Grace and Danger. Tree of Life revisited (again!)

In Terrence Malick’s  film The Tree of Life we learn of the death of a 19 year old boy, known as RL.   Most of the film in concerned with his elder brother, Jack, and the spiritual crisis he experiences on an anniversary of RL’s death.  But at the beginning of the film we are with his mother, and her immediate response to this tragedy.  She loves God,  and has been taught that ‘those who follow the way of Grace come to no harm.’   She believes that we have to choose between Grace and Nature,  nature ‘red in tooth and claw’.  But her teenage boy was full of Grace, and he has come to harm,  he is dead.

The mother questions God, but God makes no verbal reply.   Instead Malick offers us a visually spectacular 15 minute sequence telling of the creation of the Universe, the formation of planets and the emergence and evolution of life.    Some find this section of the film incomprehensible, or irrelevant.    Having seen and discussed this film many times I offer this, my response to it,  putting these words into the mouth of the Creator.

******

Your child has died.  This is tragic.  Because you love your child you scream and grieve and weep and rage and question.    

You question me, asking

Why?

Did I know?

Where was I?

What do you mean to me?

Let me answer you.

You conceived your child in love, carried him in hope, birthed him in joy and pain.    You were pregnant for nine months.    I waited nine billion years for life to be conceived on planet Earth.   And four billion years more before it could give birth to you, my children, made in my own image.    You too were conceived in love, carried in hope, birthed in joy and pain. 

Life itself is my Creation gift to you, and it takes time.   Just as your beloved child grew slowly, cell by cell within your womb, my universe also grew slowly.     I spoke and the Universe sprang into existence, and then particle by particle, photon by photon, atom by atom, element by element, grain by grain, it grew within my womb. 

My womb?     Where else?  There was and is nowhere outside me, beyond me, outwith me, so the only place my universe could be is within me.    That genesis created everything you see and know, and everything you cannot see and will never know.    

Gravity was in my left hand and randomness in my right,  and these tools brought order out of chaos,  and then life out of the inanimate.      I created my Universe to live and to bear life itself, and more – life that is in my own image, the image of love.     Giving, self-giving, compassionate, forgiving love.  Love that cares,  love that hurts and grieves.    Grieves because there is no creation without destruction and no life without death.   That is the story of this Universe.   

Every atom in your body was created in the furnace at the heart of some distant sun.    Hydrogen and helium, the only atoms in that first moment,  had to be remade there, fused together under unimaginable pressure to form oxygen, carbon,  nitrogen, iron, calcium and phosphorus,  potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine and magnesium.  You need all of these elements to simply be.    These suns burned for billions of years and then they had to die, burn out, explode and seed the interstellar space with these new atoms.    Atoms that gathered under gravity’s gentle push, gathered and clumped, formed dust clouds, then rocks, asteroids and planets.    

How many planets have to form before one can be a cradle for life?    The number would be meaningless to you, as would the trillions of minute actions and reactions needed for these earth-bound atoms to be combined and recombined, to mutate as randomness did its amazing work,  countering entropy by bringing order out of chaos, complexity out of simplicity, forming chemical compounds, amino acids, bacteria,  single and multi-celled beings;  all your ancestors.    Some think that evolution is not miraculous, but that is only because they want miracles to be instantaneous.    My Creation miracle took thirteen billion years, and turned hydrogen and light into love.   Is that not miraculous enough?

You were taught that you must choose between Grace and Nature.   That is a false dichotomy.    You thought that your child could escape the dangers of Nature by choosing Grace.    But Grace needs a natural form to inhabit.   Grace needs the cradle of Nature to find a home in.    And do not presume that you are the only living things capable of Grace.

You are compassionate. You feel the pain of others.  The suffering of others stirs deep feelings, often of anger, in your hearts.   Of course you want a world where there is no suffering.  Sometimes when you see suffering you call it evil and are angry with me.  

How can a loving God allow such suffering?      They blame me for allowing harmful as well as beneficent bacteria to evolve, or for allowing the movement of tectonic plates to cause earthquakes.   Some would like me to temporarily suspend the laws of gravity when falling objects hurt, or when falling hurts bodies.    Some people seem to want fire that does not burn, water that does not drown.      To eat without killing.   But do you think that if I could have created you, and your beloved children, without suffering and death being part of it, without Nature being as it is, without your Universe being as it is, I would not have done so?   

I also have to live, like you,  with the necessary randomness that makes life possible and unpredictable.    Randomness and gravity, my necessary creative tools,  mean that life is fraught with  danger.   Maybe that danger makes it precious.   Would I not have spared myself the waiting, the dying, the grieving, if I could?   

If you look at Nature and hate it, and me, if you blame me and fear me, reject me for the death and loss and destruction you see in the world,  then before you condemn me, consider this.   It has taken your kind half a million years to learn how to take atoms apart.    How long do you think it would take you to put them back together, to create them, to create enough to make your own Universe,  and to breath life and love into your creation?    How long would it take you to make a Universe in your own image, because you despise this one, made in mine?

Your husband is an inventor, proud of the patents for his devices.   I am proud of my devices too.    Your eldest son is an architect.  He knows that form has to follow function.     Function dictates form.      Otherwise building fall apart.     I am the architect of the Universe, and it also has a function.    Love is that function; to love and to be loved.  

This Universe has become aware, and has learnt to love.   It took thirteen thousand million years for you to learn this, in your tiny corner, but in all that time my Universe has not fallen apart.    It is well made.    And just as your child grew from its conception as a single cell, with no interference from you, save sustenance, my Universe grew from a single moment, just one event, and grew to what it is, with no interference from me, save sustenance.  As it is, it was from the beginning.

Oh yes, I know some believe I could create this Universe and all living things in days, not billions of years,  and  make you out of mud in an instant.   They wonder why I did not make a Universe in which there was no suffering.   Maybe I could have done so.   It would be a different Universe.   And in such a Universe would you be truly human?   Would you have your capacity for costly love, for compassion, for Grace.   Would you be made in my image?   Would you be so intimately connected to the whole of creation?      And could I be truly incarnate?    At One with you?   

Your beloved son has died, and you grieve.  How many of my beloved have I seen die?     If you believe that I love, then you know that I grieve for your boy too, and for every living thing.     You live today in the shadow of his death.   Because I gave you the capacity to choose love and Grace I had to also give you the capacity to turn away from them.   So I too live in the shadow of death.   The death of the Cross, of the Holocaust, of Hiroshima, of the Gulags and the Killing Fields.    I live in the darkness cast by the fear that lives in the heart of every child, every woman, every man subjected to abuse, to violence, to hatred.     These are not my actions, but yours.

You grieve for what you value.     So add this to the value of your boy.  In him his elder  brother, Jack, found me.   Found the love and trust and forgiveness and Grace – and the creativity – that are my image.   For RL, his brother, your child and mine, lived and lives in love.   All who live in love live in me.  And I live in them.    In all eternity.    

Because you love your child you grieve and weep and rage and question, asking

Why?  

Because there is no other way.

Did I know?  

Yes.

Where was I?  

With you.  Within you.

What do you mean to me?  

Everything.

The Dame in the Van.

In the last month I have seen two wonderful films, with two remarkable central performances by actresses who could hardly be more different;  Saoirse Ronan and Maggie Smith.   Both films were drawn from original material by two great writers,  Colm Toibin and Alan Bennett.   How luck am I?

I have already written about Brooklyn, and Saoirse Ronan’s pellucid portrayal of a young Irish woman.   In The Lady in the Van we have Dame Maggie Smith acting with so much skill, honed over the last six decades, that we do not notice it, as she simply ‘becomes’ Miss Shepherd, the woman who lived on Allan Bennett’s front drive for fifteen years in a series of camper vans. 

Bennett resisted writing about his rent-free lodger while she was alive. When she eventually departed this world he wrote the play from which he adapted this script.  On stage it was directed by Nicolas Hytner  (who also directed Bennett’s The History Boys  and The Madness of King George III) and starred Maggie Smith.   That was fifteen years ago, and Dame Maggie was then nearer the age of Miss Shepherd.      How she managed the physicality of this role is amazing, climbing into and out of her Coomber van time after time, negotiating an interior crammed with the necessities and detritus of years of occupancy. 

At first the van was parked directly outside Alan Bennett’s house in Camden Town, in London, an area of Victorian villas  slowly being ‘gentrified’ by middle class owners.      Most of them tolerated Miss Shepherd, despite her almost tangible body odour and eccentricity.     Some of them treated her kindly, but they were never rewarded with thanks.    Anything and everything that was given to her she regarded as her due right.   She was sure that people only did such things to feel better about themselves.   She may have been right.  Allan Bennett is clear that when he invited her to move her van from the road and onto his property it benefited him, getting it out of his line of sight, out of the way of pedestrians and stopping the noisy  altercations that sometimes erupted around her.    He thought both of them would have a quieter life.    He said she could stay for three months, until she got herself sorted out.  She stayed for fifteen years.    Never, in all this time, did she thank him.   Bennett writes that “I am sure (she) didn’t think it was kindness if she ever gave it a thought. …to her parking on my drive was a favour she was doing me, not the other ways round.  To have allowed herself to be grateful would have been a chink in her armour, braced as she always was against the world.”

Miss Shepherd (though that prove not to be her real name) was an intelligent and educated woman.  Slowly, over the years before and after her death, Alan Bennett pieced together a few scattered fragments of her life.   She had trained as a concert pianist, spoke good French, had been a nun, twice.   She had been 'sectioned' early in in her adult life and committed to a mental institution.   She was sure that she was regularly visited by the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that world leaders, both spiritual and secular, sought her advice.   She also carried a huge burden of guilt, and would serially confess her sin.    She wrote pamphlets (some of which are now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford).  

Bennett has slightly fictionalized his experience of living next to her.   On stage, and now screen,  we see two Bennett’s, one of them living the life, the other observing it and writing – or not writing – about it.   One struggling with Miss Shepherd’s demands, the other witnessing the internal and external tussles.     Bennett has written the testy interior dialogue and Jennings plays out both sides  wonderfully.   

Bennett has replaced his real neighbours with fresh ones, apart from the very real Ursula Vaughn Williams, the widow of the composer, played on screen by Frances de la Tour.   Frances previously appeared in Bennett’s film The History Boys, along with Dominic Cooper, James Corden and Russell Tovie, who all make tiny appearances here.    He also invented unctuous blackmailing retired policeman,  played here by another great British Treasure, Jim Broadbent.    Great casting throughout.

Maggie Smith recently said that when she arrived on set for the first time and  passed by Alan Bennett she muttered to him ‘Thanks a million.’   Amen to that, and the same to you Dame Maggie.     

Who's Who on The Bridge of Spies?

This review is in two parts.   The film is ‘based on a true story’.    In the second part of this review I will ask ‘Who was Rudolph Abel?  and look at  the remarkable story that the movie does not tell about the true identity of the spy eventually swapped on the Bridge of Spies.  

Spielberg’s new film is as masterly as ever.  Much more masterly, I suggest,  than some of his more recent offerings.    It is constructed with immense care,  artfully but unobtrusively set and lit.   Every frame is skilfully  composed,  shot by Janusz Kaminski (Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List and Catch Me If You Can)  from a sharp script by the British Matt Charman and the Coen brothers.    The evocation of the late 1950’s and early 60’s is spot on.    It also has two remarkable acting performances.    Thomas Newman’s music is sometimes a little invasive,  but there is a wonderful opening sequence, which is wordless and unaccompanied.

Bridge of Spies  tells the story of the capture by the FBI of a Soviet spy, Colonel Rudolph Abel,  in the late 1950’s, and how he was later swapped for the American U2 spy-plane pilot,  F. Gary Powers.    Tom Hanks plays Jim Donovan, a lawyer who had worked for the prosecution at the Nurenberg Trials,  now appointed to defend the spy.    Mark Rylance, in his first major film role, plays the spy.  

But this film is not primarily about the spy.  It is about the American lawyer, Donovan, chosen to defend him at what was always going to be a ‘show trial’, but who did so with remarkable integrity and courage,  knowing the public would despise him for his role.    Although Able was found guilty and sentenced to 30 years imprisonment he was spared execution.    The film suggests that Donovan made the argument to the presiding Judge that this Russian should be kept alive as one day he might be a useful pawn to swap if any American spy was caught by the Soviets.  This proved to be the case.    Four years later Donovan was asked by the U. S.  Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles,  to work with the CIA and secretly negotiate the swap of Abel for Powers.    

Donovan again conducted himself with courage and integrity, insisting to the CIA and the East Germans that a young American student, Frederick Pryor,  should also be included in the swap.  The Berlin Wall was being constructed and Pryor had just been arrested by the East German Stasi on the wrong side of the Wall.    The film tells us that the CIA were not at all concerned about this young man’s fate, but Donovan insisted, and  the Stasi eventually agreed.   So an individual American’s humanity and courage triumphed once again despite the heartlessness of Governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain.   Just as in Private Ryan Pryor was saved by the American Hero personified by Tom Hanks.   And the Soviet spy’s life was also saved.

After the initial arrest of Abel Tom Hanks is centre stage.    We see a little of Powers, who is never portrayed as a hero.     Like the other U2 ‘drivers’ he was given explicit instructions on how to destroy the top-secret spy plane if it might fall into enemy hands, and given the means to self-destruct if he was likely to fall into enemy hands himself.   He failed to do so.    We are not told how much he revealed to his interrogators,  but I suspect he did not have a lot to reveal.

Tom Hanks plays Donovan with his customary skill, making an otherwise ordinary man quietly heroic, in the mold of a Jimmy Stewart character in a Capra movie or, more precisely,  Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch.   Hanks has done this many times before – and so, of course, has Spielberg.    I rather like the fact that an actor who is hardly handsome or sexy or has been an action movie hero, is actually the biggest box office draw in Hollywood.  They say his films have grossed 11 billion dollars. 

And what about the casting of the Englishman Mark Rylance as Rudolph?     It seems that when Rylance was approached by Spielberg twenty years ago he chose the Shakepearian stage instead.    I am delighted tht he accepted this role, and he has now been cast in Spielberg’s upcoming BFG.    Hanks recently remarked that  Rylance ‘ has a great future.’   I wonder if he knows how great a past he has.     Rylance is a luminary on stage – and was of course the star of the BBC’s six part adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, but this is his first major film role.     Rylance can play ‘big’ if he wants to, as when playing Johnny ‘Rooster’  Byron in the award winning West End and Broadway hit  Jez Buttersworth's  Jerusalem.   But he can also play small, doing so little that every tiny inflection or facial shift catches our attention and tells us something significant.     He is perfectly cast here.    Surely a Best Supporting Actor nomination is on its way.   If he wins do listen to his speech.  Rylance does not do the expected thing when receiving awards. 

The Bridge’s script helps Rylance’s minimalism.   He says very little.   He says nothing that is unimportant.    His repeated response when asked by Donovan if he is worried  is “Would it help?”   That is wonderful.   Someone knows that being a spy is like raising teenage children - in this at least - when things look like going badly wrong it is far too late to start worrying.   You simply have to trust the work you did before, in the case of teenagers during those early years when you were bringing them up,  in the case of a spy the trade-craft employed when setting up your legend (your false identity) and the routines and systems to protect it.   In both cases you also have to trust those who support you.   Your family or your employers.   Abel had done the best he could.      Although he had been betrayed by his deputy he would not sell out to his captors.    If this loyalty cost him his life, so be it.  

The script is clear about the nature of Abel’s trial.   He was bound to be found guilty and nothing was going to stop that, including the carelessness of the FBI who failed  to get a  warrant for the search that revealed  his trove of  spying equipment.      The judge chose to ignore this legal lapse.    This obviously has  a contemporary relevance, and Spielberg is forthright is his criticism of extra-legal procedures in Camp X. 

There is nothing gung ho here and there are no grandstanding acting performances.   Even Donovan’s performance when appealing the conviction in The Supreme Court is cut short  (maybe a bad editing choice?).     All the actors  simply gets on with their jobs, from Amy Ryan as Donovan’s wife,  Alan Alder as his boss,  Dakin Matthews as the presiding judge,  Sebastian Koch as the svelte East German official Donovan has to deal with in East Berlin – a lovely counterpoint to his role in The Lives of Others’ -  Mikhail Gorevoy  as the head of the KGB in Berlin is properly oleaginous.   Scott Shepherd is the rat-faced CIA man we love to hate.   Austin Stowel as Gary Powers is really a no more than a cypher, but the film is never about him.      He is a pawn in this game.   He is never the hero.    Donovan is.   Abel was also a hero however, as Donovan pointed out to the court.   A brave and true soldier in a Cold War.     

Some critics have complained about the film’s length.  I was surprised afterwards to learn that it is 141 minutes .   It did not feel like it.    It is a remarkable movie, and I strongly recommend it.

But who was Rudolph Abel?

It seems that there is a truer and even more interesting  story not told here.    The man caught by the FBI was not Colonel Rudolph Abel, but Colonel Willie Fisher.    A recent article by Simon Armstrong of the BBC (28/11/15) refers to  Vin Arthey’s book Abel: The True Story of the Spy They Traded for Gary Powers,  and David Saunders, a professor of Russian history at Newcastle University has also researched the full story of the spy's childhood and career.    Wikipedia also provides details of his career. 

According to a book by the Soviet former spy Kirill Khenkin Fisher was born on North Tyneside on the 11^th July 1903.   Sanders has seen his birth certificate.   Fisher’s  ethnically German parents were Russian Communist  agitators, forced to flee Russian at the turn of the century.    After the Revolution the family returned to Russia and Fisher  joined the Red Army.   He spoke English, Russian, German, Polish and Yiddish and was a gifted Radio Operator.    During the Battle of Stalingrad he played a crucial part  in an important fuhlspiel,  using false radio transmissions to convince the German High Command that one of their battle groups was operating behind Soviet lines and persuading them to send reinforcements.     This was a deadly trap that cost the Germans dearly.      Arthey considers this to be the most significant event of his career.

After the war Fisher was trained in further spy-craft and rose in the ranks of the KGB.   In 1953 he was sent to New York with a false identity to take over the Soviet spy network in the USA,  "The FBI was working hard to disrupt Soviet spy rings, but Fisher kept the show on the road” writes Arthey,  “I don't think his job was seeking out military secrets, but he was an important cog in the wheel that got information back to Russia."   He may also have been regrouping the penetration of the nuclear research site at Los Alamos.   The arrest of the Atom Spies, the Rosenbergs, had thrown this mission into a spin.     Willies’ chief operator there was Kitty Harris,  another English born Communist spy  previously trained by Willie. (Wiki)    But his deputy Reino Hayhanen was incompetent.   Under the threat of being sent back to Moscow he defected and told the Americans everything he knew.    Despite the cut-outs and the fact that Hayhanen did not even know his boss’s name (standard practice) Fisher was eventually arrested by the FBI and charged on three counts. 

At this point Willie Fisher showed what a good spy he was.    He told the FBI/CIA that he was Colonel Rudolph Abel of the KGB.   The CIA knew such an officer existed, but they did not know that he had recently died in Moscow.     So now the KGB knew that their main man in the  USA had been arrested, but that the CIA did not know his real identity.   Willie Fisher maintained this pretense during the four years he spent in prison before he was swapped for Capt. Gary Powers,  shot down over Russia in 1960.

Fisher had cleverly signaled to his superiors that he had not revealed his true identity.   He had not defected or betrayed his greatest secret.   The KGB bosses would decide if they believed him.   This would be  a question of life or death if he was swapped, but there was nothing more he could do.    Worrying would not help.     The film leaves his fate unclear, and rather suggests that it would not be positive.   In fact he was rewarded for his loyalty,  paraded as a hero in the KGB, and died in his bed in 1971.  

Steven Spielberg’s new movie tells of the arrest, trial and eventual release of this spy, but does not reveal this ultimate deception.     Nor do Spielberg and the script writers make it clear that Fisher was in jail for over four years before the swap.

All this must have been known by the film makers, as attested by the way Mark Rylance speaks his lines in rather Scottish, rather than Geordie,  accent.     "I've met everybody who knew him as an English speaker," says Dr Arthey.  "They said he didn't speak anything like [a Geordie]. The best we've got is that he spoke with a kind of Scots-Irish accent, which he told people was down to being brought up by an aunt in Boston.  Abel died in Moscow… where his remains were interred at the city's Donskoy Monastery.   His tombstone bore his birth name of William Fisher - the identity that was never exposed during his captivity.”     

Professor Saunders says “We make a lot in this country about Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five, but those British spies didn't have any rank in the KGB.   Abel is the only British-born ranking officer in Soviet external security services that we know of.”

It seems that Willie Fisher was much more remarkable in life than he is in this film.    Despite his politics I feel rather proud of him.