I watched an unexpectedly great movie last weekend - and it had many pleasant surprises. I was never a great fan of Ben Affleck (preferring Matt Damon since the duo first appeared together on Good Will Hunting in 1997) - but in this directorial debut, he proved to have great talents.But, it took me a whole 3 days to find some clear thoughts and words to make a small entry about this movie - yet there are still many moral questions unanswered. It was disturbing enough that at the end of it, I remembered sitting there thinking, thinking, thinking...
The funny thing was: I felt in love with the movie right into the first 3 minutes of it ... there were scenes of downtown Boston with a voice-over which I have to reproduce here:
"I always believed it was the things you don't choose that makes you who you are. Your city, your neighborhood, your family. People here take pride in these things, like it was something they'd accomplished. The bodies around their souls, the cities wrapped around those. I lived on this block my whole life; most of these people have. When your job is to find people who are missing, it helps to know where they started. I find the people who started in the cracks and then fell through. This city can be hard. When I was young, I asked my priest how you could get to heaven and still protect yourself from all the evil in the world. He told me what God said to His children. "You are sheep among wolves. Be wise as serpents, yet innocent as doves." Beautiful ... and I was immediately bought over.
I cannot, in good conscience, reveal much about the plot. It would take the experience away. Suffice to echo the following: Dorchester, one of the toughest neighborhoods in all of Boston, is no place for the weak or innocent. It is a territory defined by hard heads and even harder luck, its streets littered with broken families, hearts and dreams. When one of its own, a 4-year-old girl, goes missing, private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro were approached to help but they did not want the case. After pleas from the child's aunt, they opened an investigation that will ultimately risked everything - their relationship, their sanity, and even their lives - to find a little girl-lost.
Gone Baby Gone is powerful stuff - a movie that derives its plot twists from moral conundrums rather than from narrative sleight of hand. The movie engages viewers not only on an emotional level but on an intellectual one. As the onion-like layers of the story are peeled away to reveal new ethical dilemmas that forced the lead character to question what truly is "right," we are invited to answer those questions alongside him then evaluate whether the consequences of his choices justify the decisions he made. It is a rare motion picture that provides such an uncompromising perspective of what is right and what is moral. It therefore sets up a moral choice that the viewer must decide through the film's main character, through whose eyes we experience the film.
Gone Baby Gone is full of dark secrets, and how they unravel will keep you glued. When I was studying in Law School, we kept hearing the legal adage that "hard cases make bad law" - and so how does such difficult moral dilemmas affect the choice we make? Will such hard questions make it any easier for us to make good decisions?
At the end of the movie, and some 3 days after, I was haunted by the question still: what choice would I have made? This movie is a tribute to this thoughtful, deeply poignant, splendidly executed film that we replay the conclusion in our minds long after we leave the theatre.
Go watch it!
2 comments:
I watched this show just today and although casey affleck's strained voice put me off, its plot and script managed to hold me still. i felt the same as u after the show.
My take: Our knowledge of a case is only based on what we can see and what we hear from the family and others around them.
How we deal with it is based on where we are standing and what we believe in. Social norms and sanctions can make things complicated. What's moral may not be seen as right, and what's right may not be seen as best. It's like xerox and copyright.
Patrick or the older guys, they all want to save the child, they have good intentions. But they act based on their positions. Some have got past issues, some got trapped in, some are blinded, some have promises to fulfill. Like they say in the show - everyone sees from his own window, and everyone has his own reasons.
One question i'm still pondering about: Who has the right to dictate what the child really deserve?
(share!)
Perhaps a guiding question would be when the child grew up and asked: "You knew I was kidnapped from my family - and you didn't do anything about it?"
That would do it for me... None has the right to dictate who our parents/families are. These are incidences of nature. We deal with it.
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