are secondary to the story, to the choices made and the consequences each character is forced to live with. It is not just good art, it is great art, even though Hugo had the bad taste to answer his own questions. And what of the notion that we as a society don't know how to raise and protect children?

Society is perhaps the worst parent of them all. Who is society? Can society breast feed their children? Does society change the diapers? Clean up after the child? Play with the child? The best society can do is pass the lame kind of judgments that Lehane does, asking the hard questions with no intention of answering them. It takes a village to raise a child? It does not, it takes parents. Short of two, it takes at least one, but it takes real honest to goodness parenting, not feel good laws and hard nosed police officers that double as baby sitters, not tough as nail judges who raise their children by sending them to some institution or ripping them away from the parents that love them and handing them over to foster parents paid to take the kid. We're not even the ball park as a society because when it comes to parenting children,k society shouldn't even be allowed into the ball park. It's strictly a family affair, and parents have a natural right to raise their children how they see fit. Will they make mistakes? Most likely. Will they do some damage? Maybe. Will the children be better off under the care of Mr. or Mrs Society? Not! Charles Manson was raised by society. Many institutionalized children are grow up to live right were society wants them to live, in a prison and out of site, so society doesn't have to see the messy work of children growing up and finding there way in the world. Moral dilemma? A moral dilemma is a euphemism for; "I know what the right thing to do is, I just would feel better if we did this way." O.k., why not? Let's let everybody run around snooping on their neighbors, deciding who is fit to raise a child and who is not, and before long there will be a Department of Parenting where married couples will stand in line for hours on end hoping they qualify for a license to have a child? Maybe then Mr. Lehane can be proud of the wonderful parents society has become.