Morality in Gone Baby Gone (open spoilers for the movie)

Great Debates
1

I’m putting this here rather than in Cafe Society because my questions are about the decisions made by the characters rather than the quality of the movie.

If you haven’t seen the movie, in a nutshell, a couple of policemen fake the kidnapping (and later the death) of Amanda, a 4-year-old living with a single mom. Amanda’s mother is neglectful – she does drugs, sleeps around, hangs with shady characters, steals from duglords, leaves the little girl (she’s 4) alone, etc.

The movie’s protagonist, Patrick Kinzie, unravels the kidnapping plot and rather than leave the little girl with a respected retired detective (Morgan Freeman, for pete’s sake!) who can give her a loving, nurturing home, he calls the cops. He tells the detective (paraphrasing) that it’s wrong to steal Amanda from her mother. The little girl is returned to her mother and the detective goes to jail.

Earlier in the movie, Kinzie shoots and kills an unarmed child molester, after finding the body of a 7-year-old boy in the molester’s room. When asked about it, whether he regrets killing the perv, Kinzie says he would not do it again.

At the end of the movie, Kinzie drops in on Amanda and her mom. Mom is getting ready for a date with a stranger who saw her on TV and thinks she’s cute, and Amanda is being left alone. Kinzie offers to watch Amanda and as we fade to black, Kinzie and Amanda are sitting on the couch watching TV. Kinzie seems to feel some responsibility for Amanda’s well-being, which is the only thing that didn’t make me reach through the TV and smack him upside his head.

Two questions that I’m not able to frame very well:

Would you have left Amanda with her new family?

If you’ve seen the movie, how would you explain Kinzie’s decision? What was his motivation? Was it because he felt some guilt about killing the molester – he didn’t want to “play God” twice? Did he return Amanda for his own peace of mind?

2

Never seen the movie but I have no problems with playing god. Hell, its not like god gets it right the first time anyway. Good people make mistakes while trying to do good things. The solution isnt to stop doing good things, its to just be more careful. I would have totally left Amanda with Morgan Freeman

3

I haven’t seen the movie, but it doesn’t really sound like a “fake” kidnapping, even if he was a policeman, and even if he had good motives.

4

Good point.

What I’m not sure of (and maybe it doesn’t matter) is whether the cops were the first kidnappers, or whether they simply kept Amanda after an exchange for ransom with a drug lord that mom had stolen money from.

I need to watch the movie again. The plot is twisty, the ransom scene is dark with lots of quick cuts. One thing that further confuses me is that mom is nonchalant (Susan Smith level fake emotion) about the kidnapping but shows real emotion after the ransom exchange, when she thinks Amanda is dead.

Appreciate the input.

5

I probably wouldn’t return the little girl to her mother, but I would probably try to get her removed from Morgan Freeman’s custody.

The kidnapper, while played by Morgan Freeman, isn’t Morgan Freeman. Just because he seemed like an affable old man, he’s a dude who kidnaps little children. There’s no saying that he’s not planning to use the little girl for his own deviant desires and we can be sure that his morality is questionable.

6

Morgan Freeman’s character and his wife were not depicted as being deviants who would hurt Amanda. I think she would have had a much better life with them. Kinzie screwed up royally, and by the end of the movie, I think he knew it. I would have left her with the detective if I were him, with no moral qualms whatsoever.

7

Sage Rat, another good point. He’s portrayed as a stable man with no ulterior motive, except that he lost a child of his own. His 12-year-old daughter was murdered, many years ago. He’s married, living in an almost-rose-covered-cottage in the country, It’s obvious that the filmmakers want us to think that Amanda will be better off there. Plus, I think the kidnap plot was hatched by Amanda’s uncle and another cop but I’m not really sure about that. Freeman might not have been drawn into it until later.

8

I would have returned the child to her mother and dimed out Freeman with no hesitation. If the mother is really that bad, there are legal avenues to pursue for the protection of the child. Deciding to kidnap her for her own good is not an ethical solution and is absolutely traumatic to the child.

Plus, Amy Ryan was not depicted as an unloving mother. Flawed yes, but she loved her daughter, was not abusive and was sincerely distraught by her kidnapping. They were bonded, and her daughter loved her back.

No, Casey Affleck was completely, morally correct, in my opinion. And the act of the kidnapping and self-appointed guardianship by Morgan Freeman’s character was, in itself, a proof that he was not a stable or ethical person.

9

I think, at heart, I’m a utilitarian. The girl would have unquestionably been better off with Freeman and his wife than with her natural mother, and while I wouldn’t have kidnapped her in the first place, I wouldn’t have undone it, either.

Arguably, these legal avenues are pretty darn traumatic for the child, who has already been traumatized quite a lot by her idiot mother.

She was also bonded to Freeman and his wife by the time she was returned to her mother (iirc), who absolutely *was *a bad mom. Being upset at her daughter’s kidnapping does not make her a good mom, and did not change the way she completely neglected her daughter, as we see in the end.

10

I’m with Dio. I find Casey Affleck’s speech that wonders about the girl growing up and asking him why she was taken away from her real mother to be quite pertinent here.

Morgan Freeman and his wife thought they could just take a cute little child and raise her in the perfect home, and everything would be alright. That raises a lot of issues about their judgement when it comes to raising kids. Their judgement was clouded by grief, maybe.

11

I didn’t see Helene truly distraught until after the “exchange” at the quarry, when she thought Amanda was dead. She was distraught when Remy and Nick came at her and made her tell the truth, but that wasn’t about Amanda, it was about being caught in a lie. The one “motherly” thing she did was not leave Amanda alone when she delivered the drugs for Cheese.

You have to do more than love a child – you have to take care of them. Helene didn’t take care of Amanda; she didn’t try to keep her safe, even after losing her once. If I’d seen Amanda with a babysitter at the end, I might have felt differently, like Helene had learned something.

12

Kinzie makes his decision because he is a good moral Catholic boy who even discusses morality with his priest. When he kills Corwin Earle he doesn’t allow Remy Bressant to absolve him by saying it’s OK to kill someone depending on who they are.

He has this conversation with Doyle.

Kenzie: I’m calling state police in five minutes. They’ll be here in ten.

Doyle: Thought you would’ve done that by now. You know why you haven’t? Because you think this might be an irreparable mistake. Because deep inside you, you know it doesn’t matter what the rules say. When the lights go out, and you ask yourself “is she better off here or better off there”, you know the answer. And you always will. You… you could do a right thing here. A good thing. Men live their whole lives without getting this chance. You walk away from it, you may not regret it when you get home. You may not regret it for a year, but when you get to where I am, I promise you, you will. I’ll be dead, you’ll be old. But she… she’ll be dragging around a couple of tattered, damaged children of her own, and you’ll be the one who has to tell them you’re sorry.

Kenzie: You know what? Maybe that’ll happen. And if it does, I’ll tell them I’m sorry and I’ll live with it. But what’s never gonna happen and what I’m not gonna do is have to apologize to a grown woman who comes to me and says: “I was kidnapped when I was a little girl, and my aunt hired you to find me. And you did, you found me with some strange family. But you broke your promise and you left me there. Why? Why didn’t you bring me home? Because all the snacks and the outfits and the family trips don’t matter. They stole me. It wasn’t my family and you knew about it and you knew better and you did nothing”. And maybe that grown woman will forgive me, but I’ll never forgive myself.

Angie tells him it will be over for them if he does it but Kenzie can’t do what he considers immoral.

Interestingly whenever I have discussed this “moral dilemma” with people, those on the side of, leave her with the Doyles, gloss over the fact that Doyle is part of a conspiracy that has killed people so that he can keep Amanda. They seem to feel that this is a more appropriate parental figure for her.

13

don’t ask, I have a hard time seeing Kenzie as a good Catholic boy but that’s the only explanation that makes sense. It’s the guilt that drives him, not the morality. He can live with Amanda having a rotten life, because he knows he did the right thing.

As for people getting killed, Doyle and Lionel and Remy didn’t set out to kill anyone. If Kenzie hadn’t become involved and figured things out, I think Ray would have been the only victim. And he wasn’t a victim of the kidnapping, but of the robbery.

14

I think the whole theme of the movie is that morality and “right” are never black and white.

Without real-life details intruding it’s easy to say he should return the child to her mother. In reality, she would have had a far more stable, loving and fulfilled childhood with the detective and his wife. The mother learned nothing from the experience and the kid is back to a childhood filled with neglect.

Doing the right thing is not always doing the best thing. Any idiot can always do the “right” thing; doing the “best” thing requires a careful examination of every circumstance that comes along, and most people are too lazy or frightened that the world might not always operate neatly to bother.

15

True. I don’t know how close the movie stayed to the book, but I appreciate how no one was portrayed as all good or all bad. I could sympathize with all of them. Helene was probably a better mom than her mom. Part of Lionel’s motivation was money. Remy was willing to kill Lionel to protect himself. A big part of Doyle’s motivation was the loss of his daughter. From the little we saw of Bea (screaming “Abomination!”) at Helene, it might have been a blessing that she didn’t have children of her own. Kenzie stayed true to his principles, even though it cost him his relationship.

16

I just saw this film yesterday an had the same exact conversation with my GF.

It is only a morally quandry in Bullshit Movieland. Kinzie is absolutely right in calling the police and returning Amanda to her mom. In what bizzare world is it ok for policemen to arbitrarily take a child and place him/her in someone elses home without due process? If the mother is that bad, call Child Services.

I mean imagine if anyone could just decide you were an “unfit parent” and snatch your kid away to be given to a family with more money?

17

Patrick Kinzie absolutely did the right thing if only because it made his annoying bitch of a girlfriend leave him, and so if there are any future Patrick Kinzie movies made (oh please oh please oh please) we won’t have to suffer through Michelle Monaghan again.

By the way, fantastic movie! Ben Affleck turned out to be a hell of a good director and Casey Affleck turned out to be a hell of a good actor.

And Kinzie did the right thing. At least with her mother she had her aunt who loved her very much, and Kinzie too, still in her life, instead of living with strangers.

There are other ways to make the kid’s life better besides kidnapping.

18

Bad luck there. I just picked up the next book Prayers For Rain and although he and Angie are no longer lovers, they are working the case together.

19

Damn. If they make the movie, and I do want to see more Kinzie movies made, with both Afflecks involved, maybe they’ll replace the actress. I just don’t like her and I can’t really explain why.

20

In a place where due process isn’t the ends, but rather a means. If due process is the goal, you’re right. If the goal is, instead, doing what is good and right, then the world isn’t that bizarre.

I agree. The police officers should have gone through the proper channels and had the child removed and then adopted her. I don’t think, however, that Freeman’s not following the proper channels means the kid should not have been removed.

I think the movie raised very interesting questions; questions that don’t have easy answers. Both sides, I think, have compelling arguments and neither side only takes place in a “bizzare” world.