The Road; John Hilcoat; (The Proposition from Nick Cave’s script) With brief almost unrecognisable appearances, from Robert Duvall and Guy Pierce, but wonderful performances from Viggo Mortensen,
And a young actor Kodi Smit-Mcfee. This is the most searing, emotionally moving story, adapted from a very difficult and demanding book by Cormac McCarthy, probably the greatest living American novelist now that John Updike is no longer with us. And I never want to see it again. Once seen, never forgotten; no need to see it, to endure it again.
I saw on the eve of the Haitian earthquake disaster, and it is a testament to the film that I talked about, linking it to that tragedy, in my Sermon the following Sunday.
It is that profound.
Avatar; so many critics seemed to go all pious and sniffy, forgetting that it is just a movie, a piece of entertainment, ok, so it cost more than any previous movie to make,
but that’s because it did new and very expensive technical things, and did them well. It had charm, even beauty, and I liked it’s eco-logical message, linking it to my experience last year with North American tribes in Canada. But it is not a sermon, or a campaign, it is a movie, as it happens it addresses an import and topical subject, and if you want to know more about the present day reality Avatar mirrors, then Google Tar Sands.
Of course it helps that it also stars Sigourney Weaver, one of my favourite film actors.
Another of my favourite film actors in Jeff Bridges, and so Crazy Heart was a treat; his performance was much stronger than the film itself, and I thought it was too soft in its portrayal of alcoholism, but hey, Jeff has deserved an Oscar for years; he didn’t get one for the Big Lebowski,
or Starman, or The Fabulous Baker Boys, so this will do.
Shutter Island; again the critics got out their knives, as if Martin Scorcesy is expected to produce an endless string of masterpieces. We don’t expect the Rolling Stones to produce earth shattering albums anymore, so let’s just enjoy them, and Shutter Island too. It’s a great piece of psychological thriller, a film noir, a tribute to Hitchcock and the 1950’s, and has Leonardo de Caprio playing a truly complex character very well. It’s good old fashioned hokum. Enjoy.
Part of my theology of film is that quality is good, for its own sake. It doesn’t need a moral message, never mind a Christian one. We are story telling animals, and film makers can now tell stories in amazing and wonderful ways, using great skill and commitment. A fairy story is not to be condemned because it isn’t a parable, so let’s just judge things on their own terms, as long as those terms are not morally reprehensible.
Another film that came out at the same time as Shutter Island, was I Am Love, an Italian film but produced and largely shaped by our own Tilda Swinton, who also stared in it. Like Shutter Island this films referenced the 1950’s and 60’s, and this time the great Italian directors Antonioni and Visconti. It is set in Milan, among a rich textile dynasty, the Recci family. It is a film with an Italian marble sheen to it, but sometimes a shining surface can reveal great depths. This film is about love, its power, both liberating and destructive. The Italian cast are great, but it is Tilda’s film, playing the Russian born wife of the firms owner who truly shines.
But my favourite movie so far this year is Where The Wild Things Are. ( Spike Jones, David Eggar script,) made with Maurice Sendek’s active approval and a wonderful voice cast; Lauren Ambrose,
who some may remember as Claire from 6 Feet under, Chris Cooper, James Gandolfini, Forest Whitaker, and
Paul Dana, Although based on one of the world favourite children’s book this is not a children’s film. It is a film about children, and how difficult adults are to deal with when you are a child. For Max, 8 years old, adults are huge, powerful, unpredictable creatures, sometimes caring and affirming, sometimes rejecting and hurtful, blaming and threatening, uncontrollable and sometimes out of control, when it seems, they are tearing pieces off each other, Adults are disappointed when children don’t live up to their expectations, and blame them when they live down to their expectations.
The Wild Things in this film are grown ups, and it takes all of Max’s energy and ingenuity and courage to even survive with them. Even the Universe is threatening. Max is told by his teacher that the sun if going to die. Ok, so it will happen in billions of years time, but what is a billion to an 8 year old? Once again modern CGI has done a wonderful job creating the faces of the Wild Things as they express a wide range of complex emotions, they are absolutely believable characters, and I’m sure we can recognise many of them as people we know, and maybe recognise something of ourselves too.
So, I’ts another film that has divided the critics, but I loved it and recommend it, as long as you don’t expect it to be simply a film of then original story. Which would take 15 minutes.
My greatest disappointments of the year so far are.
Robin Hood; boring,
The Men Who Stare at Goats, got lost in the desert.
Paranormal Activity, didn’t scare me at all.
Iron Man 2, fun, but no point other than to make more money.
The Wolfman; had no claws, pointless
Pleasantville; let me out of the Garden!
I used this as part of Lent film series, and asked;
If ‘Pleasantville’ is a kind of innocent Eden is it a place you would like to go back to? If so, why, if not, why not? Why do you think the ‘sophisticated’ sister wants to stay there? Has she learnt anything about herself in Pleasantville? In Pleasantville some people resent change. Some are afraid of it. The Mayor says “We are safe for the moment because we are in the Bowling Alley”? Do we sometimes want the church to be our safe retreat? “What’s it like outside Pleasantville” a girl asks. The boy replies that it’s ‘noisier, kind of scary, and a lot more dangerous.’ “Sound wonderful!” She says, with a smile. Can we have life in all its fullness, as Jesus offered us, without it being a lot noisier, scary and dangerous?
Are there ways in which the Church (which includes you and me) sometimes prefers the certainty and peace of a black and white existence to that of full-on colour, untidiness and upsetting passion?
Is there any need for God in Pleasantville? Does anyone seem to be a Christ-figure?
What other questions/issues about this film exercise you?
I admire many things about Buddhism, and its search for inner peace by renouncing all desires. Buddhists are urged not to want what they do not have. But what Buddhism lacks for me is passion. Love is surely passionate, expressed in love for another person or in our practical passion for justice, inclusiveness and the infinite value of every human life. We are not made to be safe, but vulnerable. Change is dangerous, but essential. The Garden of Eden was a fantasy land with no danger, no change, no vulnerability and no passion. At Easter we remember the passion of Jesus, who did not point us back to the Garden, but forward to the Kingdom. In John Milton’s Paradise Lost he tried to ‘justify the ways of God to men’ by telling the story of Satan and his angels rebellion against God and their banishment from heaven, where they plot to win by guile what they cannot win by power. Book II gives an account of how, in another world, humankind is to be created – creatures whose vulnerability presents a suitable target for satanic spite. But ‘their spite still serves/ His glory to augment’. Satan is to blame for the Fall of Adam and Eve, but his capacities, such as they are, are by ‘the will/ and high permission of all-ruling heaven. The two fold justification for God allowing Satan to tempt Adam and Eve lies in the positive value of human freedom, and the glory of the redemption. The Father explicitly foresees Adam’s weakness and fall, and makes it plain that he could have withstood temptation. But if Adam had not been free to fall, neither would he have been free to respond in ‘true allegiance, constant faith or love’. To have served God out of necessity would not have expressed the personal relationship for which humankind was created. God foresees the Fall, but does not foreordain it. Satan and the angels fall was their own work, ‘self-tempted, self-depraved.’ And so for them there is no redemption. But humanity fell by the deception of Satan.
Man therefore shall find grace,\ The other, none; in mercy and justice both,\Though heaven and earth, so shall my glory excel,/But mercy first and last shall brightest shine. (Book III. 131 – 4)
Taken for a ride?
I wonder, have we taken a step backwards? I saw the film 'Taken' and find it's purpose and popularity perturbing. It is in many ways a simple revenge tragedy. A girl is 'taken', kidnapped by Albanian sex-traffickers, and her father hunts down the gang, rescues his daughter and kills the traffikers. Despite killing approximately 25 people he then goes home, to America of course, and all is well.
Except that this is not the standard 'revenger's tragedy.' As Melville Bragg and his guests on radio 4's Start the Week made clear this week, the classic Elizabethan theatrical hero has his revenge, and then dies, satisfied. Revenge might be, as Francis Bacon remarked, a kind of wild justice, but it is not real justice. It still has to be paid for.
The act of revenge may, indeed it seems must, over-trump the original offense, as Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus makes clear, and in Taken it clearly does. The girl is kidnapped, and probably drugged, but she is not raped or otherwise seriously harmed. The gang members who are killed are all guilty, we assume, of traffiking, but not of any capitol offense. Their punishment does not fit the crime, in terms of trumps our hero is playing different game. He pays no penalty for his ex-judicial killings, not even for shooting the innocent wife of a policeman. It was, as he points out, only a flesh wound, but she had done nothing to deserve being shot. The avenging father is, however, unashamedly presented as a hero. All we are asked to do is admire and applaud him, and his actions.
But revenge tragedies moved on, even in Elizabethan times. Shakespeare wrote the bloody Titus Andronicus, but then the more considered Hamlet. That play has all the ingredients of Kydd's 'Revenger's Tragedy'; the ghost of the murdered relative, the command to revenge, the impossibility of using the legal system for justice, the madness feigned or otherwise, the play within a play and the final bloodletting, but Hamlet deeply questions his right to revenge. He has been to Wittenburg to study, to Luther's University, and Christian morality confronts him. As Catherine Belsey points out in her new book 'Shakespeare in Theory and Practice' 'Hamlet simultaneously urges revenge as a moral duty and condemns it as a sin. Neither hero nor audience can find a way out of this aporia; "to act morally' Hamlet must act murderously, but he cannot act murderously and retain moral integrity" (TLS May 22 2009, Peter Holbrook)
There is nothing remotely Christian about the hero of Taken. There are no moral doubts. The Hebrew Bible says that vengeance is the Lord's, not ours, and 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth' is to often interpreted as an injunction - you shall take an eye for an eye...' whereas it is really a limitation, you shall only take an eye for an eye. There is no Biblical approval for disproportionate retaliation, which leads to unending and escalating vendetta.
The scandal of the Cross is that it calls us to absorb the evil of violence, not return it. Jesus story of the workmen hired at different times during the day but paid the same wage tells us that God is not just, but loving, not fair but outrageously generous.
One of the world's great spiritual masters, Desmond Tutu. has learnt that love is stronger than hatred, life is stronger than death, light is stronger than darkness - so believing in the God of love we have the victory. Being victorious is not the same as winning. To win means beating others. To be victorious means not being defeated, not giving in. Vengeance means giving in to anger, hatred and the desire for revenge. What ever that it, it is not Christian.
I wonder, is there any connection between the recent glut of revenge movies and 9/11? That certainly caused profound offense, and those responsible for it have not been brought to trial. There has been no catharsis. Do we have a need for 'wild justice'? Does the popularity of this film suggest that we are in danger of failing Hamlet's test, and that by applauding the hero's adoption of his enemies lack of morality we sink to their level? Is that why I hold Zhang Yimou's film 'Hero' in such high regard?
WALL-E and the Axiom
When the film started I thought it must be a trailer for a documentary; because as the camera floats over a cityscape, it looks like photography, it’s so real. But it becomes clear that this is an animation when we slowly realist that half the skyscrapers we are looking at are in fact made of cubes of compressed rubbish, piled high between the buildings. The city is dead; there is no life here, only ruins and rubbish.
And then we see the little robot, WALL-E still busy collecting that rubbish, compacting it and stacking it. He is the only robot still working. WALL-E looks like a mechanical ET, but he is really very human. He has made himself a home, filled it with bric-a-brac, collectables, hung mobiles, and he watches videotapes and listens to music. WALL-E even has a pet; a cockroach, who followed him everywhere.
As WALL E goes about his business images pop up that remind us of another film about pollution and extinction, Blade Runner. In that film we saw huge video adverts urging people to go off world to work on other planets. In WALL E we see the same kind of ads, but now urging people to leave earth and holiday on the space cruiser, the Axiom. And indeed they have. We later learn that Axiom left Earth 700 year previously.
Now that space-cruiser is sending out ships looking for life; and one of them lands on Earth, leaving a reconnaissance robot behind. She is called Eve. WALL-E meets Eve and falls in love with her.
We have seen him watching a video of Hello Dolly, listening to the song I wants to be loved a whole life long, and when EVE arrives he knows who he wants to love him. EVE is grace and beauty in robot form. She is an I-Mac to his Amstrad. They soon start behaving like bashful teenagers; shyly exchanging names, holding hands. However when Wall E gives EVE a plant he has found she has to take it back to the Axiom; Wall E goes with her.
On that ship everything is run by robots controlled by the master computer, And here’s another film reference; this computer is obviously a son of HAL from 2001 a space odyssey. We even get music from that film to jog our memories. And like HAL this computer has secret instructions.
Even though Eve returns, like to dove to the Ark, bearing a leaf, the computer tells the captain we must survive - by doing nothing, and tries to stop him taking the ship back to earth.
So where will we find hope? In the passengers? The human beings on board? Well, we have seen them, looking like helpless pupa tended by ants, pampered and controlled, too fat to walk, spending their lives moving around on hover loungers. For 700 years generations have lived on this cruise liner, and they have adapted, or degenerated, to couch life.
But now they confound our expectations. WALL-E and EVE have brought a sign of hope, and the humans do respond to it, they overthrow the ruling computer and abandon their life of comfort and ease and set about restoring life on earth.
Now this is great fun, and very child friendly, but WALL E could be shown alongside Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth; because both are about saving ourselves from catastrophe. Of course WALL E is a parable. One reading of it is that we are treating the earth as if was our own cruise liner, that we are floating about unaware of reality. Letting things be run by systems we no longer control, destroying our living planet. Sleepwalking into disaster with our eyes wide shut. And in order to survive we must grasp the smallest sign of hope and act on it, we must rebel against the systems that resist change, and against the mind set that says we can survive by doing nothing. To do that we need hope; and we need realism.
To misquote Kipling; if you can keep your head whilst all-round you men are losing theirs, then you really haven’t grasped the seriousness of the situation. Well we must not lose our heads, but we must grasp the seriousness of the situation and then live and act in hope.
And if you think I am reading too much into a simple cartoon; ask yourself this, why is the spaceship called Axiom? An axiom is a universally recognised truth; but it is more than a truth. An axiom is something that moves our thoughts forward; it is a spur to progress and to action. Nothing we see on screen is there by accident.
