The Gone Baby Gone ending (spoilers inside, duh)

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

So yeah if you haven't seen the movie and don't want to know the ending now's the time to click the back button on your browser....






















































Anyway, what happens is that Casey Affleck's character discovers that the missing girl, once presumed dad, is still alive, and the kidnapping was part of an elaborate conspiracy within the police. The girl's mother was a broken, neglectful junkie, and her brother who felt the girl belonged in a much better home after finding out that the mother planned on ripping off the drug dealer she worked for and then splitting and rushing off with the girl somewhere (the movie also reveals that she and her boyfriend took the girl with them when they were doing drug sales because they were too lazy to get anyone to sit and once left her in a hot car for three hours on a very hot summer day while she was off doing drugs), arranged the kidnapping with his friend in the police, who then gave the girl to Morgan Freeman's character, the former police chief who lost his own daughter when she was murdered. The girl had been living with him to in the country since the kidnapping away from her mother and the slums she had been growing up in.

Affleck's girlfriend thinks the girl is better off here and begs him not to call the state police, even saying she'd break up with him if he does so. He does regardless, and the girl is found and returned to her mother, though at the end it appears she is no better of a parent than she is at the beginning.

So did he do the right thing? What would you do in that situation?

Anyway, I voted that he did the right thing because this type of vigilante moralism is tough to justify. There are proper legal channels for this anyway (social services).

[opebo]

I certainly would not have called the police, though only out of laziness and a fear of getting involved/pissing someone off.  However I do abhor the idea of some do-gooder interfering in the way described - kidnapping the child and so forth.  But I think it ill advised to do anything about such things - it is certainly none of my business, and one important lesson in life is never cross a cop:  if anyone will get you for it, it is a cop.

[Meeker]

I would've left her. That girls life would've been so much better with the former cop.