Tag Archives: Film

November 8, 2011 · 7:06 am

Meditations on Malick’s “The Tree of Life”

I’ve been hearing about this film for awhile.  ”You’ll either love it, or hate it,” people told me.  A few people who know me pretty well figured it would be my kind of movie.   Anjie travels, and I’d been contemplating watching it without her, but I kept thinking, “No.  I’ll wait for her.”  So Sunday night, we finally sat and watched it, and my first thought was, “What a mistake not to have seen this in a big theatre.”   We live on a busy street, buses going by, windows rattling.  We kept saying, “What did he just say?”  and rewinding.   Pitiful.  There were a couple of other interruptions as well, but we finally made it through.

Why, O, why didn’t I see this in the big theatre?

Frankly, even on my television, with buses roaring by bent on spoiling the most intimate film I’ve seen in a long time, I loved it.  I’ll love it a lot more the second time I see it.   To say that I loved it doesn’t mean I was completely satisfied by everything.  (The people wandering on the beach didn’t quite take me where I think Terrence Malick was trying to get me to go.)  But overall, brilliant work.

Maybe I loved it because I’m in the middle of looking very hard at the two roads suggested by the film.  The way of the Father and the way of the Mother.  The way of Nature, and the way of Grace.   The layering of the metaphors is subtle and dense, and the non-linear approach to the narrative serves the meditative feel of the film well.   I’m sure its very frustrating for folks who want answers to certain questions (how did that one character die? What happened?) that Malick has no real interest in answering, but for me, the quiet, the images, the sweep of trying to grapple with the full mystery of things left me thankful for a filmmaker willing to take those kinds of chances in story-telling.  Of course, I was also wondering how it ever got made.

I know we say that God is above gender, but there’s just no question that our language plays into the masculine side of the equation.  God is a man to most of us.   If that’s not true for you in your bones, good for you.  But my suspicion is that most of us see, uh…Him, as a masculine presence.  I’m not particularly fond of gender-inclusive language translations, but I can sure see why some people are passionate about them.  I do not pray to Him as “Mother.”  Neither did Jesus, for that matter.  What that means in the great reality that is beyond my consciousness to perceive about the reality of God, I don’t know, but on the street where most of us do our living, somehow it matters.   In The Tree of Life,  the father is tough, harsh, realistic, and ultimately deals pretty honorably with his failures, both of career and son-raising.   The mother is strong as well, but dances in the air, plays, protects, and extends ongoing opportunity for grace and change and life.

The two roads live together in all of us, as they do in the character of the grown son who talks (so quietly) about the way his mother and father grapple inside him.    And though we all walk both roads to some degree, my suspicion is that most of lean one way or the other.   I lean toward the mother’s road, unquestionably.   Is it right?  Is it the best?  Is it more complete, more God-like, more Christ-like than the harsh, demanding, warring, scrapping father?   The world is what it is, and we must make our way through it.   Truth is, Malick gives us some great images of the ups and downs of both roads.   Brad Pitt’s strong portrayal of the Father gives us glimpses of the work of grace, and Jessica Chastain’s vision of the mother has backbone and power and her own ways of demand.

To say God is not male is, I think, the right thing to say, the true thing to say.   To live as if He’s not, struggling to unearth the practical differences our thinking makes along these lines is a far different challenge.

And then there’s Malick’s framing.   We get intimations on the beginning and ending of time, and the fact that we are here in the particular now, and small, and forever kinds of people.

Gorgeous, stunning, troubling, and oddly, welcome.     As all good meditations should be.

Let me watch it again.   Maybe I’ll have more to say…

 

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February 15, 2010 · 8:05 am

The Last Station

What is love?

It’s an appropriate question to encounter on the day before Valentine’s Day, and Saturday afternoon, the question appeared with force in Michael Hoffman’s film, The Last Station, starring Christopher Plummer, Helen Mirren, James McAvoy, and Paul Giamatti.   (Spoilers ahead.)    The Last Station chronicles the last tumultuous days of the relationship between the famous Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (Plummer) and his wife Sofya (Mirren) as seen through the eyes of one of Tolstoy’s young disciples, Valentin Bulgakov (McAvoy).   (Note: Reading Russian novels and plays has never been easy — all those names and variations on names.)   Plummer is astounding as the aging prophet of the people, quietly powerful, occasionally rising to match the bluster and force of Mirren’s Sofya.    Mirren’s work is seamless, bringing this tortured woman to life with nuance and swift emotional currents that turn quickly according to Sofya’s need and strategy.   Valentin’s adoration of Tolstoy and the ideals of love, chastity, purity, and egalitarianism are etched beautifully by McAvoy,  his face shining is awe as he meets Tolstoy for the first time.   McAvoy plays Valentin’s transformation pitch perfect as he sees first hand the paradoxes of ideals meeting harsher realities, even in the lives of those who dream the ideals.   When he writes to his lover Masha at the end of the film, calling her to join him as Tolstoy battles for his life, he says simply, “Heart breaking.”  The beauty of it is that this is no revelation, but simply the statement of what McAvoy has been gradually experiencing throughout.

At issue is a will that substantially impacts the future of Tolstoy’s family.   Giamatti plays Vladimir Chertkov, Tolstoy’s secretary, and one of the fiercest adherents to a kind of new religion, or social doctrine, based on Tolstoy’s beliefs and writings.    Chertkov leads the “Tolstoyans” in a fight to have Tolstoy will the copyrights to his writings to the public, effectively robbing Sofya and Tolstoy’s children of an immense fortune.   Both Chertkov and Sofya appeal to Tolstoy on the basis of “love.”    The film pits the ideals of Christ’s love for all of humanity, and the demands of that love on behalf of social justice, against the demands and responsibilities of familial love.   Who do we care for first and foremost?   Our families, providing them with a level of comfort and prosperity that may or may not be needed?   Or the poor and the disenfranchised, perhaps creating a situation far less comfortable for our families?

What does Christ’s love demand?

Tolstoy makes his choice, and it is almost more than he can bear.   It is certainly more than Sofya can bear, and we see the shattering of individual lives even as perhaps thousands unseen are…saved?   Personal sacrifice for the greater good perhaps, but it’s hard (and beautiful) to watch these titans clash and ultimately lose (and yet not) their love.   The beauty and power of The Last Station is that it holds onto the private and social paradoxes desperately, refusing to fall into easy choices and preachy platitudes.   This is life at its messiest.   And perhaps its truest.

So glad I saw it…

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December 3, 2009 · 6:55 am

Run, Lola, Run / Choices, Chance, Outcomes

My small film group watched Run, Lola, Run last night, a 1998 German film in which a young woman receives a desperate phone call from her boyfriend.  He has lost 100,000 Deutsche Mark, and unless he can deliver this enormous amount of cash to his drug-dealing boss within 20 minutes, he will most likely be killed.  Lola, determined to help him, springs into action.   Without spoiling the fun too much, suffice to say that the outcome of this race against time is the heart of the story, and when the result of the “first run” isn’t good, the filmmaker decides to tell the story all over again, and then again a third time.  With each “run”, Lola’s journey varies slightly early on, and as you might expect, those small variations play havoc with the outcomes.  A friend said afterwards that it made him think “butterfly effect”, referencing the well known idea that runs something like this:  a butterfly’s flapping wings in a particular place might play an important role in the creation or prevention of a tornado half a world away.

In other words, stuff matters.

This isn’t a movie review, but is instead a brief meditation on the way we think about our action, our prayers, our lives, and the lives of others as we trundle down the path.   What do we control?  How do we know what we know?  As the film suggests, do all our questions roll down into one question that’s the same for all of us? And are there really that many answers, or is really just one answer, that leads back to the question, and we go back and forth between the two as long as we live?

Well, I don’t know about all that, but here’s the question I have:  how do you think of the equation that is choice + others’ choice + Providence + Evil + chance (luck) + prayer?   I’m sure those terms aren’t accurate or exhaustive in the equation, but you see what I’m getting at.   Most conversations tend to hover around which one of these is key, which one determines the rest.    Are our choices, born out of personal responsibility, the lynchpin?  But what of when we are “acted upon” by others?   Outcomes are changed by that action, yes?   And the prodding of temptations and “promptings” (sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference), what of that?   And does chance play any role at all?   And there’s prayer.   The language of scripture about prayer is diverse and provocative and strange, and we drive ourselves a little crazy trying to figure out how God goes about orchestrating things.   I know what people mean when they say that “everything happens for a reason”, but my sense is that it’s more accurate to say that “meaning can be made from everything that happens” or “I trust God to sort out the meaning and purposes of my life’s events.”  We are desperate to understand our lives, to make sense of them, to retain a feeling of control, power, and predictability.

Run, Lola, Run is a pretty elegant reminder that life, like football, is a high-pressure game of inches.   Of course, we can’t really think that much about it or we’d lose our minds, frozen into inactivity wondering what alternate future would unfold if I left the house 5 minutes earlier, or had done this rather than that, or if…fill in the blank.    Paul’s reminder that all things work together for good for those that love the Lord is as good a final word on the subject as I can think of.   Ultimately, we trust that God set up this chaos-theory world, and that while our actions don’t determine everything, and control little, nonetheless, they are the part of the equation we can directly impact, and therefore, a deep responsibility.   But grace seems just in such a world, and just as you’d expect, grace shows up as a major player in God’s dealing with the world.

Get the call, respond, run for all you’re worth, trust God with the rest.   Not a bad way to live.

Another hat’s off to the mystery…

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September 11, 2008 · 5:54 am

“Amadeus” Years Later

Amadeus

Amadeus

The Wednesday night film fellowship got together again last night. We are looking at films this month concerning Beauty, the transcendent kind. As I was thinking about films to watch (we may do My Kid Could Paint That next week), Amadeus popped into my head. A no-brainer great film about Beauty and the way God doles it out in the world. As we settled in to watch, I suddenly broke out in a panic, because the experience of first seeing it came sweeping over me. I was in San Diego working as an intern in directing at the Old Globe Theatre, working under Jack O’Brien. O’Brien is an A-list Broadway director who won the Tony for Best Direction of a Play for The Coast of Utopia as well the 2003 Tony for Best Direction of a Musical for Hairspray. In fact, Daniel told me they are studying O’Brien’s work in his Musical Theatre class at Michigan.

Anyway, I saw Amadeus in a theatre with a bunch of people working at the Old Globe that summer. And the force of Antonio Salieri’s descent into madness because of his rage at God over the vast talent of Mozart impacted us deeply. I related so well to Salieri’s fear of mediocrity and being consigned to dustbins of history while others perhaps less deserving (in my small mind of the time) would be heralded throughout the ages.

That was at the beginning of an artistic career that at that moment had enormous potential. I was where I needed to be as an up and coming young director. And now, 24 years later, watching Amadeus unfold again, it seemed likely that when it was over, I would be mired in a sort of defeatist self-examination of my career, which admittedly, has not gone as I thought it might. Would I end the evening in a pool of self-pity, needing Salieri’s absolution, the one he offers to all the crazed “mediocrities” of the world?

Herein lies the power of deep community. Had I been watching alone, I may well have ended in the self-critical pit that offered itself. But no, my friends were there, and after it was over, we talked of what it meant to be chewed up, eaten alive by envy and jealousy, and the odd notion of Salieri’s that you can take God on and win. We wondered together about how and why God hands out gifts they way He does, and why sometimes we seem so incapable of turning the two talents into four, and Jesus would have us do.

I asked everyone what they would tell Salieri if they had been able to catch him at the front end of his jealousy, when he is first meeting Mozart. None of us had any great ideas. And in that, we realized we are all Salieri at times. Always there are more gifted people, people who are further down the line than we toward the very things that are the desires of our deepest hearts.

So here’s a question for you. If you know the film, what would tell Salieri that might have helped him not descend into the madness of his jealousy and bitterness? And if you offer up a scriptural thing, the follow-up question is simply one of application. What are the concrete steps to implement the scriptural directive?

Discuss….

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August 6, 2008 · 10:02 am

No Country for Old Men

Okay, so I haven’t been blogging. No explanations other than super busy. Moving forward…

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen several films that I think give us a pretty good look at the postmodern sensibility in ways that matter. Probably the most haunting and memorable is the Cohen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men,” a film I’d been avoiding because I’d seen the trailer, and I knew the bad guy was going to be someone I was going to want to keep out of my head. I finally broke down and watched it about a week ago, and Javier Bardem, as Anton Chigurh, was as bad as I expected, and worse. A man wedded to a set of principles that establish a code of “integrity” to murder and revenge, Anton is a killer in pursuit of drug money wrongly taken in a story that often swerves in seemingly random directions, introducing interesting characters for little reason other than to brutally do away with them.  “You don’t have to do this,” the victims keep saying.  Sorry, but yes…he does.  Tommy Lee Jones, as the near-retired Texas law man in pursuit of Anton, gives valiant chase for awhile, but the further he goes, the more he realizes the rules of the game have drastically changed. The evil of the movie wants to reduce action and choice to a coin toss, but one poor woman caught up in the maelstrom of death refuses to play the coin toss game, looks the killer straight in the eye, and tells him the coin has nothing to do with it. “It’s just you,” she says (or something like that), but even as you nod in agreement, there’s a pile of things in the movie to remind you that not all is explainable in this world. But once we thought the explainable outweighed the mysterious.

Maybe not anymore.

This is the first film to have stayed with me with this kind of power in a long time. Finally, though, the more I reflect on it, the more I sense that something is not quite true here. Randomness and unexplainable events are certainly prisms through which we experience life, but the linkages between choice, character, action, and patterns of outcome are observably strong. Though collisions of circumstances and lives often catch us by surprise with no discernible explanation, it doesn’t naturally follow that there is therefore no reason, no meaning, no cause and effect, to our lives. Not that the Coen brothers are arguing this, but a life in which evil is randomly seeking out victims in unpredictable ways unconnected to character and choice is a much more frightening world than a world of sin and its predictable results.

Made me dream dark dreams…

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