Gone, Baby, Gone: A Review

Gone, Baby, Gone welcomes us into the world of South Boston. It’s a world that seems to ooze with character. The Departed, Mystic River, and Good Will Hunting are just a few of the recent efforts to take us into this world, and Gone is a worthy successor to these solid films. I have mixed feelings about Ben Affleck as an actor, but he seems at least to have a future on the other side of the camera.

The film opens with the media circus already in a frenzy. A girl is missing, the mother is frightened, and the police are scouring the community looking for any possible leads. The problem is that this is the kind of neighborhood where not everybody talks to the police, and so the child’s aunt decides to hire Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennarro, two locals that have a small PI operation, to assist the police in the investigation. Reluctant at first, both agree, and being to turn over rocks in their neighborhood to see what they can find.

I found Gone’s setup a bit challenging to get through. Ultimately, Casey Affleck won me over with his solid performance, but at the outset, I couldn’t believe he was doing PI work. He actually was playing his true age, 31 at the time, but like Matt Damon, has such a young face it was hard to see him in the role. Moving through this distraction, though, the film quickly establishes why Kenzie would be an interesting hire for a desperate family. He knows the neighborhood, and knows its underbelly and the people that inhabit it.

Kenzie’s work leads him to work with Detective Remy Bressant and his partner. Bressant, played by Ed Harris, is a Louisiana native who has a lot of years in the neighborhood. Kenzie quickly wins over Bressant’s trust, showing his knowledge of the street that provides leads Bressant had no chance to drum up. Through Kenzie’s legwork, their work takes them into the depths of the local drug culture, as it becomes increasingly clear that Amanda, the missing girl, has been the victim of a drug deal gone bad.

The film does a very capable job of exploring the world of the media circus. At least since Al Pacino’s amazing performance in Dog Day Afternoon in 1975, the world of film has had many voices exploring the drive of the media to manipulate “human interest” stories to serve their own marketing ends. Here, the media creates the story of the desperate mother, victim of a cruel world, who only wants to be reunited with her child. The story is a myth, and we are forced to contend with the cruelty that lies beneath that surface, and the fiction of the public face. The media’s need to paint in broad brushstrokes, searching for clear heroes and villains, fails to comport with the real world.

This reflection on the media is an excellent setup for the moral center of the film. Ultimately, the plot brings us to a place where Kenzie is forced to contend with moral choices in a morally ambiguous world. While the plot itself may be a bit convoluted, the payoff is worth the suspension of disbelief, as the film refuses to let us off the hook. We want moral clarity and we want moral choices to receive their rewards. Gone won’t let us go there. To the extent we think the choices are clear, the more the film makes us see the price they pay for those choices. Left with a wrong choice that could produce right results and a right choice that will produce wrong results, we are left to wonder which is the right way to go.

I expect we will rarely be presented with the choices that have this kind of clarity in life, but the moral universe this film inhabits is nonetheless very much our own. We are surrounded by systems that are broken, that reward poor ethics and punish good behavior. Christians enter those systems with a worldview that calls us to a different kind of living. Standing against the brutish pragmatism that calls us to compromise, the Biblical call is to a kind of fierce commitment to kingdom living that is unwavering even when the price is high.

As vivid as this call may be in Scripture, it is a call that still exists in a real world where the consequences will be vividly felt. Gone, Baby, Gone invites us to feel in vivid terms the reality of our broken world, and challenges to remain unsettled regardless of our convictions. That is not a bad corrective to have before us regardless of the decisions that we are wrestling with.