Relatively Speaking.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, but honestly, I don’t really feel like tackling it all at once. Here’s some of it.

In 2007, Ben Affleck directed a movie called Gone Baby Gone.  The critically acclaimed film features his brother, Casey, playing the role of Patrick Kensie, private investigator.  There is a scene at the end that stayed with me for a while.

**SPOILER ALERT**

At the end of the film, Patrick Kensie and his partner/girlfriend finally track down 6-year-old Rachel’s kidnapper (the “gone baby”, if you will).  Turns out, the kidnapper was trying to protect the girl from her own neglectful, drug-abusing mother.  It was obvious in every way that the girl would have a much better life with the kidnappers.  In the movie’s most climatic scene, we discover that the retiring police chief, played by Morgan Freeman, had staged the whole thing in order to a) save the girl, and b) fill the void in his family’s life after the loss of their own child earlier that year.

Once the jig was up, Patrick was confronted with the decision to just leave them be (he and his girlfriend where the only ones that knew) - or return the girl home to her mother.  He did the right thing and took her home.  The last scene or two shows the girl back home, still being neglected, sitting on the couch and watching TV as her mother prepares to go on a date and leave Rachel home alone .  There are other elements to the story, and the mother really DID love her daughter (she just sucked at the mom thing), and in the end, although it seemed like the girl would probably have a pretty sad childhood, she’d probably be alright.

The decision that Patrick made caused him to lose his girlfriend.  Other elements of the film - such as an earlier scene where Patrick kills an unarmed pedophile - surely played a role in his decision at the end.  Many believed that he may have regretted playing God earlier that day, and that he needed to follow the letter of the law (and redirect his moral compass) when making the critical decision about Rachel.

Should Patrick have given Rachel back to her mother?  Most of us would say, “of course.”  But the filmmakers really wanted the audience to struggle with that question

More later.