It isn't a review but the films it covers, Changeling and Gone Baby Gone, are fantastic and heartbreaking and worth at least four stars.
I wrote this piece in November 2010:
Unfortunately missing children are not a rarity in our
world, in modern history they are well documented, however in the past they
weren’t. On March 10 1928 Christine Collins reported her nine year old son
Walter missing to the Los Angeles Police Department, she was told that in cases
of missing children it was protocol to wait twenty-four hours before taking any
kind of action. This was about 15 minutes into the film Changeling, and I
balked at the idea of waiting to find a child.
Luckily I have grown up in an
age when if a child is missing a police officer is despatched to the house
right away. This society is more cynical, and also more afraid of what could
happen to our children if alone in the world. Quite rightly too, when
Changeling is allowed to play out, amidst almost constant streaming tears on my
part, the hideous possible fate of poor Walter Collins and countless other boys
is enough to break your heart and cheer at the U.S.A’s death penalty.
Reading the actual events of 1928 it appears the film decided
upon brutal murder instead of paedophilia in the Walter Collins and Chicken
Coop Murders. In the cases of child kidnap you would almost want the child to
be killed only and not molested, but it is a hideous fact of the world that
sick minds will pervert children and silence them afterward. Or perhaps worse
still kept and abused as in such cases as Joseph Fritzl who imprisoned his own
daughter for 24 years.
The Police are much more capable of handling missing
children cases now than they were 100 years ago, but even now children are
kidnapped and never recovered. The weekend I bawled my way through Changeling
marked the birthday of a British boy taken from Greece nineteen years ago, who
would now be 21 years old. His mother, like Christine Collins, has never given
up the search for her son and has relied on tourists sightings of similar boys.
However Ben Needham was reliant upon the local island police to discover his
fate, many believe an accident is a likely scenario but without proper man-hunt
specialists brought in how can even a body be found?
With all this going on in the world it is unsurprising
parents molly coddle, keep their children in their sight at all times, and do
not let them play alone for long periods of time. And then there are the parents
who should never have been allowed to reproduce, as seen in Ben Affleck’s
directorial debut Gone Baby Gone. This is another heartbreaker of a film, and
also a must see in my book, as it challenges the viewer’s perception of right
and wrong in the welfare of children. Ultimately, might the abduction of a
child from a disinterested family to put the child in a loving environment be a
justified form of kidnap? I sincerely believe couples should be vetted before
having a child, but us mammals still adhere to mother nature’s rules, so until
the robots take over terrible people will still be able to produce offspring.
Having children in this world is a scary thought, with the
fear becoming triple fold after seeing movies such as Changeling or Gone Baby
Gone. There are too many situations similar to these still occurring, but that
cannot prevent the evolution of the population. The police improve their
missing persons systems, learning from cases where things have gone right and
the child discovered, or tragically, and more often, a
body is recovered. A child is as safe as the people around it, fear of the
unknown will never stop us having children, nor will it cure the instinct to
procreate and protect.
