Gone Baby Gone
Gone Baby Gone (2007) is such a good movie, in part, because it is not predictable, yet when plot twists happen, they seem like natural developments. When the story begins, a cute 4-year old girl is missing, but the movie does not milk the sensational aspects as you might expect it to. Instead it quickly focuses on the mother. This seems quite natural because she is a bit of a tough party girl. Actually, it turns out that she is a cocaine addict who took her child on drug runs. That fits. But why did she do that? Like real life, things are complicated and messy.
The film is also good because the casting is excellent and the acting solid. Casting boyish Casey Affleck as the private investigator and cute Michelle Monaghan as his girlfriend and partner works well because relative innocents who come face to face with society’s underbelly are crucial to the theme. Ed Harris is very good as the tough old cop from Louisiana. Amy Ryan as the irresponsible mother is superb. It’s not often you see someone on screen and think, “Now that is a brilliant actress.” That is something quite different from someone who is type-cast.
The recurring emphasis on age turns out to be not a nice quirk but an integral part of the theme. The gut-wrenching climax asks this: Should a four-year old go to her biological mother who lives in poverty and has vowed to kick her addiction or to a loving middle class couple who have acquired her illegally but will take excellent care of her? In the showdown, Morgan Freeman, the retired police chief who has the girl, tells Casey that if he, Casey, were thirty years older he would naturally decide to leave the girl with the couple. To show that it is not only age-related, Monaghan’s character also thinks the girl should stay with the couple. If Casey decides to call the police, he loses his girlfriend, he keeps his contractual obligation to find the girl, and he risks putting the little girl back in an unhealthy environment. Dennis Lehane, the author of the novel on which the movie is based, says that we as a society have not figured out how to protect our children.