Everything justifiable?

Gone Baby Gone (2007)

Nature has created our offsprings to appear cute and lovable. It is nature’s way of ensuring that the adults innately protect them, and these weak ones too have a chance to mature to adult. Left to the elements, they would easily perish. So when a four-year-old little girl goes missing, the media and the general public goes into a frenzy. She is from the poorer side of Boston, born to a mother of a drug addict who spends more time in a daze and the company of men of questionable character than nurturing her child.

In the midst of this, a private investigator and his partner (Patrick and Angie) are hired to help. With the assistance of the police chief and his men, they unveil a twisted plot of the child’s mother and her lover involved in a world of illicit drugs, money, ransom and the picture of a neglected child in the midst of all these.

The tale only gets darker. The police officers involved in the rescue mission are also no angels. They take justice into the own hands and justify their actions by believing that what they are doing is to right the wrong, ensuring the right person is punished.

The clincher is when we are informed that the police together with the uncle staged the whole kidnapping of the girl and orchestrated its foiled rescue attempt with the private investigators as a privy to all. They wanted to save the child from an obviously self-defeating environment to give her a chance in life. The debate at the end of the film is whether the best place for a child is with her mother, despite her shortcomings or she should be uprooted from an apparently decadent environment to ensure a brighter future.

There is plenty of references to illustrate that the rules, made from the theological viewpoint are certainly not so straight forward. Like for instance, the doctrine of ‘Thou shall not kill’ does not apply when you are the law enforcer, and you are up against a system so convoluted that justice may be denied, and the criminal is so treacherous, killing seems to be the only human thing to do. Or is it? Are we qualified to play God? About separating the mother and kids, they feel that children are mouldable like a clean sheet of paper, they adapt. They are so gullible that they ‘turn the other' cheek all in the name of love!

At the end of it all, we are left in a quandary. We are all like occupants of a boat which is inevitably heading to crash. All of us, despite not having a single clue on how to manoeuvre the vessel, try our hands at it with gut feeling and common sense as our guide to steer the vessel!