Do you want to dance - with wolves?

I watched Dances With Wolves on television last night, seeing it again for the first time since its release  in 1990.   I really enjoyed it.     This was Kevin Costner’s Directorial Debut, and it won seven Oscars, including best film and best director.     The script was developed by Michael Blake from his own novel, and Costner played an important part of the development of both.   This is obviously a story that mattered to him, and it shows.    

Dances With Wolves tells the story of an American Unionist Officer, Ltn. Dunbar,  played by Costner, who after becoming an accidental hero during the Civil War chooses for his reward an isolated  Military Post on the Western frontier, somewhere on the Dakota prairies.     When Dunbar arrives there he finds that the Post has been abandoned,  but he patiently restores  it, enjoying the peace, solitude and simplicity.  

Initially his only companions are his horse and a curious wolf, but then a Sioux Medicine Man (Kicking Bird) stumbles upon Dunbar.    Over long slow months Dunbar gets to know the Sioux, gradually winning their trust and learning some of their language.    He is attracted to a white woman, Standing With A Fist,  who has lived with the clan since she was child,  being the sole survivor of a Pawnee attack on her family.   As he gets to know these people he also learns to know himself.    

The film is deeply respectful of a way of life that is essentially reverential towards the environment, a practical and spiritual wisdom that is still embodied by many members of the remaining North American First Nations,  as I was honoured to discover when I spent some time in British Columbia.   However, in the 1860’s the frontier was inexorably moving west and eventually, inevitably,  this idyll was disturbed.  

The scope and humour, humanity and ambition of the movie, along with its unhurried exploration of character and landscape carried me through the three hour running time.   There is a four-hour version, but I think that is not for me.   

Does it have faults?  Yes.   While trying to redress the Western’s typical racism it simply turns Black hats into White and White to Black, making the Sioux uniformly  heroic and the Caucasians abhorrent;  although the Pawnee are also villainous, led by Wes Studi who later impressed in Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans.    But despite Costner’s patent admiration for the Sioux  his film really didn’t tell us much about their culture or spirituality, even if they did make him an honorary member of the tribe in thanks for it.    It is too much a  hippie Boy’s Own Story  to be taken wholly seriously, but hey,  I rather like hippie Boy’s Own Stories.   Like Aaron Sorkin I am a Romantic Idealist.  

I really enjoyed the acting.   Costner’s characteristic underplaying;  Graham Greene as Kicking Bird building a deep and complex character,  one  you could see why he was the Clan’s Holy Man;    Mary McConnell was utterly believable as Stands With A Fist,   (I thought the love story was beautifully told).    Nathan Lee Chasing His Horse played the young brave ‘Smiles a Lot’,  who clearly in love with the Dunbar - now known by the Sioux as Dances With Wolves; and  Rodney A Grant impressed as Wind In His Hair, one of the lead Braves - who may also be enamoured  of the White interloper.   Even in the 1990s it was unusual to have such an ethnic cast, and Costner – who was also a producer -  did well to procure it.    

For some reason I did not get subtitles on my TV, so I had to intuit a lot of the Sioux talk, but that wasn’t really a problem.    The flow of the stately pow-wows was  pretty clear, as was the pillow talk of Kicking Bird and his wife. 

The Western genre has been described as ‘figures in a landscape’, and both are skillfully photographed, often with just parts of the human figure seen in the foreground to emphasize the epic scale of the landscape.   There is much visual beauty here.   Dean Selby, the Australian cinematographer, had already shot the 2^ndand 3^rdMad Max movies and knew how to emphasis and humanize the vastness of the prairie as well as the desert.  One exhilarating and extended scene is the Tribe’s Buffalo hunt.    

The John Barry score is effective. - maybe too much so - and I kept wondering where I had heard one particular musical phrase before.  It was in his Stranger on the Shore.   Lazy and distracting.  

As for the downbeat ending, that was of course appropriate in historical terms,  being set not long before Gen. Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn,  a Pyrrhic victory for the Sioux that sealed their fate, but in terms of film’s particular narrative it makes little logical sense, even if it struck the right emotional tone.   

 When this film was in production some in Hollywood called it KevinGate,  expecting it to crash and burn as the product of an immature star’s inflated ego, as  Michael Cimino’s Heavens Gate had done ten years before.     They were utterly wrong.   This was a remarkable achievement for a first-time director and lead actor.   I understand that Costner is a humble and participative worker, always willing to learn from his collaborators.   I think he did a lot of learning during  the making of Dances With Wolves.   He has only directed two more movies since then, but I think this the best of them.   The three hours are worth investing.  

There is (some) good news for women making movies....

In the midst of the ongoing revelations of discrimination and abuse in the movie world, mainly concerning women, I thought it would be good to point to the fact that in the last year, and reaching into the summer, there are or will be at least forty two films directed by women,  starring female leads, sharing equal female/male billing or featuring strong female roles.       I would rate eighteen of these as significant for different reasons; some to do with their box office breakthroughs;  some for their critical success; and some for their sheer innovation.  I have not seen all of these,  but already count ten of them among my favourite recent movies.     Surely this (not my opinion but the numbers mentioned) must be good, rays of light in the dark news still being exposed.    They are, in no particular order: -

Black Panther

3 Billboards

Wonder Woman

Lady Bird

Breaking In

Revenge

Chesil Beach

A Quiet Place

Blockers

The Rider

Zama

The Spy Who Dumped Me

Barbie

I Feel Pretty

Tully

Life of the Party

A Wrinkle In Time

Calling Grace

Overboard

The Party

Tomb Raider

Mary Magdalene

Red Sparrow

Girls Trip

Star Wars; The Last Jedi

Fifty Shades Freed

The Post

The Shape of Water

Molly’s Game

I, Tonya

The Beauty and the Beast

Sing

Pitch Perfect 2

Fifty Shades

Victoria and Abdul

Ghost In The Shell.

Allure

Submergence

The Breadwinner

Bookclub 

Double Lover

Heritary

A Quiet Place.

Let’s start with the good news.  I enjoyed this movie.  It gripped me,  made me hold my breathe at times and sometimes it rather moved me.     

A Quiet Place stars Emily Blunt, and I have enjoyed every one of the movies I have seen her in from The Devil Wears Prada and Wild Target to Looper, Edge of Tomorrow, Sicario and The Girl on the Train.   I have seen ten of her movies  and here she is as good as I expect.   This movie also stars her husband, John Krasinski, best known in America for his TV role in their version of The Office and other, mainly comic,  parts.   As Blunt and Krasinski play husband and wife their natural chemistry transfers to the screen.    

We have a small cast playing a Mother, a Father and their children.    The 13 year old British actor Noah Jupe plays one of the children and Millicent Simmons their daughter.   By some coincidence Millicent was in the 2013 movie Wonderstruck, and Noah was in Wonder released in the same year.   These young actors are both utterly convincing.    

Some of you may know that Millicent is severely deaf, and her character here is also deaf, so the fictional family all use American Sign Language.    That is very helpful because the whole family has to keep very very quiet 24/7  for their own safety.    If they make a noise they are very likely to die.   

The film was shot by the Danish cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen, whose work I enjoyed in  Far from the Madding Crowd,and Girl on a Train, also starring Emily Blunt.    John Krasinski directed the film effectively and with economy.    There is no flab or spare flesh on this movie.   So there is a lot of good news here.   Mot film critics praise it highly.

However – and I guess  you knew there was a ‘however’ coming -  Krasinski  is also a co-scriptwriter, along with Bryan Woods and Scott Beck,  and here the movie falls down.   It is not the characterization, which is engaging and persuasive, nor the pacing, which is taut and builds pretty well.  But the narrative is full of holes.   

I find it interesting that most critics describe this as a horror movie.   I wish it was, because you can get away with so much more narrative silliness in horror.   Logic is not essential in a genre that does not need to be rational.    The super-natural and does not need to make logical sense as long as it frighten us.  But this is not horror.   This is Science Fiction (sf) and that genre has to make sense.     

Why is it science fiction?   Because the premise is that the world has been taken over by huge deadly insect-like creatures (presumably aliens,  thought this is never made explicit) and it proceed along the thread of ‘we have a life threatening problem, how can we survive?’ ‘Oh, yes, this is how’.    The monsters here  are presented as real not supernatural, so we need some context to make sense of their existence.  The script provides us with lazy devices to describe their arrival on Earth and its devastating effect, but does nothing to explain why humankind is so vulnerable to them.      In fact it explicitly raises the question, what is their weakness? and the answer is clear to for us all to see,  but not, it seems,  clear to any of the world’s scientists or military.     If the monsters were super-natural beings they would not have to conform to reality because they were super-natural.  But if the monsters are alien they are part of a science fiction universe that demands internal consistency in a context of hard or soft science.     

So this is a bad science fiction story dressed up as a horror story,  underlined by the way familiar  ‘horror’ story tricks are played on us one after another.    I do get rather annoyed when people simply assume that they can write sf as if it is just another narrative devise.  It is not.  It is a genre and genres have rules.     That is what defines them.

And then there are other specific plot weaknesses.    In A Quiet Place the husband and wife are obviously clever – they are among the few human survivors because they have worked out how to stay alive despite the deadly aliens -  but they do very stupid things.   I will not spoil the plot by saying what they are  but they shout out at us, in fact the narrative is driven by them.    The most stupid thing the couple do  is central to the plot.   And when they eventually find the answer to defeating the aliens it has been signaled to us long before.   How is it that no one else has worked out something so simple long before the story started?   The answer, of course, is that if they had we could not have this story to tell, but that is never justification for writing  a bad plot.   Good sf does not rest on the premise that everyone is in the world is stupid apart from the few otherwise ordinary people who inhabit the story.    

 I think there may be two reasons why the script writers got away with this genre confusion and plot silliness.     The first is that was co-written and wholly directed by the man who plays the star’s real husband,  John Krasinski,  so maybe his wife, Emily Blunt,  did  not have enough critical distance to help her real world husband by pointing out the plot’s problems.    And he had written her a juicy role, after all.   

The second is that it is produced by Michael Bay.    Now I have nothing bad to say about any of Bay’s films, because I have never seen any of them.    Not seeing them has been my informed choice.    I do however think that the Transformer movies were monster movies rather than sf,  even if the monsters were dressed up as Robots,  so maybe he doesn’t know the rules of real sf  either.   And who made the really bad decision to provide a soundtrack to this movie?   A film that is about people being very very quiet in order to survive, and that starts with a long opening sequence that is stunning  because it is soundless, does not need a musical score.    It seems that some one did not trust the movie’s central idea, and I suspect that was Mr. Bay.    There is nothing wrong with the music itself, it is exactly what you would expect in a horror movie (remembering that this is not really a horror movie) but I would love to see it with nothing but natural sound – the natural sounds that can bring very sudden death to any of the characters.  

So I enjoyed watching A Quiet Place,even if at times I almost burst out laughing at scenes that were meant to thrill me.   Laughing because they  were simply stupid.    At other times I was moved by it, and I certainly enjoyed the acting, direction and photography.      So a mixed bag, and for me a rather disappointing one.  

The Good News according to Mary Magdalene

I enjoyed watching this new film centred on Mary Magdalene.    I thought it was thoughtful, humane, well crafted and sensitively acted.   I also think it is entirely in the spirit of the Christian Gospels and give thanks that it corrects the 6^th century libel that Mary was a ‘woman of ill repute’.    I will come back to that.

No single movie can be true to the narrative of the gospels because there is no common narrative.  Each of the Gospels tells its own story, and though there are some shared elements there are also elements particular to each one,  and the overall chronologies do not agree.    There are even direct contradictions.    It is as if each Gospel has its own point of view or POV, and Biblical scholars tell us that these POVs are essentially theological,  each of them reflecting the situations of early Christian congregations in different times and different places.

   

So here we have a Gospel according to Mary Magdalene.    Although it was made by a male director, Garth Davis (2016’s Lion was his directorial debut),  it was written by two women, Helen Edmundson (who wrote The Suspicions of Mr.  Whicher for TV and then adapted Journey’s End for the screen), and Phillipa Goslett, (whose previous script was adapted from  Neil Gaiman’s story How To Talk to Girls at Parties, a rather camp sf comedy.)   This film is made from their POV,  that of womankind.    I welcome this.   After 40 years as part of the struggle for women in my own Church to be ordained as priests – and then to become Bishops – and seeing the ongoing struggle of Roman Catholic women to simply have their voices heard in the Vatican – this film is timely.

Is it a ‘feminist’ version of the gospel?   I do not think so, because many men have seen the Good News preached– and lived out – by Jesus in a similar way to that presented here.    It is the Gospel that gives us hope in the struggle to love and the determination to meet the inevitable demands of compassion and forgiveness, rather than that of the seeking after purity, which inevitably leads to failure, blame and guilt, that have so often ruled in the Churches.    But if that is a feminist reading of the Gospel I am happy for it to be so. 

It is also about the rehabilitation of Mary Magdalene.   We know very little about the Mary Magdalene of the Gospels.    Apart from the fact that she came from Magdala, a village on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, she is not described in the Gospels as the daughter of any man, wife of any man, or mother of any man.  That matters, because most women’s identity in the Gospels is defined by their relationships to a man.   Luke simply tells us that she was one of the women ‘who provided’ for Jesus and the disciples, suggesting that she was a woman of means, possibly a wealthy widow.    The Gospels agree that she was with the group of women at the crucifixion, and John says that the risen Christ appeared to her before anyone else.   Thereafter she disappeared from the record.  The Acts of the Apostles does not mention her - which is significant because it was written by Luke, the Gospel writer most sympathetic to women.   

There is, however, evidence that she was highly revered in some parts of the early Church.   Doubtless that is why a ‘Gospel according to Mary’ appeared in the 3rd century,  saying that Mary had been the most enlightened of the disciples, the one closest to Jesus, and given ‘secret visions’.     This Gospel also described the jealousy and distrust of the male disciples.    When the official canon of the New Testament was put together in the fourth century this gospel was not included.   I do not think that is because it is pro-female (though the Church was already showing signs of misogyny) but mainly because it was pro-Gnosticism.  

Gnosticism was the movement in the early church that followed in the steps of Greek ‘mystery’ religions by making their faith one of secrets, secrets only disclosed to those initiated.   This was the kind of spiritual Freemasonry that the early church rejected.   For them (and for me) the teachings and gospel of Jesus were open, not closed.     Gnosticism also promoted the idea that the material world and human bodies were wicked, only the Spirit was good, a dualism that denied the sacredness of all Creation.  

And then in the late 6^th century Pope Gregory libeled Mary Magdalene, saying that she was ‘the woman of ill repute’ who came into the house of Simon the Pharisee as he was entertaining Jesus, and washed Jesus feet, drying them with her hair and perfuming them with expensive oil (Luke chapter 7.)   That assumption has no Biblical evidence to support it, but it stuck.  This ‘Fallen Mary’ became the subject of many paintings,  in most of which she is beautiful, often red-headed, and usually exposing a breast.    Any excuse for a bit of Church approved lasciviousness.  And of course this ‘Mary’ provided a counterpoint to Mary the mother of Jesus.   The Virgin and the Whore.  This film provides another plausible back-story  for her – and in a post Credits note firmly rejects Gregory’s libel. 

So what of the film itself?   Rooney Mara is Mary, a young woman of independent spirit, not willing to follow the traditional path of an early arranged marriage and serial motherhood.    In her time, and sadly even is some places today,  such an independent ‘spirit’ would be seen by her family (especially by the male members) as evil, something that needs to be cast out.   In Mary they hear that the Rabbi Jesus is a healer and ask him to help exorcise her.   But Jesus tells her ‘there are no demons here’, and his absolute acceptance is enough for her to leave Magdala and follow him.    She is with him to the end.    This movie is from her POV and Rooney Mara is quietly convincing in the role.  

The film is also quietly convincing.    Jesus himself, portrayed by Joachim Phoenix, is also quiet - but often intense.    One critic, Alexander Blanchett,  complained that “He played Jesus too rough and too edgy.  I mean edgy is good, but he often felt like a homeless vagabond preaching around with his not less weird followers.”   I don’t have any problem with that, and prefer it to Tab Hunter, Max von Sydow,  of even Robert Powell.     I think that Phoenix’s interpretation is entirely believable as he moves from compassion (his scenes with Mary are tender but with no hint of eroticism) to rage.   

Jesus’ Gospel of the Kingdom is simple, but it was not heard by the disciples who were looking for a political Kingdom, led by King Jesus after a popular rebellion against the Romans by the people.   Jesus and Mary see the Kingdom as simple obedience to the God of Love, achieved  not by violence but by forgiveness.   A Kingdom is a state where people live in willing obedience to their King.    

In order not to prioritize  any one of the four Gospels there are no ‘words from the Cross’ here.    The Gospels do not agree on what they were.   But Mary is there, in silent communion with her lord.   So is Mary the mother of Jesus, a mother who has already prepared herself to let go of her beloved son.   For some reason the woman who plays mother Mary is not credited.

There are subtle touches of scholarship in this script.   Jesus tells those he (and the disciples) baptize that his is the baptism Jesus received from John, and they are baptized ‘into Light’.   It is often suggested that John the Baptist was part of the Essene Community at Qumran,  where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.   These men were associated with ritual cleansing by bathing/baptism and with the title of Sons of Light, so John and Jesus may well have used that form of baptismal liturgy.  

Some have complained that the film is slow and ‘passionless’.   That is also fine by me.  I see no hint in the gospels that Jesus was in a hurry.    But his healings are deeply passionate.  When he brings the (un-named) Lazarus back to life it is as if he is dying himself, giving of his own self until he is exhausted, spent.   Of course we know that later he will be utterly ‘spent.’  

When Jesus goes into the Temple it is not only the trading that disturbs him, but the sacrifices.   When he sees the sacrificial lamb’s blood there is an almost subliminal flash of the Crucifixion.    I do not want another Mel Gibson version of the Passion dwelling on the agony of Jesus.    I really did not want the first.   Jesus does not matters to me because of his suffering and death, but because of his life and teaching.    I do not follow Jesus because he ‘suffered in death’ but because he lived in love.    His gospel of unconditional – and therefor always forgiving – love undermined the business of the 1^st century Jewish Temple, where people bought God’s forgiveness by making sacrifices.    I think that is why the High Priests needed Jesus out of the way.      I do not blame the Jewish authorities for that.   I am sure they believed that their sacrificial rituals were truly holy and according to the mind of God.   I think they were trying to defend God from Jesus’ blasphemy.   But I also believe that they were wrong, and that defending God can so often lead us astray – in Judaism, Christianity or any other faith.   Whatever God may be does not need defending.   

But nor do I accept the doctrine that God needed Jesus to die on the Cross for our salvation.    I do not think it was the Jews or the Romans that killed Jesus.  It was us, humankind.    We either willed it, complied with it, ignored it or – and this is where I stand apart from more orthodox Christian theology – now have persuaded ourselves that it was God’s will, not ours.    But as a prominent theologian once said of the resurrection, We willed that Jesus should die,  but God said ‘No’. 

It is so easy to project onto God – or Jesus – our own needs.  Judas (in a touching performance by Tahar Rahim) does so in this film,  looking to Jesus to bring in the End Time, when the dead will rise from their graves.   The dead include Judas’s own wife and child.    That is why he is so committed, so hopeful, and so impatient.  When Jesus does not seem to be in a hurry to ‘bring in the Kingdom’, or too frightened by the means needed to it, Judas does what he can to speed it on.   

There have been a number of theatrical interpretations of Judas and his motives over the last 50 years, from Dennis Potter’s  Son of Man to Tim Rice’s  Jesus Christ; Superstar.  Over the years I have produced/directed both of these in Churches in one form or another.  I do not I think that either of their answers to the ‘Judas Question’  is necessarily right, but enjoyed them because they open up a question that has haunted Christianity for two thousand years.

I do not want to end without mentioning   Chiwetel Ejiofor who plays Peter.  Ejiofor is a star who does not mind playing supporting roles, and always plays them well.  The music is composed by the late Jóhann Jóhannsson, with Hildur Guðnadóttir whose joint work on Arrival was so important.   Greig Fraser shot this movie, as he did Garth Davis’ Lion.   Their work enhances this film, which has a continuity of tone in sympathy with the script and acting.

 Reading other critiques of this movie, especially those voicing disappointment with it, I wonder what it was these critics were looking for?    A reflection of their own ‘personal Jesus’?    Excitement?   Blood?   Dramatic miracles?   Sex?  Angelic choirs?   A more groomed Jesus?   Some other version of Mary of Magdala?  

I am not surprised that the more positive critiques have been written by women.  

I think this film provides a fresh perspective,  seeing Jesus through another pair of eyes,  and this POV may support, question or challenges our own views.    I welcome that.