'Gone Baby Gone' and Moral Ambiguity.

So this movie was pretty damn good. Plot description coming up with possible spoilers. If you're one of those people who can't watch a movie if you know how it ends, then forget it. Go away. Vanish. (Okay. I think I've watched Kiss Kiss Bang Bang a few too many times now.) But seriously. This movie's definitely worth taking the time to watch, and if you're going to refuse to watch it because I ruined the ending, then stop reading now.

The short version: Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan are Patrick and Angie, a pair of young, inexperienced private detectives hired by a Boston woman and her husband, Bea and Lionel, to find their missing niece Amanda, who's about four - she's the daughter of his trashy, coke-addict sister Helene. Enter Morgan Freeman as Capt. Doyle and Ed Harris as Det. Remy Bressant. Doyle is the head of a unit that specializes in finding missing persons, who brought Remy out from Louisiana years earlier. These guys have the experience, but Patrick and Angie have the connections and know the people of the rough neighborhood the girl is from. Throw in suspects ranging from gang members to drug dealers to pedophiles, and you have a pretty messy scenario that you don't want to have anything to do with. Patrick and Angie take the case anyway. Over the course of months, the investigation is closed and reopened, another child goes missing, suspects come and go, authority figures come into question, and in the end, Patrick and Angie - Patrick in particular - are faced with a moral quandary that doesn't seem to have any good answers, and they are forced to define right and wrong, good and bad, based on their own persons, on what they think is right. It's pretty intense.

And okay, my roommate's boyfriend is snoring. Loudly.

Anyway, I really liked the movie. I think when you get down to it, the world really isn't black and white. You can choose to see it that way, but I think that is, in essence, denying reality and avoiding it. In this film, everything is just this dark, gross, murky gray that is every shade of wrong. You have good people doing the wrong thing for good reason, and how do you deal with that? Do you look the other way or do you do what, morally, is the "right" thing to do, even though it might not be the easiest thing to do or even the best thing, in the long run? I think in a black and white world, what Patrick ends up doing is what would be considered the "right" thing. But in the real world, I wonder if it really is. The movie ends in that ambiguous state - with Patrick clearly wondering if he made the right choice - and it's hard to tell. It's hard to know what would have happened next if the movie kept going, if it showed the people's lives 20 years later. And it's hard to know, because it could have gone in several directions. I think that how you think the story ends sort of shows how you're inclined to view the world and life, kind of the way that the end of Life of Pi challenges your faith. You can think a child can overcome his or her environment and not be completely messed up after growing up in an insanely dysfunctional home that's not conducive to raising children, or you can think that a child growing up in those circumstances is doomed from the very beginning in an Oscar Wilde "every woman becomes her mother" way.

It's funny. I definitely thought, as I watched the end, that Patrick made the decision that guy would make and Angie made the decision a woman would make. He went the straight-up moral route. She went the morally-less-acceptable-but-more-emotionally-influenced route. His concern was for how the adult this child would become would feel about everything, and for the child's mother. Her concern was for the child and the adult that the child, outside its home, had the potential to become. He chose with his head. She chose with her heart.

In all honesty, I would probably have taken Angie's route, but it would have been, in part, for selfish reasons: I don't think I could have lived with myself if I made Patrick's choice. It would have been torture to wonder for the rest of my life whether or not things were going to turn out okay for the kid. And if they didn't, I don't know how I'd ever handle the guilt of knowing I condemned a child to a miserable life.

Okay. I should have been doing homework. Slash sleeping some more. But oh well. I'll just panic later.