Musings

Apocalypto (2006)

2012-02-23T07:19:00.000-08:00

Jaguar Paw & Mel Gibson

Apocalypto is the fourth film directed by Mel Gibson (and only the second to be written, directed and produced by him). Having seen Apocalypto recently for only the second time, I was reminded of just how good Gibson is at what he does.

The narrative largely unfolds in a jungle, and if the spoken Yucatec Mayan language is any indication, Apocalypto is likely taking place in south-eastern Mexico (or perhaps northern Belize). Likely set in the early sixteenth century, I recognize a certain anachronism in speaking of a Mexico or a Belize long before either would have been identified as such.

The film begins with a number of Mayan tribesmen hunting in a forest. After successfully catching an animal, the tribesmen are encountered by a group of persons whose community has been attacked and who seek to pass through the jungle. Unaware of their own impending doom, the community to which the Mayan tribesmen belong has only one more night of peace before they too will be attacked by warriors in search of persons who will eventually be sacrificed to the god Kukulkan. Before being captured, the Mayan tribesman Jaguar Paw succeeds in hiding his wife Seven, and their son Turtles Run. Lowering them into a deep cave, the pregnant Seven and Turtles Run are outside of immediate danger but have no means of escape. A good deal of Apocalypto surrounds the attempts of Jaguar Paw to return and save his wife and son.

On their last night of peace, the Mayan community gathers around an old man who tells them a story of Man “drenched deep in sadness:” In the story, the animals, not liking the sight of the man so sad, approach him and invite him to seek from them whatever he wishes. Asking for sight, the man receives it from the vulture. Seeking strength, the jaguar then shares his with the man. The man, wanting to know the secrets of the earth, finds in the serpent the reply: ‘I will show them to you.’ The story teller continues: "And so it went with all the animals. And when the Man had all the gifts that they could give, he left. Then the owl said to the other animals: ‘Now the Man knows much and is able to do many things. Suddenly I am afraid.’ The deer said: ‘The Man has all that he needs. Now his sadness will stop.’ But the owl replied: ‘No. I saw a hole in the Man. Deep like a hunger he will never fill. It is what makes him sad and what makes him want. He will go on taking and taking until one day the World will say: ‘I am no more and I have nothing left to give.’"

A deep hole within the human person; deep like a hunger he will never fill. It is what makes him sad and what makes him want. One could easily read the story environmentally insofar as it holds out the concern that the human person will exploit his or her surroundings so greatly that, one day, such surroundings will no longer be life giving. However, I was struck by something rather different.

In biblical times, the sins committed by each Israelite over the course of a year would be, in a general sort of way, annually confessed by the high priest and symbolically transferred to a goat designated to carry such sins. The (scape)goat would then be cast into the wilderness and the Israelites would have a sense of having being cleansed and having been reconciled to God.

Trends in anthropology identify the relationship between desire and imitation as a most basic source of conflict. The story the old man tells anticipates conflict insofar as the man, perhaps, sees his fellow animals in possession of things he lacks. Think of how food or shelter must have existed as some of the strongest desires within the earliest communities and how a shared desire for food or shelter might have even have been the occasion for the formation and growth of communities: Might a person or a couple of persons, perhaps, have once set out in search of food and shelter and been encountered by another or by others who imitated (to the extent that they shared) that same desire for food or shelter?

What would have happened, though, when either a real or a perceived limitation in food or shelter became apparent? As a mechanism to avoid constant warring, or a relatively larger scale conflict, when conflicts between individuals became apparent to the wider community, persons would move in the direction of the one they perceived to be stronger. Others would follow in imitation and before too long a person or a group of persons would be abandoned. Such persons would become vulnerable to accusation, and once the community had projected some sort of guilt onto the lone individual or group of persons, the community would then feel justified in killing, stigmatizing or driving out the victim.

Why this talk of scapegoating? Others have observed a relationship between Apocalypto and scapegoating insofar as two significant scenes surround such a mechanism. The first of these two scenes, when considering the violence found therein, is not particularly subtle. It surrounds human sacrifice. Under the guise of appeasing this god Kukulkan, members of the captured Mayan community begin to be sacrificed. One gets the impression that representatives of the sacrificial establishment have some anticipation of an eclipse which will occur, and know that the sun will become visible thereafter. Their system of sacrifice seems built around the private knowledge of a few, and with such knowledge the impression has been created that the sacrifices are meritorious. One representative even says: “Rejoice! Kukulkan has drunk his fill of blood. We have sated his thirst.” Those watching cheer, as they are made to believe that the problems which surround them (like the famine and plague, for example) will diminish.

The second scene is more significant and easier to pass over. It takes place in the context of the arrival of the Europeans. One such European, a representative of the Christian religion, holds a cross as the boat he occupies approaches the sands upon which Jaguar Paw kneels. About a month ago in the Lectionary, prior to the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry, Jesus was in the desert. The desert, remember, was the destination of a scapegoat. Might Jesus’ presence in the desert foreshadow the way in which his own community will make him a scapegoat? As Caiaphas says in the Gospel of John: “It is to your advantage that one man should die for the people, rather than that the whole nation should perish.”

In the Gospel of Mark, as Jesus’s reputation spreads, and as his authority is presented as eclipsing that of the religious leadership, a conflict is brewing, and an important question surrounds who the community will imitate. After only one week of Jesus’ public ministry we are told that representatives of the religious leadership and the political leadership --- two unlikely allies --- have come together to discuss how to destroy Jesus. Shortly thereafter, the rumours begin to spread: Jesus derives his power from forces of evil, it is claimed. In taking the side of victims in the Gospel (victims of a scapegoating establishment), as Jesus has done in his first week of public ministry, it is only a matter of time before Jesus will become one himself.

I don't know how Mel Gibson understands Christ. Perhaps Gibson feels that the Mayan attempts to appease one of their gods anticipates the way in which Christ’s death will satisfy God. Perhaps Gibson feels that just as the problems which surround the Mayan people are hoped to diminish once their god has been appeased, so also reconciliation can only occur between an appeased God and a sinful human race once Jesus has died for such a race. To repeat, I don't know if this is how Gibson understands Christ, but certainly such sinister understandings of God are not without precedent throughout Christian history.

A result of following Christ should be the taking the side of victims. Risk exists in doing so. One's good reputation, bestowed by the community, might find itself beyond repair. Forces which have made one person a victim might then turn on those who have chosen to side with the oppressed. That part of being a Christian, I imagine, is difficult. Perhaps what might be even more difficult is the preservation of the dignity of those who oppress. Jesus does not destroy the communities in the Gospels who perpetuate this cycle of violence. Instead, he provides the example of his own person --- the example of a person taking the side of a victim --- and he offers it to the community for imitation. He is reversing the cycle of violence, and as it is imitated a new cycle is being created.

Does Apocalypto seek to present Jesus as reversing the violence perpetuated in sacrifice? I doubt it. Nonetheless, in at least two significant scenes an understanding of the mechanism of scapegoating can complement whatever message Gibson wanted to emerge.

SUPER (2011)

2012-02-12T12:19:00.000-08:00

SUPER, a peculiar 2011 film directed by James Gunn, brings together two emerging actors I very much enjoy.

The first of these is Rainn Wilson (Dwight Schrute of The Office) who plays a cook named Frank D’Arbo. Frank sees himself as a real loser. In a particularly authentic scene, the viewer is given a glimpse of a prayer Frank offers: “Other people have goodness. They have good things; they have love and tenderness, people who care about their lives. They’re not humiliated at every turn. Other people have things God.” Frank owns only two moments which have brought him pleasure, and one of these, his marrying a recovering addict named Sarah, has unraveled.

In fact, the happenings of SUPER are precipitated by the sudden departure of Sarah. Previous to her leaving Frank, Jacques (played by Kevin Bacon) arrives on Frank’s door. Jacques asks for Sarah's whereabouts, and Frank, oblivious to the fact that Jacques has succeeded in luring Sarah from him, agrees to share his breakfast with the man. Film critic Roger Ebert, while no fan of SUPER, nonetheless congratulates Bacon for his performance, noting his is a character “who visits as if an ambassador from another, better, movie.”

It’s a great line, and perhaps it’s true, but SUPER is not a bad film. It’s “pretty dark, it’s pretty messed up, [and] it’s got a twisted sense of humour,” to quote Rainn Wilson, but it is not a bad film. The violence is strong and bloody, the language is pervasive, and in at least one scene, sexual in nature, there is a certain moral ambiguity. If features such as these are beyond the toleration of a particular viewer, then Super will be also. This film is not for everyone, but it’s not a bad film.

However, it is difficult to say how good it is. What redeemed SUPER, for me, was the remarkably dark turn the film took in its last fifteen minutes or so (and Wilson’s performance during these moments), but what makes SUPER difficult to evaluate, overall, is that the intention of writer and director James Gunn, against which his final product should be judged, is not the easiest to discern.

This is not your typical superhero movie. Upon losing Sarah, something really does seem to snap in Frank’s brain. A religious experience motivates his decision to become a superhero. I mentioned that SUPER brings together two actors I very much enjoy, and noted the first of these is Rainn Wilson. The other is Ellen Page. Frank’s decision to make up his own superhero brings him into contact with Libby (Page’s character), a clerk at a local comic book who is in need of even more psychiatric attention than Frank. Frank settles on a red spandex suit and a large wrench to sport as a weapon, and thereafter brings his brand of vigilante justice to his surroundings.

If you have seen SUPER then pass along your thoughts. This little post serves more to bring attention to the film, to those of you who haven't seen SUPER, than to engage critically with its themes.

K.

For the Bible Tells Me So (2007)

2012-01-30T13:50:00.000-08:00

For the Bible Tells Me So, (available here), a documentary written and directed by Daniel Karslake, interacts with five different families. In each family, a member has come forth and revealed him or herself as a gay or lesbian person, and as each family is a Christian one, For the Bible Tells Me So unfolds the relationship between a gay or lesbian loved one and the larger Christian community and its sacred text which stigmatizes such persons.

Some of the gay or lesbian persons within these five families might be known to viewers (for example, Gene Robinson, the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, or Chrissy Gephardt, the daughter of 2004 American presidential candidate Dick Gephardt) but others will be less generally known. For the Bible Tells Me So does not rely on the fame of the families or persons interviewed.

The Robinson, Poteat, Reitan, Gephardt and Wallner families are from Kentucky, North Carolina, Minnesota, Washington D.C., and Arkansas, respectively. They are five loving families (which is not to say that each reaction to the revelation of their family member is loving or accepting). Presenting loving families, as For the Bible Tells Me So does, makes it difficult in these five specific contexts to attribute a discovered gay or lesbian identity to some fault in nurturing. In the past it was common to describe a man’s attraction to other men (or a woman’s attraction to other women) in terms of a person’s sexual preference (in the case of men, a preference made possible, even if subconsciously, on account of having an absent male parenting figure, for example). This made it easy to place at the origin of such a preference, a person’s choice (and gave justification to the view that a homosexual identity could be corrected through therapy). Gene Robinson, however, talks of being with his Grade 7 friends who had discovered a pornographic magazine, and how the magazine produced in his friends a reaction that it did not in him. It was not Robinson’s choice to not be attracted to women.

From how persons discover their sexual identity, For the Bible Tells Me So turns to the way in which the Christian community, relying on its sacred text, stigmatizes such persons. A background musical voice in this documentary sings: “It ain’t necessarily so. It ain’t necessarily so. The things that you’re liable to read in the Bible, it ain’t necessarily so.” We hear a lot of voices throughout this documentary identifying the Bible's condemnation of homosexuality. One of the five families interviewed maintains this view as relevant to their own situation: Mrs. Poteat says that “it [homosexuality] is an act of abomination. That’s what the Bible says and I believe it,” while her husband states “I have to go with what the Bible says. I have to. And the Bible says it’s an abomination.”

For the Bible Tells Me So responds that it ain’t necessarily so. Think of Paul of the New Testament, and his writing of women having “turned from natural intercourse to unnatural practices,” and men having giving "up natural intercourse to be consumed with passion for each other (Romans 1:26-27).” Paul is not an enthusiast for this sort of behaviour, but Paul, who uses this word “natural” quite frequently (Rom. 2:14; 11:21, 24; Gal. 2:15, 4:8; Eph. 2:3 & I Cor. 11:14), might have a way of understanding what is “natural” and what is “unnatural” that, in two thousand years since, has experienced some development. Paul likely views people as being naturally heterosexually oriented, and therefore those who act out in homosexual ways warrant condemnation, because they act against the person they are. Is it possible that not everyone is heterosexually oriented? General consensus exists in the scientific community that while no single cause for a homosexual orientation has been conclusively demonstrated, genetics do play a factor.

This documentary is thought provoking in the way it stretches its viewer into a different way of understanding the relationship between gay and lesbian persons and the text which Christian communities have used to stigmatize such persons. Those discussing the relationship between the Bible and the homosexual person it seemingly evaluates, are likable characters. There is little venom in anyone's presentation and I think this powerfully draws persons into considering their particular outlook. The families are likable families. It is easy to imagine, through their scenario, being a parent to a gay son or lesbian daughter, or a brother to a gay or lesbian sibling. Once we consider what we would do in their situation, some of our own preconceptions might begin to vanish.

One person interviewed expresses his sympathy with the practice of preventing “ordinary” persons from reading the Bible, because such persons usually get it wrong. "There’s nothing wrong with a fifth grade understanding of God," another persons states, "as long as you’re in the fifth grade." Suppose, however, that the ordinary people --- that those fifth graders --- have got it right; that homosexual behaviour really is condemned in the Bible. A question which would have to follow such a reading would surround the weight that judgment of the Bible should have on the ethics of a 21^st century Christian person’s life. As I have attempted to articulate elsewhere, within the texts of the Scriptures themselves there exists authentic truths of faith (what the Second Vatican Council identified as “that truth which God willed to be put down in the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation”) and there exists also statements which emerge from a historically conditioned worldview in need of being purified.

For the Bible Tells Me So attempts to distinguish between the two and see what conclusions can be drawn. They would see the dignity of persons in our midst as being at stake.

In Bruges (2008)

2012-01-18T15:23:00.000-08:00

Ken (Brendan Gleeson) & Ray (Colin Farrell)

After I killed them, Ray narrates, I dropped the gun in the Thames, washed the residue off me hands in the bathroom of a Burger King, and walked home to await instructions. Shortly thereafter the instructions came through: ‘Get the f**k out of London, youse dumb f**ks. Get to Bruges.’ I didn't even know where Bruges f**king was. It’s in Belgium.

Ray arrives in Bruges with Ken, the person responsible for recruiting him into his present line of work, and the two men lay low and wait for a call from Harry, their boss.The Belgian city ends up not being to Ray’s liking.

Ray: Bruges is a shithole.

Ken: Bruges is not a shithole.

Ray: Bruges is a shithole.

Ken: Ray, we’ve only just got off the f**king train. Could we reserve judgment on Bruges until we’ve seen the f**king place?

Ray: I know it’s gonna be a shithole.

While Ken is fascinated by Bruges, and uses the furlough to enjoy the aesthetic and cultural aspects of the city, Ray has more difficulty in overcoming his initial misgivings.

Ken: Coming up?

Ray: What’s up there?

Ken: The view.

Ray: The view of what? The view of down here? I can see that down here.

Ken: Ray, you are about the worst tourist in the whole world.

In Bruges features excellent performances from Brendan Gleeson (as Ken), Colin Farrell (as Ray), and Ralph Fiennes (as Harry). The strength of the film lies also in the talent of its writer and director, Martin McDonagh. In Bruges is the first feature length screenplay for the Irish playwright, and it earned McDonagh an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay in 2008. In Bruges is at moments brilliantly humorous and at other moments deadly serious and McDonagh seems to have no difficulty navigating between these tendencies.

Ray, Ken and Harry make for an interesting study, especially when cast against larger concepts of hell, purgatory and heaven, and the direction each seems headed. We, perhaps, know that certain actions we commit have seemingly little impact on either ourselves or the world. What I have chosen to wear today or will have for lunch seems not, for example, to have cosmic consequence. Choosing the country in which I will reside, or where I will make my home, or the profession, religion or partner to which I will commit my life can have a substantial and more lasting impact, but even more important: Who am I going to become as a person? What values will I choose to live by? How do I deal with those aspects of myself and the world that I cannot change? How do I treat those I love, and respond to the needs of those around me?

As John Sachs notes in his little work The Christian Vision of Humanity: Basic Christian Anthropology, the process of self-actualization takes place in the concrete choices I make throughout my life. My capacity for good or for evil, for love or for hate grows in particular actions. While a person should not be reduced to any single action he or she preforms, nor even the sum of all past actions, in another important way, the choices we make, taken together as a whole, indicate a sort of fundamental option which forms the deepest core of our person. That term, fundamental option, expresses the basic attitude a person has towards him or herself, towards others and towards God, and this informs subsequent decisions.

Towards what have each Ray, Ken and Harry oriented themselves? A conversation between Harry and Ken illustrates the difference Ken perceives between the two persons he is caught between:

Harry: If I’d [done what Ray did], accidentally or otherwise, I wouldn’t have thought twice. I’d have killed myself on the f**king spot! On the f**king spot! I’d have put the gun to my head on the f**king spot.

Ken: But that’s you, Harry. The boy has the capacity to change. The boy has the capacity to do something decent with his life.

Harry: Excuse me, Ken. I have the capacity to change.

Ken: Yeah, you do. You’ve got the capacity to get f**king worse.

Ray has committed an act which elicits very little sympathy. Instead of rationalizing what he has done, Ray plunges into depression and believes that only his own punishment (even if self-inflicted) is appropriate. A number have suggested understanding Bruges as a sort of Purgatory for Ray. Christians understand the human person as being far from what he or she is meant to be and in the New Testament the claim is made that “the one [Jesus] who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ (Philippians 1:6).” Viewing an artistic depiction of the Last Judgment, Ray recalls Purgatory being intended for those “who weren’t really shit, but weren’t all that great either,” but Purgatory is not so much a destination point as it is the experience of healing, and the being brought into completion. In Ray's remorse, Ken sees hope, whereas in Harry, Ken sees only the capacity to get worse.

Harry: "You're an inanimate f**king object!"

Perhaps Harry is best seen as inhabiting a sort of Hell. What Christians have traditionally called hell maintains a distinct possibility, many Christians believe, for those who have succeeded in orienting themselves towards their own self (and away from those around them). Understood in this way, hell becomes not some construction of God intended to punish a person. Rather hell cannot be seen as apart from the individual person as it describes the utter isolation of the one who attempts to radically cut him or herself off from the love of God and others, and thus hell is something already experienced in the lives of persons on earth. With Harry, writer and director Martin McDonagh explains, you have a character who believes that "if you've done a wrong there is no forgiveness. There's no getting out of it, you know, which is the way a lot of people feel if something that's horrible happens. You're doomed forever. I guess what I like is the Catholic themes of can you be forgiven? Can you forgive yourself? Can you be redeemed? That's what I wanted to explore."

Somewhere else along this spectrum which includes hell and purgatory travels Ken. The story is as much about his own quest for redemption as it is about Ray's. Ken tells Ray that "at the same time as trying to lead a good life, I have to reconcile myself to the fact that, yes, I have killed people. Not many people. And most of them not very nice people. Apart from one person." McDonagh notes: "Originally I thought that the whole story was about Colin's character [Ray] and his journey and his evolution, but the more that Brendan [Gleeson's character Ken] brought to it, the more it became a level view of two guys seeking the same thing. I think that's why the film works. Hopefully."

It works.

The Way (2011)

2011-12-09T10:17:00.000-08:00

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy journeys towards the Emerald City where she believes help will be found. Along the way she encounters a Scarecrow, a Tin Man and a Lion. Each believes benefit can be found at the same destination.

Emilio Estevez, director of The Way, claims being inspired by this tale. Estevez plays Daniel who has died on a journey. This death could be understood as symbolic of the tornado in The Wizard of Oz, and our Dorothy could be Daniel’s father Tom (played by Martin Sheen, the real-life father of Estevez). Tom, a bit of a curmudgeon, goes to France to claim his son’s remains, and discovers that Daniel was journeying along the Camino de Santiago. Tom, having been unable to travel with his live son, decides to continue along the path with Daniel’s remains.

The Camino de Santiago (The Way of St. James) is approximately a 500-mile pilgrimage from St. Jean Pied de Port (in France) to Santiago de Compostela (in Spain). Along the way, Tom meets (and is joined on his journey) by three others. Each has their own reason for being along the path towards Santiago de Compostela, the location which, according to tradition, holds the remains of James, an apostle of Jesus.

The idea of such a journey has never really appealed to me. After seeing The Way, I feel somewhat differently. Why would a person go on such a journey? Estevez explains his own person connection: Some years prior, his father Martin had a few weeks to spare, and decided to travel by car along the Camino with Taylor, his grandson (and son of Estevez). As it happened, their first stop was in Burgos (a city in Northern Spain). According to Estevez, at dinner, the Innkeeper’s daughter walked “into the room, and when she and my son met, it was love at first sight. They ended up getting married. That’s the [/our] first miracle of the Camino.” People travel the Camino in hope of a miracle, and I suppose what I like about The Way is that what one receives is not necessarily what one set out hoping to find.

Our four travellers are rather like this. Joost, a young and apparently cheerful Dutchman, hopes to lose some weight so he can fit into his suit for a coming wedding (Tom suggests he just buy a new suit). The Canadian Sarah claims that she will leave her habit of smoking behind when she reaches Santiago de Compostela, while Jack, from Ireland, perceives the need to overcome his writer’s block (Jack is played by James Nesbitt, one of my favourite actors).

It is hard to imagine that 123 minutes of some old guy walking some 500 miles would be interesting. Perhaps I enjoyed The Way because my expectations were so low. I think, however, once the viewer gets into this story, he or she will appreciate the gentle humour, and the healing that Estevez is able to bring to his characters.

The Way is not really about becoming less fat, or quitting a bad habit, nor is it about overcoming a certain creative block. What makes The Way work is that there is so much more to each character than meets the eye. Beneath Joost’s cheerful exterior, for example, is a person who no longer feels loved by those he loves. Sarah and Jack, as well, have suffered abuse, and yet (like Joost) are unable to initially give voice to what has really brought them to the Camino. By the end of The Way, I appreciated the way in which each character had opportunity to experience healing. Estevez claims: “They are imperfect and broken, but God loves them exactly as they are.” This is a phenomenal insight. God doesn’t love the persons he wants us to become. God doesn't love the person I can be. God loves the persons we are. A result of experiencing such love is transformation and movement towards becoming the persons God intends us to be, and this movment is evidenced in the characters of The Way.

Martin Sheen is, it has been said, very Catholic (he credits Tree of Life director Terrence Malick with bringing him back to God by giving him a copy of The Brothers Karamazov in 1981), but I want to dwell on the spirituality of his son (and not the son Charlie Sheen). Since Martin Sheen’s return to the Catholic faith, Estevez imagines that “his [father’s] hope and desire is that I embrace the faith completely. And I’m getting there.” In another interview he states that “there was a point in the production process [of The Way] where I stopped calling what happened along the way coincidences and began calling them miracles.”

Here's a trailer.

Wallander (BBC1 [2008, 2010 & 2012])

2011-12-07T15:26:00.000-08:00

Emily Barker is an Australian guitarist and singer-songwriter whose collaboration with The Red Clay Halo produced “Nostalgia” in 2008. Some of her imagery is beyond my grasp, but it’s an excellent piece, and has been re-recorded for use in Wallander of BBC-1. In a way that actual translations of Henning Mankell have not, the musical piece “Nostalgia” captures the mood of Wallander perfectly, and the desire for security that is perceived to have once existed (and might still).

Kurt Wallander, the creation of Swedish novelist Henning Mankell, is a police inspector in Ystad, Sweden. Three films were broadcast on BBC-1 in 2008 (Sidetracked, Firewall & One Step Behind), another three in 2010 (Faceless Killers, The Man Who Smiled & The Fifth Woman). Three further films have begun production in Ystad, Sweden and Riga, Latvia (the three are An Event in Autumn, The Dogs of Riga & Before the Frost). Persons familiar with the work of Mankell will recognize differences between his work, and what has been adapted to screen, but Mankell has expressed his pleasure with the finished product. He should be pleased: The six films thus far broadcasted are excellent.

Wallander has been abandoned by his wife, and has a difficult relationship with his daughter. It's not too far into Sidetracked that his daughter tells him "God, Dad, you are such a complete crap sometimes, you know?" He seems to know this. In One Step Behind, his investigation leads him to a young woman, Isa, who apparently went to school with Wallander's own daughter. Wallander tells Isa that, like Isa, his own daughter attempted suicide. This surprises Isa who then asks him whether he was a "crap dad" to which Wallander responds "yeah, I was a crap dad." Besides a broken relationship with his wife, and a strained one with his daughter, Wallander remains been deeply affected by his father`s disapproval at his becoming a police officer. While Wallander's co-workers respect his abilities, he has no friends to speak of and does not eat properly or exercise. He drinks too much and sleeps too little. Disillusioned by his work he regularly toys with leaving the force.

The North Irish Kenneth Branagh is Kurt Wallander. Branagh is one of those few talents who, regardless of his role (whether as Shackleton or Hamlet), succeeds in giving the impression that no one else could deliver the preformance he had just delivered. Not merely good at what he does, Branagh is one of the best.

Branagh succeeds in taking what might be otherwise rather ordinary crime mysteries (although perhaps a few [Faceless Killers, for example] are better than average) and presents to the viewer an Inspector with an open wound. Wallander is tremendously sensitive to the workings of the human person. This serves him well as a policeman, but it is also the cause of his own spiritual, emotional and physical exhaustion. The gifts he places entirely at the disposal of his work, if more sensibly distributed, might have resulted in more meaningful relationships being developed in his life.

And, yet, persons can recognize in Wallander a certain goodness, and can identify with his humanity. We see Wallander both at his best and at his worst. A real person, it feels, is so being conveyed that Mankell tells of being approached in 1994, prior to a Swedish referendum surrounding whether the country would join the European Union, and being asked by an old man whether Wallander would be voting “yes” or “no.”

People can admire Wallander because for all the evil he has encountered, it has not caused him to disassociate or become cynical. Each death reaches the core of his person. When a younger officer asks to be reassigned from a suicide to something more crime-related in nature, Wallander responds: "A fifteen year old girl burns herself to death and you don't think that's a crime?" When the younger officer backs off a little by saying "I suppose. If you put it like that," Wallander's response is "Well, how would you put it?" Wallander, in his defense of the dignity owed to those committing crimes, challenges his viewer, as well. "No one deserves to die," Wallander tells one character, in an attempt to prevent the vengenace about to be taken against a person who has committed great evil.

God on Trial (BBC2 [2008])

2011-11-25T20:41:00.000-08:00

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins writes that "the God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

In God on Trial, an 86 minute drama which aired on BBC2, prisoners of Auschwitz hold court and place on trial the one they believe responsible for their plight. God, the claim is made, has broken his covenant with his people.

The author of the screenplay is Frank Cottrell Boyce, and it is quite powerful. The Roman Catholic Boyce describes how, in order to prepare for this screenplay, he familiarized himself with the Hebrew Scriptures. After doing so he felt “beaten black and blue,” and any person familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures (familiar with, and honest about, such writings) should know exactly why.

Some persons occupying this block house in Auschwitz, and awaiting their end, raise the possibility that someone other than God is to blame. Kuhn, for example, takes God’s defense arguing that Auschwitz is not the first time the Jewish people have experienced hardship. His reasoning confuses Baumgarten, the head of the court, who asks if Kuhn is attempting to evidence God’s habitual breach of contract. Kuhn’s argument, however, is that there have been reasons for hardships in the past, and in the case of Auschwitz, instead of blaming God one should look within. Others feel rather differently.

When Rabbi Akiba, the mystic of Zamkevitz, launches into a series of questions which explore God’s actions throughout Hebrew history, what he has to say is worthy of reflection. Akiba’s presentation is representative both of the fine acting on display in this film, as well as the excellent quality of writing:

In Faith and the Future, Joseph Ratzinger asks: “Are we still able to believe in the God who smote the first-born of Egypt, who led his people to war against the Canaanites, who struck down Uzzah dead because he dared to put out his hand to steady the Ark of the Covenant? For us, is all of this not just the ancient East — interesting and significant, perhaps, as a phase in human consciousness, but only a phase in human consciousness, not the expression of divine utterance?”

The Hebrew Scriptures were written by persons marked by the limitations of their own environments. Authors made mistakes scientific and historical in nature, and one wonders what would have prevented them also from erring in matters moral and religious. In other words: Are we to believe that our knowledge of science and history develop, but not our knowledge of God? In his book Introduction to Christianity, Ratzinger notes that in the formative period of the New Testament era, a “completely unexpected event,” is experienced when “God shows himself from a hitherto unknown side.” Is it possible that in our evolving perception of God, we have attributed things to him that we shouldn’t have?

For a person worried about the way in which the Bible can still be understood as inspired, consider the Psalmist who writes “happy are those who pay you back for what you have done to us --- who take your babies and smash them against a rock (Psalms 137:8-9).” This is most definitely an error of conscience. This error is honestly manifested in the Psalm, and forms part of a process of inspiration that is only rectified at a later stage in understanding of God (when God is understood and experienced in Jesus, for example).

The specific intentions of individual authors and the specific things that individual authors say, must ultimately subordinate themselves to the overall intention of the divine author (God) who is working with human persons. Perhaps this is what the Second Vatican Council meant when they asserted that “the books of the Scripture teach firmly, faithfully and without error that truth which God willed to be put down in the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation (Dei Verbum, paragraph 11). The challenge, then, is to determine which truths God has placed in the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation. Might the attributions of genocide to God fall outside this scope?

K.

Millions (2004)

2011-11-08T07:13:00.000-08:00

The backdrop for Millions is a country about to change its currency. Money, however, is of no interest to the seven year old Damian Cunningham, who views it as just a thing, and things change. One minute something's there, and you can cuddle up to it. The next minute it's gone, like a Matleser.

Or a Mom.

In one early scene, the Cunningham family is moving house. We see the father standing on the sill of a door looking into the house that he and his two boys have emptied. Faintly we hear past memories. A woman is laughing. The father and children are playing. The loss the family has experienced, in the death of the man's wife, is apparent on his face.

New faces in a new school, Damian's older brother Anthony coaches Damian on making the right first impression. Keep off the weird stuff, Anthony warns, referring, perhaps, to Damian's eccentric interests. It's too late, however. One scene previous, we've experienced Damian contributing to a classroom conversation about admired persons. Students are identifying different soccer players, and the teacher, looking for persons other than athletes, finds in Damian an obliging response:

[Teacher] Damian?

[Damian] St. Roch, sir.

[Teacher] Who's he play for?

[Damian] No one, sir. He's a Saint.

[Teacher] Oh, well, that's better. Go on.

[Damian] He was so worried that he might say something bad that he said nothing at all for 20 years.

[Teacher] We could do with a couple like him in this class. Thank you, Damian.

[Damian] I like a lot of the virgin martyrs too. Like St. Agatha. She ripped her own eyes out so she wouldn't have to marry this man.

[Class]: Ew...

[Damian] Or St. Catherine of Alexandria. They tried to kill her by crushing her to death on a wheel, but she made the wheel explode and all the splinters killed people in the crowd.

[Class]: Ew...

Damian's intimacy with Catholic heroes stems not simply from his having read about them, but also from his conversations with such persons, and his experiencing of them in his company. It catches the viewer by surprise when we see Clare of Assisi, for example, joining Damian in a hermitage he has constructed from cardboard boxes. The experience is short-lived, however, as a backpack filled with cash falls from apparently nowhere and crushes his hermitage.

Millions unfolds by exploring the ways in which each boy wants to spend the money. Nine year old Anthony, described as having “a good heart” but just not knowing “where it is,” wants to invest the money in real estate and increase its value, while Damian wants to distribute it among the poor.

Damian buys dozens of birds and frees them into the wild. Encountering Francis of Assisi, Damian asks: “You did this, didn't you?” to which Francis responds that it was his own first act as a saint. When Damian asks what Francis did next, the saint from Assisi responds that he washed a leper. This confuses Damian and Francis tells him “you could just help the poor Damian.”

And he does. In fact, Damian and Nicholas of Myra do some work together, when they fill with cash the mail-box of Damian's neighbors. The Ugandan Martyrs bring Damian up to date with the crisis in Africa, informing Damian that because so many persons cannot afford clean water, diseases are rampant, while a rough-spoken Peter the Apostle drops in and advises Damian that when he is sending money to charities, he should not tick off the box which allows those charities to pass along his information to other like-minded organizations. You'll be besieged, man. Damian seems not to care.

Damian just wants to be good, and as much as he loves those who appear to him, there's really only one saint he wants to see. Clare hasn't seen Damian's mother Maureen, but then again, Clare tells Damian, it is infinite up there. Absolutely bloody infinite. Joseph the Worker hasn't heard of Maureen either, and asking Damian whether Maureen was a virgin martyr just confuses the boy. Damian has to repeat the name "Maureen" to Nicholas:

[Damian] St. Maureen. She's new.

[Nicholas] What did she do?

[Damian] Skin care. She worked on the make-up counter at Self-Ridges.

[Nicholas] Doesn’t ring a bell but then I don't get out much.

Millions is a touching story with lots of laughs. Based on the novel Millions by Frank Cottrell Boyce, and adapted to screen by Danny Boyle, Millions celebrates the goodness of faith and the beauty of innocence, as well as the power that exists in love to transform those who experience it. Encouraged is the beautiful vision of God that Damian holds, even if Millions recognizes that, as we get older, such a vision will be harder to maintain. As Wordsworth once wrote:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore; ---

Turn wheresoe'er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I can see no more.

It does not mean, however, that what we once saw we didn't really see, or won't ever see again. Enjoy Millions.

The Tree of Life (2011)

2011-10-13T07:33:00.000-07:00

American director Terrence Malick is a philosopher by training. A graduate of Harvard, and having pursued doctoral studies at Oxford, Malick taught philosophy at the MIT and, in 1969, the reputable Northwestern University Press published his translation of Martin Heidegger's Vorn Wesen des Grundes.

The Tree of Life is the fifth film of Malick and was awarded the Palme d'Or in 2011 at Cannes. It begins with words attributed to God: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? [Were you there] when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Job, you may recall, has his oxen, donkeys and camels fall out of his possession, and those servants in the vicinity are killed. Fire falls from heaven and consumes both Job's sheep and his shepherds, while the house of his eldest son collapses and kills all within (including every daughter and son of Job). Job's body is struck with malignant ulcers, and his friends turn on him, believing he is being punished. Job, however, knows that God has no grounds to punish him, and though Job refuses to curse God, he does seek an explanation. God responds with questions which remind Job of who God is, and who Job is in relation to God and the cosmos.

Job receives no explanation, and is certainly not informed that he has been the chief character in a cosmic wager between God and Satan, and thus the problem of evil remains. With Job in mind, the viewer is drawn into the early narration of Mrs. O'Brien: “The nuns taught us there are two ways though life. The way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow. Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it, when love is smiling through all things. They taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end.”

The viewer needs to be conscious of, and distinguish between, three early glimpses of the O'Brien family history in The Tree of Life. In one moment we see, as the narration of Mrs. O'Brien is unfolding, her and her husband, and their three young sons. It is the 1950's, and they are living in Waco, Texas. The family --- all of them --- are seen in prayer and in play. They are happy, or, at the very least, appear a typical family of the era. Another moment observes Jack, an O'Brien son, now rather middle-aged and depressed. A third moment occurs somewhere in between the previous two, and has the viewer with Mrs. O'Brien, and then her husband, receiving the news that one of their sons is dead.

Mrs. O'Brien, who we have heard vow to remain true to the way of grace whatever comes, now finds herself challenged in a Job-like way. We overhear her wondering: Was I false to you? Lord? Why? Where were You? Like Job, we hear: Answer me.

Before engaging with her queries, it is worth noting that besides the inner wrestlings of Mrs. O'Brien, the son Jack is in need of healing. Father we hear him saying. Mother: Always you wrestle inside of me. His father, Mr. O'Brien, is dominated by the way of nature, and teaches his children that it takes fierce will to get ahead in the world, noting that if you're good, people will take advantage of you. Mr. O'Brien's way slowly becomes that of his son Jack. We see Jack, as a growing child, witness the death of a friend in a swimming pool. It is a significant event in his own wrestling between nature and grace, and we hear him asking God: Where were you? You let a boy die. You'll let anything happen. Why should I be good if you aren't? The adult Jack, however, seems not to have been satisfied by his allegiance to nature. We note his observation that the world is “getting greedier,” and we overhear him saying that he thinks of his dead brother every day.

I think that Malick, an Anglican (Episcopalian, I suppose), wants to engage with the poverty of the way of nature in two major ways. When Mrs. O'Brien is seeking an answer from God, Malick disturbs his unfolding narrative by launching into what is, perhaps, a 20 minute sequence wherein life emerges. The universe springs into being, while stars and galaxies spin through space. A planet foams with volcanic fury and, to quote another, seas “toss, amoebas squiggle through translucent polls, sea-fronds wave, underwater creatures swarm, vegetation spread, and dinosaurs stalk through forests.” Malick seeks to present the the poverty of the way of nature in a second sequence. We see the adult Jack walking through a door and meeting the mother and father and brothers of his youth. Reconciliation occurs. Key to this sequence, I think, is the relationship between the Agnus Dei of the background, the eucharistic posture of Mrs. O'Brien, and her words i give you my son.

Returning to the first sequence, there is both violence and beauty in the emergence of life. The majesty of the creative act can, perhaps, be seen as paralleling God's questioning in Job, but the act itself can never be an answer to Job's situation. This is because, turning back to The Tree of Life, the presence of violence (a bloodied and beached behemoth, potentially violent dinosaurs...) invites, rather than answers, questions surrounding the reign of death. In these early moments there is both nature and grace. The sequence does, however, help the viewer understand how just as Jack's specifically depressed adult state assumes a childhood with specific moments which conditioned his development, so also life in general assumes a past which has had some say in the emerging present.

Again, this cannot be an answer to Job, or to Mrs. O'Brien (or to anyone else subject to death, for that matter), even if it is true. As a result, the Incarnation sequence, while also not answering why those who have chosen the way of grace can still come to a bad end, does indicate an identification on the part of God with those who hurt.

Worth noting is that The Tree of Life does not demand a particular confessional allegiance from its viewer in order to be appreciated as a work of art. It is a film, to quote Ebert, of “vast ambition and deep humility.” There were once several directors who yearned to make no less than a masterpiece, Ebert recalls, but now there are only a few. Malick, in Ebert's view, has stayed true to that hope ever since his first feature film in 1973, and I suppose it is for the viewer to decide how close Malick comes to succeeding.

K.

Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

2011-10-03T08:28:00.000-07:00

Spain, 1944. The Civil War has ended. Hidden throughout the Spanish mountains lie men who continue to resist the Fascist regime. Military posts have been established to exterminate the Resistance.

Some time long before, in a realm where lies and pain do not exist, the daughter of a King dreams of a human world, and into such a world she then escapes. Over time, the memory of her identity and origin fade, and eventually she experiences death. Knowing, however, that the soul of his daughter will take another body, the King awaits her return to the human world, and portals all over the human world are opened to allow for her return to his Kingdom.

These two stories intersect in Ofelia, the step-daughter of Captain Vidal (a commander of a military post aimed at exterminating the nearby Resistance). An avid reader of fantasy, Ofelia's imagination allows her to escape from her cruel surroundings, and in the realm to which she escapes, she encounters a labyrinth. There, a creature tells Ofelia that she has been led to the last of the portals which was opened to allow for her return to her father.

The year 2006 was a truly remarkable one for Mexican film. Film critic Roger Ebert has suggested that we start talking about the era of the New Mexican Cinema, and what he has in mind are the films of three Mexican friends and contemporaries. In 2006, Alfonso Cuaron adapted P.D. James' Children of Men, Alejandro González Iñárritu directed Babel, and alongside Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, we easily have there of the best films of our young new century.

A lovely scene in Pan's Labyrinth has Ofelia lying in bed with her increasingly pregnant mother, listening to her mother talk about being lonely. Experiencing some physical pain (her unborn-child is “at it again”), the mother asks Ofelia to tell her yet-to-be-born brother a story. The young girl gently taps her mother's stomach as if to get the brother's attention, puts her head to her mother's stomach and whispering mi hermano, mi hermano (my brother, my brother), she begins to tell him a story. Were this touching scene to end here, the viewer still would have experienced some relief from the cruelty which surrounds Ofelia, and yet instead the camera descends into darkness, and then into the glowing sac in which Ofelia's brother is peacefully afloat. This remarkable scene is the sort that leaves those more eloquent among us simply stammering for words.

Moving from such a remarkable scene (and there are a number of others), the role of choice in a person's obedience and dissent, and the relationship of such to the violence of Pan's Labyrinth is, I think, worthy of some engagement.

We know you are not here by choice, Captain Vidal is told by a supper guest. If the guest has in mind the Captain's being assigned to a rather insignificant military post, he has misread the Captain. You're wrong about that, the Captain corrects, before explaining what he hopes to acheive in his assignment. To those present, those who have chosen to ally themselves to the Fascist cause rather than to the Resistance, the Captain states: We are all here by choice.

By contrast, good characters such as Doctor Ferreiro or those in the Resistance have really only one choice. When the Doctor, for example, attempts to persuade a member of the Resistance to cross the border into safety and be with the woman he loves, the man responds I'm staying here. There's no choice.

In another instance, Captain Vidal orders the Doctor to keep a tortured man from dying so that more information can be extracted from him. Rather than obeying and prolonging the tortured man's life, the Doctor administers a drug which hastens the death of the man.

Why did you do it? the Captain asks.

It was the only thing I could do.

No. You could have obeyed me.

I could have, but I didn't.

It would have been better for you and you know it. Why didn't you obey me?

The Doctor responds: To obey --- just like that --- for the sake of obeying, without questioning. That's only something people like you can do. Those good in Pan's Labyrinth do not lack freedom. When they say that there's no choice, or it was the only thing I could do, what they are saying is that once convinced by their conscience of what is good, there is really only one way to respond. Despite the ways in which an external authority might hope to call a person into submission, the internal authority of one's own conscience is what should guide a person's action. The Victorian John Henry Newman once wrote that the conscience is “a messenger from him who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil,” and Pan's Labyrinth models characters unwilling to act against this voice.

I wonder, however, about the extent to which what the viewer is told might differ from what he or she is shown. This observation is not unique to me, and perhaps others are more certain of its implications than I, but it seems to me that what the viewer is being shown tempers the extent to which we believe what we are being told. Before we know much about Captain Vidal, the viewer experiences him repeatedly smashing a bottle into the face of a man his soldiers have caught trespassing. This brief (but graphic) scene determines the way in which the viewer thereafter will experience Captain Vidal.

After initially viewing Pan's Labyrinth, my only issue with the experience was the extent to which Captain Vidal had emerged as particularly one-dimensional. I experienced him as not someone who does evil, but as someone who, quite simply, is evil. This experience of Captain Vidal was unsatisfactory because it flew in the face of claims like Guillermo Arriaga's “as a writer you have to love your characters, even if you hate them. If you love the characters you hate, you'll make them believable,” or Graham Greene's “when you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity---that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corner of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.” How could such a beautifully imaginative film like Pan's Labyrinth evidence such a lack of imagination when it came to the presentation of one of its characters?

This question betrays a superficial viewing of Pan's Labyrinth. Captain Vidal's brutal act of violence manipulates the viewer. It overshadows all those moments prior and all those moments after which give the impression that Captain Vidal is, in fact, a member of the human race. We see him listening to music, shaving, and cleaning his boots. We see him reconstructing an old watch, identifying his hopes for the sort of Spain in which his son will one day live, and we see his concern, perhaps even love, for his wife.

Despite numerous instances of the humanity of Captain Vidal, the horrific violence we see him commit draws the viewer into an emotional satisfaction at the potential (and actual) violence committed against him. I wonder if, deep down, Guillermo del Toro has communicated how self-righteously we might, one one hand, buy in to what we have been told about the centrality of conscience, but how easily, on the other hand, we are swayed by what we have seen; how despite what we have heard about the importance of the conscience, that conscience can nonetheless be muted to the violence committed against a person who, we have been shown, is a supposedly worthy victim of such violence. Further, if the voice of our conscience can so easily be ignored, how different are we from Captain Vidal who has succeeded in muting his own?

K.

The musical score for Pan's Labyrinth can be heard here.

Mother and Child (2010)

2011-09-15T18:15:00.000-07:00

Mother and Child is the fourth feature length film written and directed by the Colombian Rodrigo Garcia. A fascinating tidbit about Garcia is that he is the son of the famed Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel Prize winning author of 100 Years of Solitude.

Garcia's work consistently explores the experiences of women and the feelings those experiences motivate. Consider the previous three films he wrote and directed. His 1999 film Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her loosely connects the stories of five women and the obstacles being encountered as life unfolds. Three years later, Garcia came back with Ten Tiny Love Stories which consists of ten female monologues, each of which remembers a particularly impacting relationship in it's speaker's life. In 2005, he gave us Nine Lives, wherein --- surprise, surprise --- the viewer encounters nine consecutive women, and experiences an uninterrupted moment in each of their lives (one is in prison, one has chanced upon a lover from long before, another is caught between her increasingly invalid father and increasingly resigning mother...).

With Mother and Child, Garcia presents the story of three women, and the power that exists in the bond between a mother and her child. Annette Bening delivers an Oscar-worthy performance as Karen, a fifty year old physiotherapist who, at the age of 14, became pregnant and had her child passed along for adoption. Naomi Watts is Elizabeth, a thirty-something year old lawyer who, herself, was a child of adoption. Finally, we have Lucy, a younger woman who works in a bakery with her mother and who, along with her husband, have begun the adoption process and appear eager to welcome a child into their home.

At one point in the film, Karen's elderly mother asks her daughter: “You expect me to live forever? Even if I could I wouldn't want to. It's just one disappointment after another.” There's a lot of disappointment in Mother and Child. That Karen had to part ways with her child affects Karen entirely. Everything I do, she reveals in a moment of self-revelation to a man trying to win her affection, every thought in my head takes me back to her. Everywhere I go I look for her face in the crowd. I write her letters that I never send. I buy her birthday gifts. I have a name for her: Rachael. I don't know if she's dead or alive. I have nothing else. That's who I am. I have nothing to give.

Elizabeth too, although very successful and very beautiful, lives under the great shadow of having been abandoned or unwanted. Elizabeth is not capable of forming genuine relationships with others and, as a result, prizes her own fierce independence as a virtue. She is not a bad person, but in her hurt she does use others. Lucy, our third woman, is not psychologically crippled to the extent that Karen or Elizabeth are, but she is physically unable to have children, and this places strain on her relationship with her husband.

In the supporting cast, Cherry Jones plays Sister Joanne, a sensitive nun who works at an adoption agency, and who, because she is approached by each Karen, Elizabeth and Lucy, serves to draw the stories of the women together. The result is a remarkably emotionally affecting two hours (and five minutes). Thankfully, Mother and Child, although taking very seriously the sometimes crippling disappointment experienced by its characters, still presents opportunity for healing.

Seven Pounds (2008)

2011-09-07T08:33:00.000-07:00

Seven Pounds opens in intriguing fashion. Ben Thomas has called an emergency operator:

I need an ambulance.
9212 West Third Street in Los Angeles?
That’s room number 2.
What’s the emergency?
There’s been a suicide.
Who’s the victim?
I am.

Next comes an earlier moment in Thomas’ life. We hear Thomas’ voice-over narration: "In seven days, God created the world. And in seven seconds, I shattered mine."

As we follow Thomas around, we find him using the credentials of a tax-man to seek out genuinely good and decent people. Once convinced that the persons he is investigating are truly good, Thomas sets upon dramatically bettering their state of life. To illustrate, Thomas approaches a middle-aged Latina woman who is living with her abusive boyfriend, and, for what appears to be no apparent reason, Thomas offers to help her and her two children escape. After being beaten on a later occasion, she phones Thomas for help. Thomas leaves her the keys and deed to his beach-side home, and moves into a cheap hotel.

Ben Thomas, Ebert writes , the man from the IRS. He can get in anywhere and ask any question. But surely the IRS doesn't require him to punch a nursing home supervisor for not allowing an old lady her bath? And why, after he intuits he is speaking to a blind man on the phone, is he so needlessly cruel to him? And why does he then follow the same man into a restaurant and engage him in conversation?

We don't really know why Thomas is doing what is doing. However, Will Smith's performance as Ben Thomas is such that a good range of emotion is conveyed, and I think because of the quality of Smith's performance, audiences don't mind following along even if they don't immediately know why Thomas is doing what he is doing.

IMDB advertises two taglines for Seven Pounds. They couldn't be more different. The first calls upon viewers to "experience the most extraordinary story of the holiday season," but this gives the impression that we're being invited into another Pursuit of Happyness (an inspirational picture brought to life two years previous by Seven Pounds director Gabriele Muccino, and Will Smith).

The second tagline reads: "Seven Names. Seven Strangers. One Secret." Better, and while not necessarily that "extraordinary story of the holiday season," I think this film's treatment of themes of guilt and atonement can allow viewers to genuinely experience something meaningful in Seven Pounds.

While Thomas takes very seriously the implications of his actions, he is unable to open himself to grace, and seems not to believe he can be forgiven for whatever it was that happened in those "seven seconds."

After reading Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter, Greene's friend Evelyn Waugh took issue with Scobie, one of Greene’s characters. Unsure as to whether Greene was sanctioning the actions of Scobie, Waugh argued that the actions of Scobie were either a “very loose poetical expression” or “mad blasphemy.” Rather, Greene wrote in response, the actions of Scobie simply evidenced “how muddled a mind full of good will could become when once ‘off the rails.’”

Seven Pounds excellently documents, even if it does not intend to, the muddled mind of Ben Thomas. To illustrate, consider love. Love is not simply the self-less being and doing for another. Love is also the allowing of oneself to be loved (Benedict writes in Deus Caritas Est that "anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift"). I think this is Thomas' dilemma: He graces the lives of others, and that grace dramatically transforms such persons, but he can only extend a sort of grace, and he is only extending because he does not know to receive grace and allow that grace to transform and heal his own guilt-ridden life.

One trailer can be viewed here.

No Country for Old Men (2007)

2011-06-12T20:04:00.000-07:00

Compared to what? The bubonic plague?

The novels of American author Cormac McCarthy are on my Summer reading list. His earliest published work is The Orchard Keeper, from 1965, and his most recent is The Road, from 2006 (which earned him a Pulitzer Prize). Increasingly cited as a candidate for the Noble Prize for Literature, McCarthy’s 1985 work Blood Meridian has been identified by literary critic Harold Bloom as one of the finest novels of the century.

In recent years, two of his works, No Country for Old Men and The Road, have been adapted into, what I would consider, excellent films. I’ve spoken here of The Road, and in this post I’d like to introduce the Coen Brothers' adaptation of No Country through the lens of a theme common to both works.

But, first, a summary: No Country, in case you have not yet seen it, follows Ed Tom Bell, a Sheriff in a Texan county along the United States-Mexico border. Sheriff Bell wants to bring Llewellyn Moss to safety, after Moss, a veteran of the Vietnam war, has stumbled upon a drug deal gone wrong, and made the decision to leave the scene with a satchel containing several million dollars. Moss is being pursued by a group of Mexicans connected with the drug deal, and by Chigurh, who has been hired to reclaim the money.

In both No Country and The Road, there is concerned reflection on the nature of God's interaction in human affairs. Perhaps you remember the following conversation between Eli and the Man (from The Road):

Eli: Supposing you were the last man alive?
Man: How would you know that? That you were the last man alive?
Eli: Well I don’t guess you’d know it. You’d just be it.
Man: Maybe God would know?
Eli: If there is a god up there he would have turned his back on us by now. And whoever made humanity will find no humanity here. No sir. No sir.

No Country, like The Road, does not to force conclusions about God’s involvement, but as to whether God might have turned his back on humanity, we do find the Sheriff telling another: “I always thought when I got older that God would come into my life in some way. He didn’t.”

Who has come into the Sheriff’s life is Chigurh, the very personification of evil. Trying to learn something of this Chigurh, one man asks just how dangerous is he? The response: Compared to what? The bubonic plague? While no match for Chigurh, one gets a sense that the Sheriff would like to have a bigger picture into which he can place Chigurh, and into which he can understand the evil personified in Chigurh as not being the last word.

Against the explanations of the Sheriff has not experienced God because there is no God to experience or, God has turned his back on humanity and awaits its self-destruction, I would like to identify two clues pointing towards McCarthy's vision (although, having not read his larger body of work, I am open to modifying my position). First, recall the Prologue to M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water, and that image of the severed link between humans and those who live in the water, and how even despite human violence, those in the water are persistent in their attempts to again to reach the humans. Is McCarthy's world one wherein God’s continued interaction is found in, for example, fleeting gestures of goodness? Are these God's persistent attempts to reach humans? In The Road, after all, McCarthy does gives the concept of “the fire,” and place in the Man's mouth the remarkable claim that if his own son is not “the word of God then God never spoke.”

Second, in No Country, although the Sheriff is no match for the evil personified in Chigurh, the Sheriff’s dream, featuring both himself and his father, could be seen as capturing the existence of another reality: “It was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin’ through the mountains of a night. Goin’ through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin’. Never said nothing’ goin’ by. He just rode on past … and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. 'Bout the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and he was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.”

Is No Country an invitation to share in the pessimism of its author? It’s possible, I suppose, but I think enough clues exist to justify the possiblility of hope.

K.

Biutiful (2011): A Review

2011-06-01T20:55:00.000-07:00

Director Alejandro González Iñárritu

Far from exhausting what I would like to say about Biutiful, given its DVD release yesterday, and given my now having watched it for a second time, I’d like to offer a few thoughts.

Biutiful follows Uxbal, a complex man who makes his living in the underworld of Barcelona, Spain. On one hand, he participates in the exploitation of immigrants, but on the other hand, he seems not indifferent to their plight. One could say that Uxbal feels for them, but one would have to hold this in tension with what Uxbal nonetheless does.

Uxbal is father of two small children, and the husband of an unstable wife. Discovering that he has only months to live, Uxbal seeks, among other things, reconciliation with his estranged wife, to be remembered by his children, and to raise enough money to ensure their security after he dies.

Javier Bardem (perhaps best remembered as Chigurh in No Country for Old Men) portrays Uxbal. Apparently, the Oscar nomination he received was the first to go to an actor preforming entirely in the Spanish language. While describing his own performance as “exhausting,” Bardem claims not to regret accepting the role. He speaks of his admiration for Uxbal’s “forgiveness [and] compassion, those things that the character has to bring from the very bottom of himself, to understand the world he is in, to make it a little better of a world for his kids.”

Iñárritu, that “almost unreasonably talented Mexican filmmaker“ (according to Ebert), finds in Biutiful his fourth major film. In his three previous three, he experimented with the way in which his narrative would unfold. Amores Perros, for example, finds three stories occurring simultaneously, while 21 Grams also has three stories but ones which move back and forth in time. In Babel, Ebert sees Iñárritu in “full command his technique,” but here in Biutiful, we follow one central character in a fairly straightforward and chronological manner.

Apparently Biutiful received a nine-minute standing ovation at Cannes. If you read the reactions people had to Biutiful, some note how in the theatres after the film ended, a good many simply stayed silently sitting in their seats for some time.

One of the great strengths consistently present in Iñárritu’s work is his ability to preserve the dignity of his characters, even the dignity of those who do reprehensible things. His past collaborator, Guillermo Arriaga, puts it best when he says that “as a writer you have to love your characters, even if you hate them. If you love the characters you hate, you’ll make them believable.”

I find this reminiscent of the following narration in Graham Greene’s The Power in the Glory: “When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity---that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corner of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

So many filmmakers have suspended their imagination. Iñárritu’s integrity, on the other hand, appears uncompromising. Biutiful made 24 million dollars, which is to say, nothing, but in exchange, a film which challenges (and respects) its audience emerges.

K.

For those unfamiliar with the film, two trailers can be found here and here. You might also consider the two-part interview (part I; part II) with Iñárritu wherein he describes his vision for the film. Finally, here is a scene of Uxbal with his daughter Ana.

Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

2011-05-28T01:10:00.000-07:00

I confess to not remembering whether, as a child, I was read Where the Wild Things Are. Perhaps I was, but perhaps not. In any event, the nine sentences penned by Maurice Sendak (almost fifty years ago) have since been put to screen by Spike Jonze.

Max is a lonely eight year old boy who inhabits two seemingly different worlds. The first he shares with his mother and his sister, both of whom incur his wrath in the opening few scenes. After incidents with each, Max, decked out in a wolf costume, runs away.

Emotionally, he enters into the second world he inhabits, and here exist the wild things. These playful monsters have a propensity for violence, and when Max first encounters them, they contemplate eating him. Declaring himself to be a king from another world, Max convinces the wild things of his power to make things right. Carol asks “well, you know, what about loneliness?” to which Douglas, another wild thing, asks whether Max will “keep out all the sadness?”

The presence of loneliness and sadness indicate that the two worlds Max inhabits are only superficially different. Max’s great concern as king is how he can make everything okay between the wild things. When Carol finds himself in conflict with the others, and notes how everybody is mad at him, the best Max can do is appeal to his own experiences of having people mad at him. Quick solutions do not exist even here.

One of the more curious scenes occurs quite early while Max is in science class. He listens as his teacher describes how essential the sun is for life. The teacher observes that “like all things” the sun will die, and when it does it will envelop and consume the surrounding planets, and the solar system will go dark. So as to reassure his eight-year old audience, the teacher informs that long before the human race will likely have fallen extinct as a result of any number of calamities, which he then goes on to list.

In the world Max shares with the wild things, Carol picks up on this same all-things-pass theme. Touring Max through his kingdom, Carol observes in a more desert-like setting that “this part of your kingdom’s not so great. This used to be all rock and now it's sand. And then one day it's gonna be dust. And then the whole island will be dust and then I don’t even know what comes after dust.”

Particularly memorable is that moment when Max admits to one of the wild things that he is not actually a king. The wild thing remarks that he was never even sure a king existed who could do things like deal with loneliness and keep out all the sadness. Yet crippling anxiety or despair need not follow. Realities are present which make existence more stable and secure, although they are interestingly found not in monarchy but in motherhood. After yet another fight between the wild things, Max, realizing he cannot make things right, simply says to one of them: “I wish you guys had a mom.” It seems that it is in the experience of motherly love, rather than in the immediate elimination of sadness or loneliness, that a person can move toward a more authentic mode of existence.

Where the Wild Things Are (you can watch a trailer here) is not necessarily appropriate for the child you might be reading Sendak's nine sentences to, but it's a thought provoking piece that catches its viewer by surprise, and raises concerns that a person will have to encounter at some point.

K.

JCVD (2008)

2011-04-25T09:18:00.000-07:00

JCVD unfolds largely in the French language, and is the work of the French Tunisian Mabrouk El Mechri. Mistaken by Belgian police as being responsible for a robbery-gone-wrong (and subsequent hostage-taking), Jean-Claude Van Damme, who plays himself, finds himself being used by the trio of real robbers as the “face” of their crime.

There is nothing particularly remarkable in the sound of this story-line, and Van Damme's inclusion would normally be motivation enough for the viewer to find something else to watch. Having said this --- and here I am not pulling from The Onion --- JCVD deserves a viewing.

It's a pretty good script, and Van Damme's performance is, believe it or not, superb. Time magazine goes so far as to describe his performance (as far as 2008 performances go) as second only to Heath Ledger as the Joker.

What makes JCVD work is its treatment of Van Damme. The film is a self-parody of sorts. Every aspect of Van Damme's life is placed under scrutiny: He says worse things about himself, critic Roger Ebert notes, than anything “critics would dream of saying, and the effect is shockingly truthful.”

Van Damme has no money, and he is being passed over for work. Within the first few scenes, we find him at a custody hearing for his daughter. When the Judge asks the girl who she would rather live with, she says “every time my dad is on a TV show my friends make fun of me.” It hard to fault such friends...

Here's a snippet from a conversation between Van Damme, and Arthur, a robber star-struck by Van Damme:

Arthur: Got any new projects?

Van Damme: Not for now.

Arthur: I saw a thing on the web, what's it called?

Van Damme: Purple. Purple Amulet.

Arthur: What about that?

Van Damme: Steven Seagal got that part

Arthur: What?

Van Damme: He got that part.

Arthur: Steven Seagal? You're ten times better.

Van Damme: Well, he cut of his couette.

Arthur: His what?

Van Damme: His couette.

Arthur: Couette?

Van Damme: His ponytail. For the first time.

Arthur: Oh, I see. That's a tough one.

Two of the robbers, the psychotic Carradine and the somewhat likeable Arthur, steal a number of scenes with their strange banter and uneasy relationship. Much of the dialogue is excellent, and its hard not to smile when an elderly taxi-lady lauches into an extended monologue chastising Van Damme for telling her he is too tired to talk.

You might find JCVD even occasionally touching. Even if you don't, should Van Damme have found himself within the best 250 preformances of 2008 (let alone the second best, according to Time), that, I think, would have been reason enough to give this a viewing.

Here's a trailer: JCVD.

Enjoy, and let me know what you think.

The American (2010)

2011-04-01T13:30:00.000-07:00

The American features George Clooney as Jack, a figure of some mystery to those he encounters. Jack is a "good man" in the view of a prostitute with whom he finds himself involved, but someone "with a secret."

Jack finds himself in Abruzzo, a small community in the Italian countryside. Pavel, his contact, has arranged for him to construct a weapon for another mysterious contact, an assassin named Mathilde. While in Abruzzo, Jack is befriended by Benedetto, an elderly Catholic priest, and Clara, a prostitute.

In discussions about The American at IMDB, the first board had the heading: "Top Five of Worst Movies Ever." Ironically, the person posting remarked that until The American, the worst he’d seen was Babel. In fact though, The American was, I imagine, one of the better films of 2010, and certainly the best I saw.

The American, I found, was very Christian in its themes (although not remotely Puritan in its depiction of the human body). The film evidenced to me how hope or love can bring healing to the human person.

During a conversation with Jack, Fr. Benedetto drops the line: "A man can be rich if he has God in his heart." In his encyclical Spe Salvi , the Pope discuses how hope heals, not by curing a person from his or her burdens, but by allowing that person to face his or her present with the conviction that the present leads towards a goal, and that this goal justifies the efforts of one's journey.

By a person experiencing something of what awaits, hope allows a person to disassociate healthily from his or her present situation. Hope frees a person from what might otherwise hold him or her down. Seeing Jack as a man desiring peace, Fr. Benedetto observes that those seeking peace, often have much sinning in their history, but through his friendship with Jack, Fr. Benedetto allows Jack the possibility of disassociating himself with his past, and of freeing himself from what might otherwise overwhelm him.

Jack’s relationship with Clara emerges as central to this movement. In another encyclical, this time Deus Caritas Est, the Pope discusses the movement towards self-abandonment, and how a love which heals consists in the movement beyond one's own selfish character, and beyond submission to one's own instinct, towards a desire for the other's good.

When Jack says, after some "activity" with Clara, that he has “come to get pleasure, not give it,” we see in his words a certain baseness, but how, eventually, through Clara’s love of him, and her desire for his betterment, the possibility exists for his own transformation.

Ultimately, The American is a story holding out the possibility of redemption, and those are the best sorts.

Here's a trailer.

K.

Santaolalla

2011-03-17T22:48:00.000-07:00

Gustavo Santaolalla is an Argentine musician who has been active since 1967. For the last 10 years or so, he has taken to composing music for films.

He was awarded, two years in a row, an Oscar for “Best Acheivement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, Original Score.“ He won for Brokeback Mountain in 2005, and then Babel in 2006.

I recognize him because he’s done the music four each of Iñárritu’s four films (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel and Biutiful).

Since I find myself a little busier than usual these days, perhaps I can sustain this blog, for a little while longer, by providing a sample or two, or three, of his work?

Here's "Iguazu," "Pajaros," & "De Usuahla a la Quiaca."

If you need visuals, here's "De Usuahla..." live, and "Iguazu" with pictures.

Tell me what you think.

K.

Biutiful (2011): First Impressions

2011-03-05T15:44:00.000-08:00

Thursday two Seminarians and I went to a 9:50 p.m. viewing of Biutiful. Since I first heard Biutiful was in the works, I convinced myself that this would be one of those special pictures not frequently experienced.

Two persons were sitting in the theatre when we entered, and before the film began, a further two (presumably) human people showed up. In a room accommodating 300 or so, there sat seven, which, I admit, was more than I expected.

Bardem is brilliant as Uxbal, a man who makes his living in the underworld of Barcelona, Spain.

Guillermo Arriaga, the writer of Iñárritu’s three other films, asserts that “as a writer you have to love your characters, even if you hate them. If you love the characters you hate, you’ll make them believable.” Iñárritu, who wrote and directed Biutiful, has placed this energy into Uxbal, and the result is a character who draws the viewer into his life.

In a worthwhile (albeit unprofessional) interview, Iñárritu states that his goal was not cheap emotion, melodrama or soap-opera, but rather, an accurate depiction of the human condition:

"This kind of film now is almost like a, as I was telling this guy, an act of resistance. It's an act of resistance to a culture of stupidity that is flowing and intoxicating all societies. It's just it seems that we are very comfortable in the vulgarity of the easy things. These twitters and all these texts and everything, we are very comfortable just--- but to feel something, and to express emotions, see the young kids they don't express---its cool to be in control, its cool to be that, you cannot show vulnerability, you cannot be fragile, you can't have doubts. That's what the films say and that's our culture, and that's where we are headed to be as a culture: We will not die, we will just be young adolescents all our life."

I think the diagnosis is fair, and the beauty of the picture is that it draws the viewer into the reality of his or her own existence. Poisoned by an untreatable cancer, Uxbal is going to die. And so are we. Uxbal is going to leave behind persons who have experienced his love, hate, or indifference. And so will we.

He is a man of vulnerabilty, fragility and doubt. Relational beings are.

Death figures prominently, as does forgiveness and reconciliation. Despite life's tragic sense, life is biutiful. Emily captures several of Uxbal's concerns (and perhaps some of our own as well) with the questions: Is loving someone enough to fix them? Or Does anyone remember us once we're gone? Uxbal himself, poses a final question, in the picture's closing words. All are worth pondering.

K.

Here's a scene of Uxbal with his daughter Ana.　

The Road (2009)

2011-02-06T21:28:00.000-08:00

A man and a woman wake together from their sleep to find a different world: “There was a long shear of bright light, and a series of low concussions.” Years pass. No animals have survived. There are no crops, and the dead trees that haven’t yet fallen, soon will. “Each day,” the man narrates, “is more grey than the one before. It is cold and growing colder as the world slowly dies.”

This clip captures the dying world viewers are about to enter.

A son is born. Man, wife and son possess a pistol with two bullets. Fearing cannibals, the man teaches the boy how to use the gun on himself if the need arises.

The Road won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007.

Can I offer a snippet or two of dialogue from its adaptation to film?

Here the man and an elderly wanderer named Eli converse:

Eli: Supposing you were the last man alive?
Man: How would you know that? That you were the last man alive?
Eli: Well I don’t guess you’d know it. You’d just be it.
Man: Maybe God would know?
Eli: If there is a god up there, he would have turned his back on us by now. And whoever made humanity will find no humanity here. No sir. No sir.

Or, for example:

Boy: I wish I was with my mom.
Man: You mean you wish you were dead.
Boy: Yeah.
Man: You mustn’t say that. It’s a bad thing to say.
Boy: I can’t help it.
Man: You have to stop thinking about her. We both do.
Boy: How do we do that?

Regarding spirituality, while God seems absent, the man sees in his son something remarkable considering everything that has and is happening around them. Consider this line: “The child is my warrant and if he is not the word of God then God never spoke.” As I understand the Franciscan tradition (particularly the 13^th century Duns Scotus), every created thing is a “little word” of God. Jesus, in such a tradition, is the Word, but nothing in creation is seen as worthless or trivial because each thing images God in its own unique being. The man is certainly not a closet-Franciscan, but I do find it interesting, that in spite of the feeling of having been abandoned, in looking at his son, he sees God.

One reviewer speaks of the man and boy taking refuge in an abandoned church, and how “huddled beside a fire that looks like a sacrificial altar, beneath a large bright cross [Director John] Hillcoat frames a beautiful, indelible long shot in this scene, capturing within the frame a prominent cross and a father who would sacrifice everything for his son.” Worship has been absent for years, and “yet the cross still speaks.”

Eli has noted that whoever “made humanity will find no humanity here.” At one point, the man’s wife pleads with her husband saying “I don’t want to just survive.” There is more to being human than existing, and at a certain point the man loses sight of this. He has the boy though, who acts as a sort of conscience for the two. The boy is the one who shows love to the old man Eli, holding his hand, telling his father to help Eli to his feet, pleading that Eli be given food. The boy urges his father to have pity on a desperate man who has wronged them. The father loves the boy---that is certain---but in his quest for the boy's survival, the man seems to have sacrificed the good the boy expects of him. Will he who made humanity find humanity? Author Cormac McCarthy reminds that to love has risk, but to “just survive” and be without it is to lose one's humanity.

K.

Creation (2009)

2011-01-22T20:28:00.000-08:00

Creation is the story of Charles Darwin.

Charles Darwin, if you did not know, is often associated with matters surrounding life's evolution. While persons previous to him had suggested life's evolution, none proved its truth to the extent that he was able to through the use of scientific data. Further, in setting the mechanism of natural selection alongside evolution, Darwin enjoys a certain originality.

However, Creation is not really about science. It is neither a documentary of Darwin’s now famous voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle, nor is it a narration of The Origin. It is primarily a story about Darwin’s two great loves: His daughter Annie, and his wife Emma. Here's a trailer.

Featuring Paul Bettany as Charles Darwin, and Jennifer Connelly as Emma (Bettany and Connelly are real-life husband and wife…), this is a touching film about love, and the beauty of life. I don‘t want to anticipate your experience, so I leave aside the emotional power of this film, and instead identify three observations.

1. Proponents of Intelligent Design will be challenged by Darwin’s rather sarcastic observation regarding “the love he [God] shows for the butterflies by inventing a wasp that lays its eggs inside the living flesh of caterpillars.” Referencing Malthus, and Malthus’ observation regarding the way in which epidemics, famines and wars keep the world’s limited resources in balance with those who would consume such resources, Darwin asks “why this exceedingly wasteful plan?” In light of a Creator often associated with goodness, why does it have to be, as Tennyson describes, nature “red in tooth and claw”?

2. Creation invites reflection on the meaning of suffering and death, and where God fits into these experiences. Darwin is not above praying for those he loves: “Sir, I kneel before you in all humility. If it is your power, God, to save ----, then I will believe in you for the rest of my days.” Compare the experience that every person has (the loss of someone they love) to the way in which Rev. Innis prays that God teach those in his congregation that “all misfortune, all sickness and death, all the trials and miseries which we daily complain are intended for our good…[are] the corrections of a wise and affectionate parent.” Is that the meaning we want to attach to suffering and death?

3. Creation invites reflection about what is owed to the truth. Emma asks: “Charles, do you not care that you may never pass through the gates of heaven, and that you and I may be separated for all eternity?” She believes he is “at war with God,” but for what reason would he be separated from her for all eternity? As he puts it: “I owe it to my children to have the courage of my convictions.” Does that really warrant damnation?

To conclude, Creation presents Darwin in a way I have often pictured him, as a cautious naturalist, and as sort of point of moderation between the extremes of those who believe he is at war with God (and therefore worry for his well-being) and those who praise him for having killed God.

Biutiful (2011): A Preview

2011-01-06T14:38:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, 5 January 2011, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s first film since Babel played in one theatre in each New York and Los Angeles.

Biutiful (pronounced beautiful) will contrast with the three previous works of Iñárritu (which had featured the writing of Guillermo Arriaga). A noticeable difference will be the way in which the narrative unfolds: Biutiful possesses none of the multiple stories that weave in and out of one another. Biutiful takes place in one city, features one central character, is told from one point of view, and in one language.

Biutiful is the story of Uxbal (played by Javier Bardem), a not-very-nice man whose life is falling apart.

Someone like Graham Greene would consistently provide obstacles (political clashes, misplaced sensuality, robbery, crimes of violence…) for his characters to either hurdle or fall upon. His characters would agonize and despair, challenge and defy, and yet, as one critic has noted, only once “stripped of such pretence [could they be] hurled headlong into a state of unmerited grace.” Uxbal seems to follow in this tradition.

In a two-part interview (part I; part II), Iñárritu states that his goal was not to create “cheap emotion,” or ”melodrama or soap-opera,” but rather to depict the human condition. His themes, he recognizes, are:

not cool now, in a culture that we are living now. This kind of film now is almost like a, as I was telling this guy, an act of resistance. It’s an act of resistance to a culture of stupidity that is flowing, and intoxicating all societies. It’s just, it seems that we are very comfortable in the vulgarity of the easy things. These twitters and all these texts and everything, we are very comfortable just—but to feel something, and to express emotions, see the young kids they don’t express— its cool to be in control, its cool to be that, you cannot show vulnerability, you cannot be fragile, you can’t have doubts. That’s what the films say and that’s our culture, and that’s where we are headed to be as a culture: We will not die, we will just be young adolescents all our life.This is not the sort of film that will make much money. Biutiful will capture despair and agony, and what some might call the tragic sense of life. Because of this, there is a certain darkness associated. But despair and agony, or the tragic sense, shatter unreflective security, and remind a person that he or she is not at home in this world. To some, this gives rise to a hope that a home exists elsewhere.

When asked whether he had much in common with Iñárritu, Arriaga responded “yes a lot of things, but I’m an atheist and he’s very Catholic.” Take the MPAA rating seriously, but if you have the opportunity to take in Biutiful, do so. While likely disturbing, I think you will find it a moving and edifying experience. I think you will find hope communicated. And purely from an aesthetic point of view, I think you will find that this is the closest thing to a masterpiece you’ll have seen in quite some time.

Two trailers: Here and here.

K.