Art imitating life... Kate and Gerry McCann (top) and new film Gone Baby Gone.
In 1999, the American crime writer Dennis Lehane published the fourth volume in his acclaimed series featuring Boston private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. Gone, Baby, Gone sees the two star-crossed lovers and sleuths hired to find four-year-old Amanda McCready, kidnapped from her home without leaving a trace.
In May 2007 Madeleine McCann is abducted in Portugal causing a barrage of media hyperactivity which continues to this day. September 2007: the film adaptation of the book by director Ben Affleck, starring Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan in the main roles, and Hollywood stalwarts Morgan Freeman, Amy Madigan and Ed Harris in important supporting parts, is scheduled for release in the US in October and in December in the UK and selected by the London film festival as one of its main gala features. However, it has now been announced by Walt Disney Distribution that the film is to be withdrawn from the festival and its UK release cancelled altogether in deference to public perception of the Madeleine McCann case.
Another adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel some years back was Clint Eastwood's film version of Mystic River. Both the book and the film were about the murder of a young girl. A sad fact of modern life is that young girls are being murdered somewhere in the world every single day. Was there any call to ban and withdraw the Eastwood film?
Indeed, in any given week we are shown movies with a farrago of violence, much of which often apes the newspaper headlines: people being shot, armed robberies ending in tragedy, crimes of passion, etc... But aside from fundamentalist bigots, there is no demand to see all these films banned, let alone the books they are often based on - we all know the word has unfortunately not got the same power as the moving image to disturb and provoke. So why has Gone Baby Gone provoked such a drastic reaction? Can't the majority of viewers distinguish the solid line between fact and fiction and realise that fiction is often the best way to make us think about issues and problems?
Without giving too much away, I will reveal that the child is found alive in the book and I assume the film too, and that there is a sinister, unintended irony in the fact that the child actress who portrays the abducted youngster in the film does look a little like Madeleine, and that Amy Madigan as the mother sports similar hairstyle and cheekbones to Kate McCann. Nonetheless, I still don't see the point of withdrawing the film; who do they think they are protecting?
After the McCann case broke both the BBC and ITV decided to rewrite storylines in, respectively, Eastenders and Coronation Street, due to purely coincidental similarities with the affair. "It was felt any storyline that included child abduction would be inappropriate and could cause distress to our viewers", revealed a BBC spokesman. However Gone Baby Gone was actually written more than a decade ago and filmed a year beforehand and cannot in any way to be said to be exploiting the case.
This whole sorry state of affairs reminds me of studios and filmmakers hastily brushing out images of the Twin Towers in still unreleased movies shortly after the tragedy of 9/11. One production, a minor independent I can't recall right now, went against the general consensus and did not do so, and the horizon of the late Towers was slowly panned across in a closing sequence. I found this a brave statement, poignant and apposite. The New York audience I viewed this with in a downtown movie house in December, just three months after 9/11 actually applauded.
Come on: we can make our own mind up. Let us see the film. Enough mollycoddling.
