Tuesday, December 17, 2024

The Moral Dilema of "Gone, Baby, Gone"

 I invite you, Dear Reader, to see the movie "Gone Baby, Gone" available now on Prime Video. It is a standard investigative mystery about a missing child but, like every great movie, raises that genre to a new level. The plot unravels with surprises that are, retrospectively, coherent with the entire narrative. Marvelously directed by first-time Ben Affleck, it is dominated by the superb performance of his brother Casey as protagonist, tough, young Irish Catholic private investigator in gritty, corrupt, brutal Catholic Boston area. The ensemble cast is extraordinary: Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, Amy Ryan, a lovely Michele Monahan, and strong supporting performances including a short, electrifying scene with the magnificent Michael Williams (of happy memory who played Omar Little in The Wire.)

The protagonist rises to the level of a classic hero: courageous, smart, calm, persistent. He is a man of honor: wearing a cross and medal, he refers more than once to advice given him by a priest. He is entirely at home in the violence and decadence of the ambiance. He is no saint: he lives with his partner/lover: but with Michele Monahan can you blame him? At one point he surrenders to rage and murders a pedophile/murderer. Emotionally everyone would approve, but his conscience torments him; again he refers back to his Catholic faith. 

But what sets the movie apart is the excruciating moral dilemma at the conclusion. I will not be a spoiler. Please watch it! Does Patrick McKenzie do the right thing? Or is his girlfriend right?  Please watch with your spouse, sibling or friend of the opposite sex: I am guessing there will be a gender divide on this one. We learned from feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan that the female moral conscience is more relational, concrete, compassionate than the moral-principle-and-order-based masculine psyche. Another way of viewing it is the divide between the consequentialist (used to be called "situation ethics") and the "essentialist" perspectives. The protagonist, you will see, is strongly masculine and essentialist, which is to say Catholic.

To illuminate the dilemma consider another, similar: a historical one. At the end of World War II, a devout Catholic Polish family faced a crisis: when the Nazis took control of Poland, their Jewish neighbors entrusted to them their baby with the understanding that later the little one would be returned to them or their family in Canada. The Jewish family perished in the Holocaust. The Catholic family now loved the little one. Additionally, they would of course have believed the eternal salvation of the soul would be more certain within Catholic devotional and sacramental life than in a Judaism that continues to deny the claims of Christ. They consulted their parish priest. Surprisingly, for that Catholic time and place, the priest said they were morally obliged to return the child to the biological Jewish family. 

In this he affirmed three truths: first, the binding nature of a moral promise; secondly, the sacred nature of the biological family; thirdly, a trust that God's salvific action is effective beyond the explicit boundaries of the Catholic Church, specifically in a Rabbinic Judaism that continues after millennia to renounce the messianic claims of Jesus Christ. He was startlingly "liberal" in the classic sense: open-minded, free-spirited, affirmative of all that is good and true and beautiful. 

That priest became John Paul II. Already in 1945 he was thinking with Vatican II (1962-5). I can think of no one who manifests a consciousness that is at once virile, essentialist, Catholic and yet classically liberal and influenced by the feminine, especially the Marian.

As you ponder the conclusion of "Gone Baby Gone," recall this significant incident!

Please let me know your thoughts!

No comments: