Who decides what is right for a child?

Rating: 9/10 (18 February 2008)

Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and his girlfriend Angie Gennaro (Michele Monaghan) are private investigators who are known for their knowledge and contacts within Boston's blue collar world. Patrick himself is native to the area and so his connection to the people that make it up run deep. When Lionel and Beatrice McCready (Titus Welliver and Amy Madigan) approach them to help find their kidnapped niece Amanda (Madeline O'Brian) both of them find themselves in a case that runs far deeper then they imagined.
Gone Baby Gone is a rough movie to watch but is powerful nonetheless. Ben Affleck enlists the difficult lower class areas of Boston almost as if they were characters for the film. The heavy Bostonian accents, punctuated with the famous short temper that many Irish descendent's are known for, give the film sense of life that other movies of this genre often lack. Many of the characters seem real simply by the way they hold themselves in a manner that one would expect someone from the wrong side of the tracks. The characters of Gone Baby Gone are for the most part stuck in a hopeless cycle that often accompanies those who grow up in a area known more for drugs and poverty then anything else.
Patrick and Angie soon discover that Amanda's mother Helene McCready(Amy Ryan) was involved in a plan to rip off a drug dealer who she worked for. Helen, the stereotypical addict mother who cares more for her next high then her own child, proves more of a challenge then a help for the two which later becomes an issue. It is Helen's behavior and attitudes towards Amanda that will set the real moral question behind Gone Baby Gone.
Police captain Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman), who is less than pleased at having two private investigators help the police, assigns Detectives Remy Bressant (Ed Harris) and Nick Poole (John Ashton) as contacts for Patrick and Angie. It is Remy in particular who becomes an important character once it is assumed that Amanda has been killed by the very drug dealer that her mother stole from weeks earlier. His own actions will also set the scene for the final question that both Patrick and Angie must ask themselves.
Gone Baby Gone takes several changes that turn the entire case upside down. Even after Amanda's suspected death, Patrick and Angie discover that that it wasn't a drug dealer but Lionel, Remy, and even Captian Doyle who were behind the "kidnapping" of Amanda. Lionel wanted a better life for his niece, Remy and his partner saw chance for money, and Jack wanted an opportunity not only to save a child but to perhaps replace the daughter he himself lost years earlier.
The truth is made known only after several deaths and even then the question still remains difficult to face. Once it is discovered that Jack and his wife are raising Amanda in a safe country home far from the drugs, booze, poverty, and a life that will never escape her neighborhood, Patrick must decide if what Doyle has done is really in Amanda's best interest or if she should be given back to her mother. Remy's own death and confession of various illegal activities meant for the greater good forces Patrick to realize that if right and wrong are to be separate then the "right" way to do things must always be done no matter what. And that includes giving Amanda back to a mother who in any other situation would probably care less about her. It's a difficult choice that leads to Doyle's own arrest and Angie leaving him after pleading for him to leave Amanda far from Boston.
Gone Baby Gone isn't just a kidnapping or mystery movie. It's a movie that forces one to ask whether or not if justice and being right are always worth the price that both demand. It would be easy to argue that Patrick should have left Amanda with Jack but in doing so one enters a very dangerous slippery slope. As Remy proved through his own actions, doing the wrong thing for the right reasons can still lead to negative consequences. Doing the right thing can also lead to such an ending but in this case honor has been served if one is willing to hold to a greater standard then just emotions. Patrick must live with his choice but he could argue that it is choice that he was glad he made and one he can live with.
9/10