Giving Up

I am sitting here, watching the credits role from the film "Gone Baby Gone". The effect of the movie's plot/theme, combined with my third leinenkugels and some really beautiful music has put me in a quite a mood. The film centers around a man named Patrick, played wonderfully by Casey Affleck, who is hired as a private detective to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. Taking time to hash out plot details and provide a decent "review" of the film would be monotonous for you and me, so I'll spare us both. What I am very interested in however is the manner in which the film deals with the general, yet very specific shortcomings of its characters, and indeed the light in which it paints humanity in general.

What I really like to do after watching a movie I enjoy is looking it up on rottentomatoes.com. This is one of my favorite websites. It gathers all the reviews from a movie it can find from magazines and newspapers all over the country and gives said movie a percentage based on how many critics gave it either a "fresh" or "rotten" review. The site itself provides no opinion, but rather harnesses the opinions of hundreds of movie critics. I was pleased, as I often am when my opinion coincides with the "experts", that Gone Baby Gone recieved a 93% on rotten tomatoes and a 91% from its "top critics" (which implies major newspaper and magazine reviews).

There was one reviewer's comment however that really irked me, not because it was necessarily inaccurate, but because of its implications. Terry Lawson, of the Detroit Free Press writes that "we give up before the detectives, not just on the story, but on humanity, which I doubt is what anyone really wants." My contention with this comment is not that Lawson is wrong in this movies' depicton of humanity's shortcomings, nor his assumption that most people don't want to give up hope on our species capacity for good.

My contention with Lawson is that giving up on humanity, indeed giving up on ourselves is in fact the only hope we have. Perhaps Mr. Lawson is unable to see it this way, as I am sure many people are who have yet to be truly disappointed in themselves, or who are too afraid to admit their own failures. Perhaps the world Mr Lawson lives in is one where people keep their word, or don't continually behave selfishly and/or violently. Perhaps Mr Lawson genuinely believes that humans are good, and that given the opportunity they will change for the better, not because they should, but because its ingrained in our makeup.

Well perhaps Mr. Lawson, what is keeping humanity from attempting to fix the mess it has made of itself and of the world is its own insistance of goodness. Perhaps if we took a moment and stood back from ourselves we would realize that we aren't that great. I think this honesty is a relief to most of us. The moment we realize we aren't, nor will we ever be the people we want or the people we think those around us expect us to be. Maybe a collective acceptance of humanity's failures will bring us closer to creating a world worth being a part of. Yes it is difficult, and maybe people don't want to see it, but the relief alone is worth checking out. The relief of giving up.