THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE

THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE (2005, USA, Scott Derrickson, screenplay with Paul Harris Boardman)
People say that God is dead, but how can they think that if I show them the Devil?

I know people have qualms about this one. I can only say I was completely caught up in it, deeply affected, and extremely proud of what Scott Derrickson has accomplished. I think EMILY ROSE is one of the most direct apologetics both for the reality of Evil and the authenticity of the Christian faith that I've seen represented on film. And I don't think it's a mere tract, the kind of Christian propaganda movie we all dread that does nothing but bully an audience with over-argued apologetics that mostly just provoke us to take up the other side.

Though marketed as a straight-up horror movie, EMILY ROSE aims to be much, much more than simply scary (though it is that): it tries – and I think it mostly succeeds – to examine the possibility that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in most of our philosophies. Oh, Scott does the scary stuff real good: I'm sure there are plenty of viewers who will feel he's at his best in the straight-ahead horror sections. But how thrilling for me to see a film – especially in a cash-cow genre that's been milked of any real significance – make the risky choice to take these these things absolutely seriously, not just as a terrific premise for scaring people and taking their money, but as authentic phenomena with real spiritual significance.

Predominantly, supernatural horror films grab anything at hand that will render maximum fright quotient, to grab maximum box office buck: there's no thought of treating the genre ingredients with respect, with authenticity, as if these stories offer anything that might relate to real human experience. Vampire hunters wield crosses, but only as weapons: scripture is magic incantation rather than spiritual truth. Characters are treated as plot puppets rather than human beings: they are on a Dangerous Adventure In Another World, but are not on any real spiritual journey of their own. They have emotions and motivations, but not souls, and certainly not eternal souls.

EMILY ROSE treats its central characters with integrity, as human beings, and it argues passionately that to dismiss the possibility of supernatural evil and the validity (indeed, the necessity) of a spiritual response, may be not only foolish but deadly dangerous. The Catholic church gets bad press these days, and I'm not sure the cross-wielding (even cross-bow-wielding), holy water sprinkling demon hunters don't do as much to trivialize and marginalize it as sex-abuse scandals and media cliches of corrupt officials, ineffectual priests and ignorant parishioners. Derrickson seeks to rescue these holy symbols from the pop cultural recycling bin, to re-invest them with the legitimacy and authority they need to protect us from the Dark. However willing this director is to use the horror movie tropes, he never lets go his central theme: these are not out-of-date superstitions and rituals indulged in by untrustworthy religion mongers, and we forget that at our own peril. Jesus took the power of the evil one quite seriously, if the gospels are to be trusted: we who put our trust in the gospels do well to do the same.

As effective as the film is in frightening us, I respect the fact that there is a line it does not cross. There is an integrity there. At times I felt assaulted, but never violated: the film horrifies, but does not offend. I may not always want to look, but I never feel I am seeing what I shouldn't see. The camera is never prurient.

Simply considered as a movie, EMILY ROSE is at its best when the devil's around. As a genre film-maker, Derrickson knows the ropes: the high-intensity direct encounters with evil are visceral, intense, extreme, without going over the top or lapsing into laughable improbability, and the director is equally strong at setting up those sequences with sustained tension, creating oppressive environments with unsettling images. For all the rain and Catholicism, he doesn't go gothic: there's a dispiriting flatness to key locales that evokes the kind of experiential deadness that has everything to do with evil. The Rose house has an abandoned, autumnal look. Things are out of joint: wasps swarm around an unseasonal grey hive, farm cats move away as if pressed down by some invisible weight. The despairing university campus haunts me hours after the film has ended, reflecting Emily's own oppressed psyche with sterile concrete architecture, noisy cafeterias, soulless cinderblock dorm rooms and poorly-lit basement classrooms. In a more superficial horror film, these settings are merely creepy, serving as nothing but tension builders, moody set-ups for the dreaded explosions of terror or violence to come. While they do function that way in EMILY ROSE, they also achieve something far more significant than that, something that humanizes this film in a remarkable way.

The humanity of Derrickson's approach is seen most powerfully in the character of Emily Rose. She is never just a plot device, a human football to be kicked around by the demons, a living football field on which God's squad and Satan's team battle for victory. Jennifer Carpenter is an exceptionally gifted and experienced stage actress, a graduate both of the Juilliard School in New York and the Sacred Heart Academy in Louisville who brings both tremendous technique and powerful personal connection to the role. She plays its outsized demands with an utter physical and emotional commitment that somehow manages to sidestep all the pitfalls inherent in so physically extended (and at times bizarre) a role. She never mis-steps into caricature or cliche: she renders Emily with the same artistry and authenticity she brought to Mary Warren in The Crucible on Broadway, and we are able to see Emily for what she is: not a horror-movie monster, but an ordinary human soul. Maybe even an extraordinary one.

Emily's university experiences root the film in a human reality that renders the supernatural sequences far more deeply affecting: this is precisely how life feels for thousands of isolated students on campuses everywhere. This is exactly how cold and alienating a university campus can look, especially in the unrelenting drizzle of a cold fall rain. The pathetic fallacy isn't just a fallacy: at least in our perceptions, the physical world can very much embody the weather of our souls. As darkness closes in on this young woman, it matters little whether the demonic faces are real or imagined: they lay seige to her soul. I was especially shaken by the resolute determination of Emily's oh-so-young, oh-so-courageous boyfriend to stand by her, though he had nothing to offer but helpless love and proximity. How many early-budding college romances end up traveling equally terrible (if less overtly supernatural) journeys? What could equip this good-hearted boy for such a long and terrifying dark night of the soul? I felt for these kids.

I also felt for Emily's family, deftly drawn with few lines and solid performances. The sister who is sent with a message to the upstairs bedroom where her depressed sister has separated herself from the family, standing outside in the hall and hearing her sister's voice mumbling away in the empty room. The mother and father who are not the rural gothic rubes we expect them to be – this is a horror movie, after all. Simple, yes, but not simple-minded. Troubled, yes, but what sane person wouldn't be? It turns out the Rose house may not conceal ugly family secrets after all. Not all evil is so easily explained.

While Derrickson succeeds in breathing unexpected humanity into the people around Emily, and in using a certain visual flatness to great effect in the university setting, he doesn't get the same payoffs with the other secondary element in the film. Once the film's truly unsettling opening has passed, we step through a series of obligatory lawyer-biz scenes that seem to come right off a not-very-inspired TV set: the characters are stock, the "rising star in the legal firm" backstory standard issue, and soon enough we can't wait to flee the limbo of that boring bar, even if it means fleeing into the welcome presence of Satan. Better evil, well-portrayed, than mundanity rendered banal.

Some viewers find the courtroom scenes similarly uninspired, and that is surely a weakness in a film that's as much courtroom drama as horror movie. The arguments move forward methodically, the setting is visually mundane, drained of any possible mystery or drama. But all that worked for me. This is where we work with facts, the very walls seem to say. This is the real world: we don't believe in ghosts here. How lurid and improbable these medieval religious images look in such a utilitarian frame. If you can prove your case here, you've really done somethingl.

The problem with genres is that they set such rigid expectations: horror flicks start scary and get scarier, and then finish up with an unbearably scary climax; courtroom stories are filled with brilliantly engineered plot reversals, unexpected revelations that change everything, and stunning rhetoric that carries the day. Fans of both genres will have their expectations thwarted. It starts out scary, and rises to some pretty horrific climaxes, but that's not the emotional territory where it plays out its final act. We watch the case progress through the court, but we witness the methodical unfolding of an argument rather than the more melodramatic twists and turns of a fictional legal suspense story. If the central dramatic (and legal, and philosophical) question grips you as it did me – if you think it is important to wonder whether such supernatural horrors might actually be something more than, or at least something other than, the psychological horrors of mental illness – and if the jury is still out for you on the matter, as it is for me – then EMILY ROSE may work as superbly well for you as it did for me. If these questions seem to you insignificant, or if your verdict is already in – or if all you really want is to watch a genre flick – this one may very disappoint.

What will not disappoint are the performances not only of relative newcomer Jennifer Carpenter, but of Tom Wilkinson as the surprisingly three-dimensional and compassionate priest, and the always extraordinary Laura Linney as his defence attorney. This story may not afford Linney the scope of something like YOU CAN COUNT ON ME, but her intelligence and humanity provide an entrance point for an audience that will share her healthy skepticism about the priest's story, and which may find itself following along on her journey away from the cut-and-dried rationalist assumptions with which she begins the story into intellectual and spiritual territory that's far more ambiguous.

We also follow her as she pursues the central line of argument not only of the court case but of the film itself. Perhaps scientific/medical models are not the only ways of viewing the world; perhaps they involve speculation, theory, subjectivity and "leaps of faith" in the same way religious models do; perhaps not all priests are monsters, perhaps not all Catholics uneducated rubes, perhaps sometimes spiritual solutions are best suited for spiritual maladies; perhaps supernatural phenomena (such as demonic possession, for example) are worthy of legitimate inquiry; perhaps there is more in heaven and in earth. The film doesn't ultimately set out to establish "proof" by irrefutable argument - that may be the strategy of late-night talk show guests, but wouldn't appeal to most folks who aren't already convinced paranormalists - but rather to establish reasonable doubt toward the empirical-rationalist scientism that insists "such things cannot happen, and people who believe such things are dangerous." Perhaps too great a reliance on the machineries of science can also be dangerous?

EMILY ROSE makes the case for the reasonableness of religious belief: more precisely, for the wisdom of seasoning our certainties about the world with a certain reasonable doubt. If my summation of the film's argument makes it sound like a mere tract, rest assured it is not: this may not be a perfect film, but it is a dramatically powerful one, well acted and bloody scary - all the moreso when one realizes the director is playing for keeps. Derrickson isn't content to slap together another midway house of horrors or freak show that so many fright flick directors are willing to be: he treats supernatural evil as something all too real and deadly powerful, and that is truly frightening. He tells us that otherworldly darkness may visit not only Rwandan killing fields or hearts of darkness in Africa or Vietnam, but even a decent prairie farmhouse or cinderblock university dorm room. "The horror, the horror...."

REQUIEM, THE EXORCIST, HELLRAISER: INFERNO, SHAKING HANDS WITH THE DEVIL

Available at Videomatica

SOUL FOOD REVIEWS ONLINE: Links

Links to Soul Food Reviews here and elsewhere
Updated Sep 16 '06: recent additions in red

28 Up (soulfoodmovies, Aug 12 '06)
3 Needles (soulfoodmovies, Aug 12 '06)
The Addiction (Looking Closer '04)
Amateur: Hartley (soulfoodmovies, Aug 12 '06)
American Beauty (soulfoodmovies, Jul 28 '06)
Amistad (Christianity Today Movie Bible Study, '05)
Around The Bend (soulfoodmovies, Jul 28 '06)
Au Hasard Balthazar (CT Movies, Jun 21 '05)
Barcelona (soulfoodmovies, Sep 16 '06)
The Best Two Years(CT Movies, Feb 30 '04)
The Big Country (soulfoodmovies, Aug 11 '06)
Bright Leaves (CT Movies, Oct 8 '04)
Brother Sun, Sister Moon (CT Movies, Mar 9 '04)
Cat People: Schrader (Aug 2 '06)
Cat People: Tourneur (Aug 2 '06)
Close Up (Looking Closer '04)
Cool And Crazy (Looking Closer '04)
Cotton Patch Gospel (Looking Closer '04)
Curse of the Demon (soulfoodmovies, Aug 2 '06)
The Day The Earth Stood Still (soulfoodmovies, Jul 13 '06)
Dear Wendy (CT Movies, Oct 7, '05)
Divided We Fall (soulfoodmovies, Aug 18 '06)
Dreamlife of Angels (Looking Closer '04: just past Jeffrey's article)
Everything Is Illuminated (CT Movies, Oct 14 '05)
The Exorcism of Emily Rose (soulfoodmovies, Jul 6 '06)
The Eyes of Tammy Faye (Looking Closer)
Fight Club (Looking Closer)
Gates Of Heaven (Looking Closer)
Heaven (soulfoodmovies, Aug 27 '06)
The House Of Sand And Fog (Matthews House Project, Mar '04)
Ikiru (CT Movies, Mar 16 '04)
I Walked With A Zombie (soulfoodmovie, Aug 9 '06)
Joe Versus The Volcano (soulfoodmovies, Jul 14 '06)
The King (soulfoodmovies, Jul 8 '06)
King Arthur(CT Movies, Jul 7 '04)
The Last Days Of Disco (soulfoodmovies, Sep 16 '06)
A Man Escaped (CT Movies, Nov 23 '04)
The Manchurian Candidate (CT Movies, Jul 30 '04)
March of the Penguins (soulfoodmovies, Jul 28 '06)
The Merchant Of Venice (CT Movies, Jan 14 '05)
Metropolitan (soulfoodmovies, Sep 15 '06)
Most (The Bridge) (CT Movies, Oct 25 '05)
The Neon Bible (soulfoodmovies, Aug 2 '06)
Not Of This World (Looking Closer '04)
Pale Rider (Looking Closer '04)
Personal Velocity(Looking Closer '04)
The Princess and The Warrior (soulfoodmovies, Sep 5 '06)
La Promesse (soulfoodmovies, Jul 28 '06)
The Quiet American (soulfoodmovies, Sep 16 '06)
A River Runs Through It (soulfoodmovies, Jul 24 '06)
The Rookie (Looking Closer '04)
Rosetta (soulfoodmovies, Jul 28 '06)
Run Lola Run (soulfoodmovies, Sep 5 '06)
The Sea Inside (CT Movies, Jan 7 '05)
See Grace Fly (CT Movies, Dec 3 '04)
Shadowlands (CT Movies, Jul 19 '05)
Shane (Looking Closer)
The Shawshank Redemption (CT Movies, Sep 24 '04)
The Son (soulfoodmovies, Jul 28 '06)
Stars In My Crown
The Station Agent (soulfoodmovies, Jul 13 '06)
Strange Cargo (soulfoodmovies, Aug 7 '06)
Superman / II / Returns (soulfoodmovies, Jul 11 '06)
Time Of The Wolf (soulfoodmovies, Jul 8 '06)
To End All Wars (CT Movies, Jun 15 '04)
Ugetsu (soulfoodmovies, Aug 15 '06)
Waking Ned Devine (soulfoodmovies, Jul 31 '06)
The Wicker Man 1973 (soulfoodmovies, Aug 29 '06)
The Wicker Man 2006 (CT Movies, Sep 1 '06)

Best Of The Bard: Top Ten Shakespeare Films" (CT Movies, Nov 9 '04)
Celluloid Christians: Faith portrayals in recent movies" (Looking Closer, '03)
Moving Pictures: 100 Spiritually Significant Films" (CT Movies, Jun 22 '04)
Take Me Out To The Movies! Top Ten Baseball Films" (CT Movies, June 8 '04)

Critical Consensus: The Films Of 2005 (MCN)

1 Brokeback Mountain 992.5
2 History of Violence 820
3 Capote 675
4 Good Night and Good Luck 455
5 Squid & The Whale, The 451.5
6 Crash 449.5
7 King Kong 442.5
8 Munich 411.5
9 Grizzly Man 365
10 2046 300

11 Constant Gardener 261.5
12 Cache 251
13 Match Point (Woody Allen) 232
14 Syriana 219.5
15 Kings & Queens 202.5
16 New World, The (Terrence Malick) 195.5
17 Pride & Prejudice 164
18 Batman Begins 162
19 Last Days 154
19 Walk The Line 154

21 Sin City 153
22 Mysterious Skin 152
23 Nobody Knows 148
24 Cinderella Man 147
25 Me & You & Everyone We Know 146.5
26 Wallace & Gromit 145
27 Best Of Youth 141.5
28 Hustle & Flow 137.5
29 World, The 137
30 Murderball 134

31 Head On 130
32 Oldboy 120.5
33 Tropical Malady 120
34 Saraband 119
35 Broken Flowers 117
36 Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada 102
37 Paradise Now 101.5
38 March of the Penguins 99
39 Junebug 95
40 40 Year Old Virgin 94

41 Holy Girl 92
42 Kung Fu Hustle 90
43 Downfall 86
44 Look at Me 81
45 Café Lumiere 79
46 Kiss Kiss Bang Bang 68.5
47 Keane 64
48 My Summer Of Love 63
49 Serenity 62
50 War of the Worlds 61

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED (2005, USA, Liev Schreiber, Jonathan Safran Foer novel)
Maybe sometimes I'm afraid I'll forget.

Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel had a ton of fans among readers and critics alike, telling the curiously self-referential story of a young man who travels to Ukraine in search of a woman in a photograph who helped his grandfather escape Eastern Europe just ahead of the Nazis. There was an audaciity about the author's combination of wildly inventive verbal humour, bold imaginative strokes and dark Holocaust subject matter that somehow, improbably, worked brilliantly. The film (also a debut, Liev Schreiber's first turn behind the camera) aims for the same brash blend, and if it doesn't achieve the artistic "perfect storm" of the novel, it does tell an important story in a fresh way that may perfectly fit a generation. (The GARDEN STATE of genocide flicks?)

I know a playwright whose holocaust-themed play was recently rejected by a major American theatre: they celebrated the writing, but felt the "holocaust genre" to be "supersaturated." As if this is something we should put behind us. God forbid. Jonathan's wild and crazy Ukranian tour guide, infatuated with all things new, tacky and American, begins the film with just such an attitude: "The past is past." At least that's what he always believed until he encountered The Collector, this young Jewish American (not alone in his inexplicable obsession, it turns out) who's "a compulsive rememberer," gathering the flotsam and jetsam of his life and his family's lives in the plastic bags he carries everywhere.

There is something sacramental in this reverent oblation of mundane objects that's reminiscent of the central moment in American Beauty. Ricky Fitts has filmed a plastic bag caught in a whirlwind in an urban alleyway, a sight whose strange beauty communicated to him the benevolent presence of God: "Video's a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember."

Everything Is Illuminated is a film that doesn't want us to forget. Or perhaps it is a film that wants a new generation to remember – to re-member, if you will, to re-assemble – a past beyond its own personal memory, which nevertheless profoundly shapes its present. Whatever its possible short-comings, this may be a very important film indeed, a story for and about a generation half a century removed from the Holocaust who must come to terms with the horrors of their not-so-distant and not-so-different past – horrors which befell young men and young women not so different than themselves.

Available at Videomatica

Originally published in longer form at Christianity Today Movies

DEAR WENDY

DEAR WENDY (2005, Denmark, Thomas Vinterberg, Lars von Trier screenplay)
It's the time of the season for loving

Dick loves Wendy. Helplessly, obsessively, tragically. It's a star-crossed-lovers story that's as ancient as it is familiar. With one crucial variation: Wendy is a gun. Specifically, a 6.35mm six shooter, a sweet little double action pearl handle revolver with internal hammer who makes a new man of Dick, turns a weak and sensitive loner into a man with confidence and authority. A good woman or the right gun can do that.

Dick refuses to follow in the footsteps of the town's real men and work in the mine. He stocks shelves in the corner grocery and carts around a toy gun he found in a second-hand shop, comforting himself with smug judgements of the town's other inhabitants (as much an echo of DOGVILLE as the story's stylized small-town setting). Until he learns the true power of what he carries in his pocket, and his life begins to change. He's a natural shooter who he can plant six shots in the centre of a target without aiming or even thinking. Wendy and Dick are made for each other.

Problem is, one of Dick's strategies for moral superiority has been to call himself a pacifist. But hey, that's no problem: his firearm will be carried but not brandished. Why bother? Just packing heat makes him walk taller – of course he's never going to use his weapon. If you grew up in the MAD shadow DOCTOR STRANGELOVE, you're already sceptical: it's a naive rationalization that contains the seed of eventual tragedy.

Dick and a gun-loving "Hey, I'm a pacifist too!" pal from the grocery store form The Dandies, complete with secret passwords and symbols, rituals and pledges, even dress-up clothes and a secret clubhouse they fix up in an abandoned part of the mine. It's everything kids could want in a secret club. Big kids. Kids with guns.

Of course, as Ibsen taught us, a gun on the mantle in Act One must be used before the end of Act Three. Complications arise, as complications are wont to do, and sudden violence escalates into a bloody BUTCH CASSIDY / WILD BUNCH showdown in the town square, triggered by a tragic misunderstanding.

Well, not exactly tragic. This sad-fated tale doesn't actually aim for the emotional catharsis of tragedy. Its tongue is mostly in its cheek, and it's plenty cheeky. DEAR WENDY is to DOGVILLE as DOCTOR STRANGELOVE is to A CLOCKWORK ORANGE – indeed, the "I can walk" climax is a direct nod to that other over-the-top satire of the American weapons fetish: WENDY could easily be subtitled "How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Gun." Everything is played with a brash style and ironic tone that signals satire more than sentiment: Lars and Thomas don't want to break our heart, they want to poke us in the eye or slap us upside the head.

Judging by the critics, they succeed at that if nothing else. This movie makes Americans mad – which no doubt makes Vinterberg and von Trier perfectly happy. The not-so-melancholy Danes are in mischief-maker mode, court jesters whose cinematic smackdown chooses provocation over subtlety. Antagonistic reviewers find the movie glib, its characters, situations and plot developments absurd: I'm guessing the film-makers simply find America's love affair with guns equally absurd, and are quite content to match style and subject.

Whether you love or hate this bratty little movie may depend on whether you feel it's your nose that's being tweaked by the town fools. If you're pretty convinced that guns don't kill people, etc, that your country's more right than wrong and that America's latest war "is really about peace" (aren't they all?), you'll likely find this movie by a couple of Europeans facile, as condescending and self-righteous as its misguided central character. On the other hand, if you consider all this GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL stuff a poor way to run a country, DEAR WENDY may seem a perfectly appropriate response, gleefully deconstructing our love of power and the dreadful gravitational pull of violence.

I don't go looking for a gospel message in every film I see. But I do have this habit of taking everything life brings my way – film included – and holding it up against the Bible, to see what light might be refracted. And when I wonder what sort of letter Jesus might write to Wendy and her lover, I think of his words to Peter; "All who draw the sword will die by the sword." Maybe he said that because, if nothing else, weapons are power. Intoxicating power. DEAR WENDY charts the corruption wrought by that kind of power, observing the way young ideals fall by the way once easier, quicker, more decisive strategies present themselves.

Maybe what we've got here isn't exactly a love story or a tragedy, or even a satire. Maybe Dear Wendy is film noir in disguise, sans tough detectives or moody black and white cinematography. Naive, corruptible, lonely young man meets femme fatale, and it all leads, inevitably, absurdly, to destruction.

Some dames you just can't trust. Dames like Wendy.


Available at Videomatica
Originally published at Christianity Today Movies
P.S. DEAR WENDY has the best website in the world. The one for DOGVILLE was equally cool, but it has disappeared from the web.

MOST WANTED: Videos I Need For My Book

Updated Sep 17 2006: New or newly updated entries in purple

Here's a list (followed by some details) of movies I'm trying to track down for my book – to rent or borrow, or maybe even to buy for under twenty bucks Canadian. VHS, DVD, whatever. Anybody got any leads? Email me: fellowpilgrim@hotmail.com

Alice
Amen.
Angels Of The Streets (Bresson)
Bless You Prison
Blue In Green
Le Chambon
La Colline Aux Mille Enfants
The Confession (1920, USA, Bertram Bracken)
Diary Of A City Priest
The Displaced Person (1976, Glenn Jordan, TV)
Dog Nail Clipper
Elina: As If I Wasn’t Here (Finland, Klaus Haro)
Europa 51
The Eyes Of Asia (Portugal)
Faustina (Poland, 1995)
Forgiving Dr. Mengele
He Who Must Die / The Greek Passion (1957, Jules Dassin)
Heaven Over The Marshes
Hiding And Seeking
The Idiot (Kurosawa)
In Your Hands
Inside Out
Investigation Of A Flame
Jesus Christ Movie Star
The Jesus Trip
Lake Of Fire
Love In The Ruins
Machuca
Man Dancin’
The Man Who Planted Trees
Mister Moses
The Navigator
Not Of This World
A Question Of Faith (Timothy J. Disney)
Resurrection (2001, Taviani)
The Seventh Room
Sister Helen
Son Of Man
Spiral Road
Tales From The Madhouse
The Trial of the Catonsville Nine

DETAILS

BLESS YOU PRISON (2002, Romania, Nicolae Mãrgineanu)
"Based on the memoir of Nicole Valéry-Grossu, this film is a convincing testimony of how she is overcome by faith in an extremely painful and hopeless situation."

LA COLLINE AUX MILLE ENFANTS (The Hill of the Thousand Children, AKA LE CHAMBON?, 1994, France, Jean-Louis Lorenzi)
"French TV dramatization of the story of Le Chambon—the French village that saved 5,000 Jewish children by hiding them from the Nazis. Le Chambon was inhabited by Huguenots, a people who knew about religious persecution from personal experience. Their pastor, Pastor Andre Trocine, led his people to do what was morally right. He wrote, “The duty of Christians is to resist the violence that will be brought to bear upon their conscience through the weapons of the spirit.” This drama focuses on the pastor and the choices made by the people of Le Chambon during this difficult time—a time which tested their courage and morality." (see also the documentary Weapons of the Spirit, which includes interviews with the citizens and survivors of Le Chambon.)

THE CONFESSION (1920, USA, Bertram Bracken)
A priest hears a killer's confession and must protect the oath of confidentiality, even as his own brother is being convicted of the murder.

DIARY OF A CITY PRIEST
Set in one of Philadelphia's toughest neighbourhoods, Father John MacNamee is faced with gangs, poverty, drugs, and an often pervasive feeling of hopelessness. "David Morse conveys Father Mac's weary yet resolute faith, creating a moving, inspiring portrait of a spiritual man who struggles with translating his faith into action every day." From the book. Sundance Film Festival, Heartland Film Festival.

THE DISPLACED PERSON (1976, Glenn Jordan, TV, 58 min)
Horton Foote screenplay, Flannery O'Connor short story about a conscientious but driven Polish refugee who disrupts the heirarchy of power on a Georgia farm in the 1940s. John Houseman plays "an otherworldly priest."

ELINA: AS IF I WASN'T HERE (Finland, Klaus Härö)
"The film's 9-year-old protagonist, Elina, lives with her mother and sister in the countryside, withdrawn into her own private world. She only shares her emotions with her dead father, whom she believes still lives in a misty marshland. At school, Elina rebels against a taciturn teacher who tries to force the children to speak Swedish. Härö makes no "adult” distinctions between the spiritual and the secular in this visually rich film. Children's film of the year: Berlin 2003 Crystal Bear, Young People's Jury; Montreal film festival. (ET)

EUROPA 51
"Rossellini's major statement on postwar materialism and the sort of Christianity that is so radically called to social justice and renewal that it becomes a threat to middle class notions of the status quo and even sanity. Another major work, starring Ingrid Bergman." (*DC)

THE EYES OF ASIA (Portugal, Joao Mario Grilo)
"17th century Japan. The story of Julian of Nakaura, a Japanese Jesuit priest who was tortured to death for refusing to renounce his faith. Grilo mixes the historical narrative with a modern "story" in which a European (Geraldine Chaplin) visits Nagasaki and learns the story of Julian's martyrdom from the priests who keep his memory alive." PTC

FAUSTINA (Poland, 1995)
"Gorgeously photographed, hauntingly scored, beautifully directed and acted, that offers a deeply spiritual portrait of Sr. Faustina.... On first viewing, my impression is that Faustina belongs on a very short list of deeply spiritual portraits of faith and religion, alongside such films as Alain Cavalier's Therese, Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, and Cloche's Monsieur Vincent." SDG

HE WHO MUST DIE (1957, Jules Dassin)
From Nikos Kazantzakis' novel The Greek Passion.

HEAVEN OVER THE MARSHES (Augusto Genina)
"Several times in THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS Rémy thinks back and obsesses over an actress that he lusted after in one of his favorite films, Augusto Genina’s Heaven Over the Marshes.... a film in which the main character is a fourteen year-old girl who instead of enjoying "the pleasures of sin for a season" resists the sexual advances of a desirous farmhand. It's a film Bazin called "a rarity; a good Catholic film." Yet Rémy obsesses over and reflects on this spiritual film and seems to miss any of the noble themes in it, only concentrating on what he has focused on for the duration of his entire life -- hedonism." stef

HIDING AND SEEKING

INSIDE OUT (South Africa, 1998)
"South African comedian Gilda Blacher stars as Hazel Levin, a young Jewish actress from Johannesburg stranded in a small Karoo town when her car breaks down. Recognized from a TV commercial, Hazel finds herself invited to direct the town's nativity play. She must deal with some openly antagonistic townsfolk - not only because she's Jewish, but also because of her attempts to involve the black community in the production. Inside Out is a gentle, romantic tale of love, tolerance, tragedy and triumph that explores, often with hilarious results, the changing face of South Africa."
(Not the one that goes "Jimmy Morgan is a middle-aged man with expensive tastes, a fondness for call girls, an addiction to gambling... and agoraphobia." Also definitely not the porn series.)

JESUS CHRIST MOVIE STAR
Doc about Jesus movies.

LOVE IN THE RUINS
Scott Derrickson short (35 min) from Walker Percy novel. Student film, undistributed.

MAN DANCIN'
Fairly recent Norman Stone feature about an ex-con who gets involved in a Passion Play

MISTER MOSES
Robert Mitchum

NOT OF THIS WORLD
A nun and a laundromat owner find this baby... (to buy)

A QUESTION OF FAITH (Timothy J. Disney)
"In the heart of California wine country lies a monastery where centuries-old traditions of ritual, discipline and solitude create a timeless serenity--until a member of the order experiences a miraculous encounter with implications that are both stunning and uplifting. As the community struggles with the ramifications, long-buried conflicts begin to surface and the Brothers are forced to grapple with the fundamental tension between faith and reason."

RESURRECTION (Italy/France/Germany, 2001, Paolo & Vittorio Taviani)
From Tolstoy's novel. "Made for the small screen, this three-hour version is just long enough to faithfully cover the book’s events and probe its moral and spiritual dimensions, which have been constant themes of the director-brothers’ work” (Deborah Young, Variety)

THE SEVENTH ROOM
Edith Stein movie

SON OF MAN
Crazy-revolutionary Jesus. Script by Dennis Potter.

SPIRAL ROAD
Missionaries, lepers, Rock Hudson.

TALES FROM THE MADHOUSE
Got myself a PAL copy. Now I just need to find a way to play the thing: or even better, to dub it onto dvd without spending $30 for the service. Anybody?...
Eight 15-minute monologues inside a crumbling Victorian sanatorium, characters who met and missed Jesus. One script by Murray Watts, one directed by Norman Stone, one starring Clair Bloom, one Jonaythan Pryce, etc.

SHADOWLANDS

SHADOWLANDS (1985, UK, Norman Stone, William Nicholson)
SHADOWLANDS (1993, UK, Richard Attenborough, William Nicholson from his own stageplay)
The pain now is part of the happiness then.

In 1993, Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger starred in Shadowlands, the heartbreakingly personal story of C.S. Lewis's fascinating relationship with Joy Gresham. It gave many North American viewers their first glimpse of a little-known chapter in the life of this revered Christian writer, but the episode was not new to British audiences: it had been dramatized for BBC television a decade earlier, then made into a highly successful London stage play.

North American film buffs and Lewis fans alike have had to put up with a certain level of frustration ever since. You'd no sooner start to praise the Oscar-nominated film version of the story than somebody would pipe up to tell you how much better "the original" was. Which, of course, was impossible to get hold of, so you'd just have to take their word.

What you could get hold of, though, was the playscript, and when a buddy brought me a copy fresh from the West End I saw right away this was a masterful piece of writing: indeed, it gripped me even more than the film I loved so much, and I resolved that I would play that role one day. (You see, writing about movies is just my obsession: there's no money in it, so – being practical by nature – I I realized right away I'd need to support my habit with a more lucrative day job. I picked acting.)

This spring I finally got my chance not only to put William Nicholson's amazing script onstage but also (finally) to view the original BBC production, which was released on DVD as we prepared for rehearsal. It's amazing to see how substantially different the three versions are – all written by the same man, William Nicholson. To compare them is a fascinating study in the evolution of a script.

Just as thrilling is the opportunity to watch veteran British actor Joss Ackland (his IMDb entry lists 139 movie credits!) create an interpretation of "Jack" Lewis that's profoundly different from better-known, widely-acclaimed Anthony Hopkins performance which followed. We'll never get a chance to meet this man we feel we know so well through his writings – at least not this side of the wardrobe – so it's a great privilege to have two such fully-realized portrayals provide a truly three-dimensional perspective of C.S. Lewis.

The 1985 teleplay begins with an extreme close-up of an eye, blinking. Eerie underscoring distances us from the laughter and conversation we hear as the camera pulls back to show High Table at Magdalen College. Forkfuls of food are thrust into mouths, fish heads are cut off, blotchy-faced Oxford dons cough and chew. We rise from the table and flee outdoors: "Why am I so afraid? I never knew that love could hurt so much, and I love you, and all I want is to love you. Beyond every door I hear your voice saying to me, 'This is only the land of shadows. Real life hasn't begun yet.'" Walking into a darkened doorway, we find ourselves traveling down the long, empty corridor of a house, into an abandoned spare room. The doors of a wardrobe swing open, we push through coats and furs until we come to a lantern, shining in the middle of a snowy wood.

In the first a minute and a half of this made-for-TV teleplay, we already know how close we'll be to the essence of C.S. Lewis – and we know where the coming love story will be headed. We see the world through Jack's eyes, but it's a world he's alienated from. And when he turns away, with Joy preoccupying his thoughts, it's his own childhood and the world beyond the wardrobe he goes back to. The story that's to come has been framed by childhood and bereavement, and we've glimpsed its two worlds – the clubby male environs of British academic life, and the crisp, cool magical world beyond.

We also sense how much this cinematic creation will be informed by the literary creations of the central character – not only in the Narnia reference and the image of the childhood home described in his spiritual memoir Surprised By Joy, but in the voice-over which is so close to the opening of A Grief Observed; "No one ever told me grief felt so much like fear..."

Then the title credits roll and we're immersed in the day-to-day bachelor's life of Lewis in the early 1950's – but already our ears are being tuned to what's coming. We hear Lewis give a radio talk on marriage, we see him chided by his university peers for his "plain Jack" talks on thing he knows nothing about. Ackland is wonderful here: he's got the intelligence, a willingness to engage in the argument at hand, but there's a tremendous humility as well. "Shouldn't I have said that I haven't been married?" is played with a winning sincerity: for all the public attention, this is a man who isn't always sure of himself. It's a warmth and humanity that permeates the entire performance, and seems so close to the heart of the Lewis we meet, for example, in the preface to The Problem of Pain, where he acknowledges not being a "real theologian," and openly admits not living up to his own principles on the subject of pain, admitting to a personal aversion to any sort of real suffering.

Essentially, Shadowlands maps Lewis's own journey from the intellectually impressive but not-lived-through and not-quite-convincing arguments of The Problem of Pain (1940) to the agonized heart's cry that is A Grief Observed (1961), which he began writing the very hour he returned home after Joy's funeral. The earlier book strives to construct answers and explanations, the later offers few. But it's the second of the books that Christians turn to in times of bereavement, and this film takes the viewer through the experiences that bring Lewis to his deeper humanity and wisdom. (The play makes this structure even clearer, opening not with a radio talk on marriage, but with an intellectually dazzling public address on God's responsibility for suffering in the world which plays like a distillation of his 1940 book – just as it ends with a monologue very close to the spirit of the 1961 volume.)

BBC director Norman Stone identifies himself as a Christian – a recent project, Man Dancin', is about a criminal released from prison who gets involved in a parish Passion play – and Stone's affection and affinity for Lewis is palpable, not only in the winsome performance he draws out of Joss Ackland and the warmth he finds in the romance with Joy, but in his honouring of all the literary and theological elements in Nicholson's original script. This script draws on a wide range of Lewis's works, and it's willing to give tremendous screen time to Joy and Jack as they get to know each other, in a literate conversation that ranges from conversion stories to theology and politics. Most significantly, while the teleplay takes Lewis in his grief to a point where God has slammed the door in his face, with "the sound of bolting and double bolting, and after that, silence," we also see him wake in the night and wander back out into those Narnian woods, where he finally can remember Joy and sense again something of God's presence.

And what a splendid Joy Claire Bloom gives us! As Jack and Warnie plod along a path by the River Chartwell, Joy darts in and out like an excited child on a day trip, peppering the stolid brothers with a barrage of opinions and questions, all inhibition and intelligence and enthusiasm. And if her American accent never gets any closer to New York than someplace in the mid-Atlantic, there's spunk and savvy and sass enough in this performance to provide all the Yankee brashness the role calls for. This dame is smart!

If anything, the subsequent stage version even more richly explores the world of words and ideas (naturally enough, since plays tell their stories in words, movies in pictures) while sharpening the moment-to-moment dramatic thrust of the story. Where the BBC film can feel talky at times, the play shows considerable dramaturgical development: the dramatic momentum is much stronger, the story is always moving forward. The argument at the Christmas party, for example, is much more developed, and there's real crowd-pleasing energy in the back-and-forth argument between Joy and Christopher. (That's another great strength of the stage play: Christopher Riley is a far more significant character, and far more nuanced, not merely Jack's snide adversary, but also a loyal and insightful friend, a wonderfully drawn "secular priest.") The play is also less bound by the movies' need to be "realistic," and incorporates a magical and deeply moving series of images drawn from The Magician's Nephew where Douglas enters the wardrobe and ultimately brings back a magic apple which he presents to his mother just after her marriage to Jack, just before her recovery, deftly suggesting the possibility that her remission is as much miracle as it is medicine, brought about by a child's faith.

The Attenborough version benefits from the stronger narrative craftsmanship of the stage play, and it also looks a lot better. Stone's Oxford is dreary as hell – specifically, that peculiarly British vision of hell Lewis describes in The Great Divorce – dismal, dingy, and always raining. (I guess if you think of that as a choice, it's a plus: I think it's mostly just a small budget and a shoddy DVD transfer.) But the bigger-budget version goes too far in the name of narrative drive, stripping out too much conversation, too much theology, too many ideas, almost all the literature – does Hollywood really believe people only know The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe? More seriously, it also truncates the ending of the story in a way that almost suggests Lewis abandoned his faith by the end of his life. (I've long believed the Lewis estate has fallen into the hands of Screwtape himself – maybe this was their doing?)

Hopkins' portrayal of Lewis also raises qualms. This actor, one of the greatest of our time, was at the top of his game – think Silence Of The Lambs (1991) and Remains Of The Day (1993). His Lewis is a brilliant portrayal of a brilliant mind, but there is also a brittle unconcern that seems at odds with the Jack of history – or of the preceding two versions. Which is not just Hopkins' doing: the 1993 screenplay adds a sub-plot about a personality clash between Jack and an inattentive student, and focuses Joy's relationship to Jack on some pretty abrasive conflict over Jack's insistence on winning every argument, surrounding himself with people who are either worshipful or weak. How do these elements strengthen the essential thrust of the story? They feel more like the knee-jerk iconoclasm of the times, when it's assumed audiences won't believe characters who are too "good," too nice. A shame.

Maybe it sounds like I want hagiography, and maybe I do. But to miss Jack's warmth and generosity is to miss something essential in the man: biography after biography shows us a man who, while he certainly loved a no-hold-barred debate and may have alienated some, was also much beloved. Indeed, if there is a missing element in these two cinematic interpretations of C.S. Lewis, it may be his largeness of spirit. As Douglas Gresham himself writes, "even within the first hours of meeting him, the enormous vibrancy and vitality and charm and humor of his personality completely expunged any physical deficiencies that I might have seen in him. He was a very humorous man... If Jack was in a room, there was laughter. If he was sitting by the bedside of someone dying of cancer, there was laughter. If he was talking to his colleagues, his peers, there was laughter.”

I suppose these performances may have been crafted the way they were to leave room for dramatic contrast and character development: if Joy was to be the spark that lit Jack's world ablaze, perhaps they felt she ought to be the one that brought the laughter and life. But I'm convinced that Jack's vitality and heart can be shown right from the outset without losing a bit of the story's shape: the contrast is between Jack and the world around him, and when Joy comes into his life, we recognize two people who are profoundly right for each other. There's still plenty of emotional terrain to be covered as the bachelor becomes a friend then a lover and a husband, as the two of them ride the waves of hope and despair that marked their years together. But a bigger Jack is a truer Jack, and makes for a greater and truer story.

That said, each film is in its own way a gift, and I wouldn't do with out either of them. I suspect that the real Jack Lewis was somewhere between the warm and self-effacing man Joss Ackland brings to the screen – much preferred by Christians and Inkling-o-philes – and the brittle, brilliant mind Anthony Hopkins has etched in our memory. And if the latter Lewis is too disconnected, too detached, too domineering in the early going, it certainly sets us up for a powerful reversal when his world falls to the ground late in the film. Who will ever forget the raw vulnerability of that attic scene with Douglas? That one moment places this film, and this performance, very close to my heart indeed.

And without Shadowlands – in any of its incarnations – how many of us would ever have met Joy Davidman? What a gift she is! Films rarely present us with such characters, yet we all have them in our lives and count ourselves blessed – these opinionated, forceful, courageous woman who don't give a damn about being ladylike, whose breathtaking femininity is all in their wit and their passion and their uncompromising authenticity. No guile, no quarter, just heart and mind and fiery commitment. When I first saw Debra Winger in the role, I had my qualms: she seemed too young for Lewis, too brashly American, a shade too cantankerous. Now I realize how perfectly this actress fulfilled the role: mine were exactly the reactions of Lewis's crusty and protective friends when the real Joy showed up in his life! (Winger and Hopkins couldn't have been more suitably cast with respect to age. During shooting, he was 54 and she 37, precisely the ages Jack and Joy would have been when they met in the fall of 1952.)

And whatever with think about the nuances of these interpretations, the fact is both films offer the magnificent gift of making Lewis and his time real to us. We journey to Oxford – the Attenborough film in particular makes this place into a central character in its story, which is as it should be – we get to know Warnie and Douglas and Joy, we experience the difficulties all of us face eventually when our faith in a loving God comes up against the reality of suffering in our world. And if we don't come away with answers, we come away larger, having passed through some very dark shadows indeed, but reminded that even the brightest things in our pale world are nothing but a shadow of the life to come.

THE LION, THE WITCH & THE WARDROBE, THE MAGICIAN'S NEPHEW, TOM AND VIV

The 1993 version is available at Videomatica

Originally published at Christianity Today Movies

THE SEA INSIDE

THE SEA INSIDE (MAR ADENTRO, 2004, Spain/France/Italy, Alejandro Amenabar, wr Amenabar & Mateo Gil)
When you depend on others for everything, you learn to cry with a smile.

If you've got your mind made up about euthanasia, you'll find this film either galling or grand, depending which side you come down on. But if you don't already agree with the film's viewpoint, it's one-sided polemic will mostly just aggravate you. The film is so resolved to make its point, so unwilling to lend credibility to any other side of the argument, I found myself constantly assessing (and ultimately reacting against) the film's arguments – even though I don't have a position on the issue at hand. It got me into my head when it wanted to be in my heart: it made me stubborn when it wanted to win me over.

Simply regarded as a film, though, THE SEA INSIDE is memorable: it's propaganda, sure, but not mere propaganda. There's genuine artistry here, and humanity. It relates the true story of Ramon Sampedro, a quadriplegic man who's been confined to his bed for three decades, following a diving accident. In spite of his condition, he is resolutely cheerful: because of his condition, he wants to die.

THE SEA INSIDE shows us the glory of common things, the sensual delight of a swim in the ocean, an embrace or a bicycle ride, serving ultimately to emphasize Sampedro's unbearable circumstances, where most of these glorious and common pleasures are out of reach if not out of sight. Following from this, we are expected to support his conclusion – that death is a reasonable exit from this unbearable tension.

As you might expect from a film with a euthanasia axe to grind, religious characters are not treated with respect. As in the matter of abortion, the folks who position themselves as "pro choice" have little patience or respect with those who claim the label "pro life" (unfortunately the opposite is just as often true, but that's not the focus of this particular tract— er, movie), and in this highly politicized story any character with qualms about Sampedro's "mercy killing" is likely to be both Catholic and unlikeable.

A quadriplegic Catholic priest visits, to persuade Sampedro of the value of his life. The priest is portrayed from first to last as a self-righteous and pushy man, a dominating, opinonated and ill-informed fool with a weak and brittle argument. The movie works hard to get laughs out of his inability to get up the stairs to Sampedro's room in his wheel-chair: the gag is condescending and mean-spirited, and smug in its treatment of the conversation that follows. Frankly, Sampedro's arguments are flawed, his rhetoric glib and unconvincing. He is proclaimed the victor not because he makes better arguments, but on the grounds that he's not a jerk like those Catholics. In case we miss the point, his salt-of-the-earth sister-in-law ends the argument by saying to the priest: "I don't know which one of you is right, but I do know one thing: you have a big mouth." The film lacks her humility: it's perfectly sure that it's right, and proclaims that to us at every possible opportunity.

Best thing about the film? The visceral power of two of its most potent visual sequences. When we flash thirty years back to the ocean dive which led to his life-long paralysis, the leap is rendered with a point-of-view camera shot that gives the dive a sudden and visceral exhilaration followed by a sudden and terrible impact that we almost feel in our bodies, then a prolonged hovering silence as he floats face down in the water. This moment is echoed later in the film in the film's most memorable and effective sequence. The camera scans along the man's arm and stops at his hand, which we regard for some time, unsettled by its complete immobility. Then, just as we become uncomfortable with the motionless image, we are startled to see the hand move, ever so subtly. Slowly, painstakingly, the hand moves the covers aside, rises from his bed, sizes up the bedroom window, turns away from it to walk down the hallway. He stops, turns back toward the window, then runs headlong and flings himself out. Once again the camera has shifted to his perspective, and the all-too-familiar sense of plummeting downward is transformed at the last instant from an apparent suicide attempt – a dream? a nightmarish re-imagining of his terrible and fateful ocean dive? – into a thrilling fantasy of flight: just before the dreaded jarring impact we pull up and soar triumphant across the fields and vineyards, through valleys and over ridges to the sea where that terrible accident occurred. In the context of a film which confines itself fairly rigorously to the mundane and tangible realities of day-to-day life in a single room, such fantasy sequences – always introduced with a wonderfully sly subtlety – extraordinary. We feel these sequences almost physically in our bodies, a potent evocation of all that Sampedro was doomed not to experience in his.

In matters of religion, Sampedro is no theist, disdaining the metaphysical foundations of the legal argument against his intended suicide. In matters of eternity and the human soul, he is at most an agnostic: "After we die, there's nothing, just like before we were born.... It's just a hunch." If there is a hint of transcendence in his life, it is to be found in the image of the his "eternal lover, the sea": in an evocation of Job 1:21, he says of the sea that "It gave me life, and it took it away." And truly, if the sea is his capricious god, perhaps it can be said that his is ultimately a self-centred religion, dwelling on "the sea inside" rather than the larger one outside, which transcends him.

WHOSE LIFE IS IT ANYWAY?

Available at Videomatica

Originally published at Christianity Today Movies

Critical Consensus: The Films Of 2004 (MCN)

Critic Top Ten Lists - 2004
compiled by Movie City News

1. Sideways (1207.5)
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (877.5)
3. Million Dollar Baby (797.5)
4. The Aviator (699.5)
5. Before Sunset (602.5)
6. The Incredibles (566)
7. Kinsey (398)
8. Hotel Rwanda (335)
9. House Of Flying Dagger (332.5)
10. Fahrenheit 9/11 (323)

11. Hero (317.5)
12. Maria Full Of Grace (309.5)
13. Finding Neverland (295)
14. Bad Education (286)
15. Spider-Man 2 (256)
16. Ray (253.5)
17. Vera Drake (230.5)
18. A Very Long Engagement (230)
19. Motorycycle Diaries (225.5)
20. Collateral (217.5)

21. Kill Bill 2 ( 216)
22. Tarnation (186)
23. Closer (143)
24. The Sea Inside (140)
25. Dogville (136.5)
26. Moolaade (120)
27. Garden State (117)
28. The Life Aquatic (116)
29. Touching The Void (100)
30. The Passion Of The Christ (94.5)

31. I Heart Huckabees (89.5)
32. Notre Musique (86.5)
33. Phantom Of The Opera (86)
34. Napolon Dynamite (85)
35. Shrek 2 (81.5)
36. Goodbye Dragon Inn (71)
37. Team America: World Police (71)
38. Super Size Me (70)
39. The Saddest Music In The World (68)
40. Harry Potter 3 (66.5)

41. Door In The Floor (66)
42. The five Obstructions (57.5)
43. Shaun Of The Dead (54.5)
44. Control room (53)
45. Crimson Gold (52)
46. The Return (52)
47. The Big Red One (51)
48. Metallica: SKOM (51)
49. Friday Night Lights (49)
50. The Dreamers (44)

Data compiled January 23, 2005


A&F Top Ten Lists - 2004
compiled by Ron Reed

1 Dogville 376
2 Eternal Sunshine 364.5
3 Before Sunset 220
4 Incredibles 213
5 Passion of the Christ 191
6 Spider-Man 2 163.5
7 Hero 163
8 Return 139
9 Kill Bill 2 130
10 Mean Creek 129.5

11 Finding Neverland 121.5
12 Collateral 110
12 Story of the Weeping Camel 110
14 Aviator 96.5
15 Sideways 88
16 Hotel Rwanda 85
16 Vera Drake 85
18 Million Dollar Baby 78.5
19 Maria Full Of Grace 73
20 Garden State 71.5

21 Motorcycle Diaries 66.5
22 Distant 62
23 Time of the Wolf 58
24 Saddest Music In The World 55.5
25 Napoleon Dynamite 51
26 Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow 48
27 Life Aquatic 44
28 Café Lumiere 40
29 Merchant Of Venice 38
30 Rivers & Tides 37

31 Tarnation 35
31 Village 35
33 Fahrenheit 9/11 34.5
34 House of Flying Daggers 34
35 Bourne Supremacy 33.5
36 Holy Girl, The 33
37 Saved! 30
38 Five Obstructions, The 29.5
39 Polar Express 29
39 Blissfully Yours 29

41 Baadasssss! 27
41 Harry Potter 3 27
41 Primer 27
41 Spartan 27
45 Riding Giants 24
46 Spring Summer Fall Winter 23.5
47 Mean Girls 23
48 America's Heart & Soul 21
48 I Heart Huckabees 21
48 Sea Inside 21

Last tabulation March, 2005

SEE GRACE FLY

SEE GRACE FLY (2003, Canada, Pete McCormack)
Listen kids, when I was at this school the world was a different place. So, to further amend my valedictorian speech: I was wrong about the future. There isn’t one. Forget jobs, forget education – pray your ass off.

In an evocative and assured opening sequence, we hear an urgent conversation about a top secret hi-tech project that must be completed within days. “He” arrives Friday, and there is much left to do: equations to be reworked, data to be confirmed and, most importantly, people to be warned – “that’s part of the deal.”

The stakes are high, the hushed voices intelligent, businesslike, rational – apart from odd non-sequiturs like “we’re still in the duality of here and now” that slip past us in a flow of technical detail and scheduling issues we can’t quite track with. The camera pans across walls and tables covered in paper: elaborate blueprints littered with yellow and pink sticky notes, documents filled with formulas and geometric diagrams, detailed DaVinci-like drawings of what seems to be a space ship or flying machine. A voice remarks “this might feel like an act of faith right now, but it is backed by fact,” and we see a Bible, held open with a black document clip.

It turns out that these preparations are for the arrival of Jesus, and the voices are inside the troubled mind of Grace (the extraordinary Gina Chiarelli), a fortyish woman who has designed a flying machine to transport the faithful out of this world at the moment of Christ’s return, scheduled for ten o’clock Friday morning.

That also happens to be the time set for her mother’s funeral – a cover for the Second Coming, according to Grace. When her brother Dominic (Paul McGillion, looking like a less-weathered Mel Gibson) returns for the funeral haunted by his mission work in war-ravaged Sierra Leone, Grace disappears into the streets and alleys of Vancouver to evade hospitalization and to spread the word about the Lord’s imminent return.

If the film treated Grace’s religion entirely as a symptom of her mental illness, it would hold little interest. But SEE GRACE FLY presents us with something much trickier and more truthful – a legitimate faith, masked by the symptoms of mental illness. For all Grace’s confusion – documented in painful detail by Chiarelli’s fearless and celebrated performance – we are never allowed to forget that there is a real human soul in there, an intelligent and compassionate woman who is operating with complete sanity in a world that seems to her to have lost its grip on the truth.

But the real fascination comes when screenwriter-director Pete McCormack adds one more level of complication. Could it be that Grace is not only an authentic Christian, but also that she is right? She’s right about a lot of things – things she couldn’t know by ordinary, rational means, a fact that forces Dominic to examine his own faith, earthbound, weary and detached. The triptych of believers is rounded out by Father James, a robustly human Catholic priest who’s a long-time family friend (an unaffected and appealing Tom Sholte)

As refreshing as it is to see a film which sets aside all the galling Bad Missionary stereotypes perpetuated by such everybody from Peter Weir to Barbara Kingsolver, the Dominic character ultimately rings false, in spite of a convincing performance by McGillion. He felt more like an NGO worker than like any missionary I’ve known. I buy (and appreciate) his compassion, his smarts, his weaknesses and doubts, but somehow his faith felt tacked on, not organic. I recognize that a certain relational detachment is essential to the character – he’s “the king of walking away” – but that could play just fine in a character with a more authentic faith.

The Dominic problem comes to the fore in a sexual scene late enough in the film that I’m wary about spoiling things with too-precise details. It’s not that a Christian wouldn’t be sexually tempted, or that some of the scene’s wonderfully surprising consequences might not occur – our God is wildly unpredictable, more interested in drawing people to Himself than in dotting every moral “i”. But the character’s response to the experience simply doesn’t convince: there’s no wounded conscience, no sense of a moral compromise that needs to be worked through. It’s as if the writer simply doesn’t understand why such an experience would be any real problem.

A great strength of McCormack’s writing is a certain sense of humour and proportion, the way in which Weighty Moments are punctuated by a self-deprecating comment or just plain old reality. I love Grace’s flashes of lucidity and frankness about her own mental difficulties, and the truths she speaks in the midst of her mania. One sequence in an elementary school is a particular gem; “So, to further amend my valedictorian speech, I was wrong about the future...”

Sometimes SEE GRACE FLY suffers from First Screenplay Syndrome. Some of the theological musings and psychological insights are a bit too on the nose. There’s also a tendency to toss too many ingredients into the narrative stew. Some are particularly jarring, such as an incest reference that needed to be developed or cut, and an utterly peripheral sperm donor sidetrack that seriously misjudges the tone of the scene where it’s inexplicably introduced.

I also can’t help second-guessing the film’s concluding scenes, which reach for ambiguity and mystery but seem merely indecisive, the result of post-production compromise rather than a clear and precise choice that would give the poetic resonance and complexity McCormack was after. Instead of choosing among several possible resolutions, the film gives us a couple and leaves us to sort things out.

The film was made on an excruciatingly tiny budget, and unfortunately that shows. While there are great-looking scenes and several strong visual images, overall the film looks bland and badly lit. But the guerilla-filming tactics also yield some of the movie’s most extraordinary moments, such as an unforgettable sequence where Grace distributes yellow sticky notes to drivers stopped in traffic: real drivers, real traffic, real risk and energy.

The film’s fans – and they are many, just check out all those festival awards – feared that technical problems would hurt its chances for theatrical release, but heart and artistic ambition have triumphed. SEE GRACE FLY opens in selected Canadian cities in November and December, and will soon be available to American viewers through www.cineclix.com.

I celebrate this film for its independent spirit. I’d rather see a flawed but gutsy film like SEE GRACE FLY than the kind of plastic perfection so often served up at the multiplex. Leonard Cohen wrote about the cracks in things, “that’s how the light gets in.” The consumer-tested design and polished surfaces of so many commercial films render them unlikely to bring us much spiritual truth – at least, not the incarnational kind of truth that shone through when Jesus took on flesh and lived out a dusty, sweaty life in Palestine. But where the big money projects fail, a rough and passionate project like this one might just succeed. Whatever you make of the film’s other artistic and technical merits, there is no denying its passion and integrity, and the power of Gina Chiarelli’s heart-hurting performance.


Originally published at Christianity Today Movies

BRIGHT LEAVES

BRIGHT LEAVES (2004, USA, Ross McElwee)
The preacher, what does he say about the present tobacco situation?
Just about like the rest of us, he actually don’t know what to say. He’s got mixed feelings about it.

This soft-spoken Ross McElwee documentary takes as its point of departure the possibility that a minor Gary Cooper feature may have been a fictionalized biography of the film-maker’s great-grandfather, who made and lost a fortune in the North Carolina tobacco business. His highly personal films are like the smart, sardonic personal essays you’d find in Harper's magazine or on NPR's "This American Life." If Woody Allen were a laid-back Southerner instead of a wired-up New Yorker, and if he made rambling autobiographical documentaries instead of tightly-constructed autobiography-disguised-as-fiction commercial features, he’d be Ross McElwee.

Exploring the connection between his great-grandfather's story and that of his father, a physician, McElwee interviews his dad’s patients who suffered from tobacco-related illness. One woman remembers Dr McElwee's visit to her own father’s bedside the night before major surgery, when the two men prayed together. McElwee seems surprised: "My father did? I never heard that story." To which the woman replies, "Oh well, sometimes daddies don't talk about things like that." We cut to the woman's aged parents harmonizing "Silent Night," then to a faded home movie of his father listening to that same couple singing that same song over the telephone decades earlier, an annual Christmas tradition. It's not apparent at first, but when the senior McElwee turns his head we see that, inexplicably, he is wearing a yarmulke. "Right after I filmed this I kept meaning to ask my father why he, a staunch Presbyterian, was wearing a yarmulke here. Was it just a somewhat odd Christmas present from a grateful Jewish patient? I kept forgetting to ask him, and now it's just one of those things I'll never know." McElwee gravitates to mystery.

McElwee's south is, as Flannery O'Connor described it, "Christ-haunted." BRIGHT LEAVES brings us people of faith, cancer victims and tobacco farmers alike whose faith in Jesus helps them with – or perhaps diverts them from? – the difficult questions posed by life in general, or by this inquisitive film-maker in particular. Whether it's a heartfelt "Silent Night" offered as a Christmas appreciation, or gospel quartet numbers like "Gospel Ship" or "Ship Of Zion" sung by a tobacco grower who wonders how his religion and his work fit together, the film frequently uses music to introduce a spiritual context for its subjects. And if McElwee questions the consistency of a Christian who earns his living from the bright leaves that bring death to so many, he does it with a light and respectful touch: his affection for these good and faith-filled people is obvious, and he never condescends or passes judgement.

Perhaps McElwee's films are nothing more than mildly diverting video journals, their insights and inter-connections insubstantial and insignificant. On the other hand, it may be that these films are marvels of loving observation and understatement that work on us slowly and subliminally, teasing awake a slumbering curiosity about the ordinary details of our own lives. If there are profundities, they are offered in a self-effacing and amusing way that grows more precious as the avalanche of non-fiction media grows ever more shrill, opinionated and superficial.




Available at Videomatica

Complete review at Christianity Today Movies

THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION

THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994, USA, Frank Darabont from Stephen King story)

If Steven King writes your nightmares, then this is the one where they send you to jail for a crime you didn't commit. But, as in so many of his stories, King wants to do much more than scare us out of our theatre seats, and THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION also charms and intrigues and inspires us.

Maybe that's why the film currently stands at #2 in the Internet Movie Database Top 250, an ongoing poll of IMDb users. A remarkably faithful Frank Darabont adaptation of King's novella "Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption," the movie lost money at the box office but went on to bag seven Oscar nominations, and by the time it was in the hands of video vendors, those golden statues that it didn't quite get and the platinum word of mouth that it did get turned it into a genuine phenomenon.

People love this movie. Christians love this movie. My first time I liked it okay, but re-viewing it in advance of its limited theatrical re-release this Friday I joined the ranks of its fans. I love the film's easy pace and the welcoming, let-me-tell-you-a-story voice of its narrator – a star-making performance by Morgan Freeman who, after a couple decades of steady work in mostly smaller roles in mostly minor films, hit big with stand-out stuff in UNFORGIVEN, then SHAWSHANK, then SE7EN. I love the agonizing tension between how bad the place is and how good the things that happen there can be. It's dark as hell inside Shawshank prison, but I love watching Tim Robbins soft-spoken banker Andy Dufresne kick at it – quietly, relentlessly, over the span of decades – until it bleeds daylight. Tim Robbins shares his co-star's ease and calm within the role, and director Frank Darabont deserves huge credit for getting performances from every one of his actors that are far removed from the melodrama and hysteria we might expect in a Steven King pot-boiler.

Of course, if that's all we expect from Mr King, we're not paying close enough attention. The central character in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999) is an eleven-year-old girl lost in the Maine woods, whose hope comes from imagining herself as her hero, the gritty Red Sox relief pitcher who points to heaven after every save. We Christians who were sure we sensed something capital-T Transcendent in the story sensed right: in a letter accompanying review copies, the author wrote ”I have been writing about God - the possibility of God and the consequences for humans if God does exist - for 20 years now, ever since The Stand,” twenty-one years earlier.

He grew up poor in a series of small towns, his mom working endless crummy jobs to keep her two fatherless boys in food and clothing. He won a Bible for memorizing verses at Methodist Youth Fellowship, watched a lot of movies and spiked countless rejection slips onto a nail he pounded into his bedroom wall, proud testimony to his persistence as he submitted story after story to an endless series of pulp magazines.

Always he had an eye for the horrors and cruelties to be found in the mundanities of life around him, the maggots that bred in restaurant linens he cleaned at an industrial laundry or the soul-crushing oppression visited on an impoverished classmate when she got herself some pretty new clothes and tried to rise above her circumstances. "Someone made a break for the fence and had to be knocked down, that was all. Once the escape was foiled and the entire company of prisoners was once more accounted for, life could go back to normal." (On Writing, pg 81)

That high school episode fueled the writer's first best-seller and hit movie Carrie, the story of a girl whose torment leads to horrific, if unintentional, retribution for her tormentors – a less than divine judgement that's not proportionate or just, but which has the horrible finality of one of Jesus' more stark and startling parables: "Fool! Tonight your soul is required of you."

King's description of that episode also points to one of his central pre-occupations: a life stripped of freedom can be hell, the kind of hell you find in a prison cell. But that's not the whole story: even in such a place, hope can see a person through. The hope of freedom, freedom that's found in books and music, in hard-won ice-cold beers on a rooftop on a hot and hard-working afternoon. Most of all, the hope that works itself out in friendships, that works itself out in long and persistent efforts to make things, and to make things better.

In THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, Andy painstakingly fashions chess pieces out of rocks scrounged from prison workyards. He's told it's hopeless, but year after year he sends off letters to state legislators, requesting books and funds to improve the prison library (I can't help thinking of the persistent hope of that young boy, mailing off stories to editors of pulp magazines). He teaches reading, he gives free tax advice, he asks the name of an anonymous prisoner who's been beaten to death. Andy bears up under terrible oppression, becoming a favourite target of "the sisters," inmates who subject him to years of painful abuse (again, echoes of high school oppression and impossible retribution). And over the years, hope grows: in Andy, in the other prisoners, and especially in the character through whose eyes we view the story. Morgan Freeman's Red is an institutionalized man, a lifer who knows he's guilty (something most other inmates won't admit) and who has come to accept and even rely on the very prison walls that keep him from true freedom.

Viewers who aren't put off by the inescapable violence of THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION may want to check out THE GREEN MILE, another Steven King prison story where the violence (and everything else, spiritual themes included) is much more explicit. Also directed by Frank Darabont, it's not nearly the film his first one was, marred by a stylistic heavy-handedness that's on its way to being as glossy and smack-you-in-the-face manipulative as 1999's THE MAJESTIC, where the director tries for Capra but gets mostly corn: it looks and feels more like an ad than a movie.

As King himself suggests, THE STAND is also loaded with things for Christians to chew on. Indeed, some reviewers who don't believe any of this stuff are quite put off by it all. It's one of those post-apocalyptic survival yarns, where the stark setting and life-and-death situations force characters to make impossible moral choices with their survival on the line. In THE STAND, those revealing decisions are clearly shown to have spiritual consequences, as people gradually align themselves with 108-year-old Mother Abigail or the demonic Randall Flagg. True King Fans tell me the big fat novel is a much better bet than the sometimes fascinating, sometimes tacky 1994 mini-series (available on DVD), but it's got its draws: watch for cameos by people like Ed Harris, Kathy Bates and even Sam "Evil Dead" Raimi.

By far the greatest film derived from a Steven King story is Stanley Kubrick's treatment of THE SHINING. Die-hard fans of the novel may be bothered by Kubrick's departure from the book at key plot points, but most film buffs agree this is a prime example of a truly great film being made from a potboiler novel (see also GODFATHER, THE). The director zeroes in on the family dynamics here, and finds the real terror: what's it like for a boy to fear his father, a wife her husband? Isolated in the snow-bound Outlook Hotel, Jack Nicholson plays an increasingly obsessive writer whose white-knuckle sobriety doesn't look like it'll make it to spring thaw. If the film isn't clearly "spiritual" it certainly ends up supernatural, but what matters here is the auto-biographical: King's life and family were very nearly destroyed by his own alcoholism, and you have to wonder whether it wasn't his recovery process that got him relying on the Higher Power who begins showing up with greater and greater frequency in his stories from then on. On Writing includes his understated account of surviving a near-fatal accident, which seems suffused with a sense that he may have been delivered from death in an almost miraculous way.

It's dodgy to try reading testimony into someone else's story – just about as dodgy as drawing assumptions about an author from the things his characters say or do, or the way his stories play out. Those who look to Steven King for the latest celebrity conversion are likely to be disappointed: as much as hope and faith, even Christian faith, are constant themes in his books and movies, he's quite direct about the whole business when he writes "while I believe in God, I have no use for organized religion." (I can't help thinking Jesus himself may have had similar thoughts, but never mind.)

But believe in God he does. Many of his stories – especially SHAWSHANK – are filled with hope in the face of horror. With a sense that evil is real, and must be resisted – but that it is mostly overcome not through magic or violence, but in the heart. The real battle against evil and despair is fought in the hard everyday decisions of ordinary, faithful people who choose not to give in.

In Dreamcatcher, one of King's most recent novels (filmed in 2003), a character talks about God, "who had crept back into his life over these last few months... who sings the lullaby, helps us to go to sleep when we’re sad and scared.” That sounds like the God I know.


Available at Videomatica

Originally published at Christianity Today Movies

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (2004, USA, Jonathan Demme, screenplay by Daniel Pyne & Dean Georgaris from 1962 George Axelrod screenplay and Richard Condon novel)
Pauline Kael said that the original 1962 treatment of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE might be “the most sophisticated political satire ever made in Hollywood,” and that it brought John Frankenheimer to life as a director. More than four decades later, Jonathan Demme comes back to life as a director at the helm of one of the finest and most inventive remakes ever to take the screen.

Calling a film “one of the great remakes of all time” sounds like faint praise indeed. Most celluloid retreads are bad ideas, badly executed. Either the first go-round wasn’t all that good to begin with – so why waste everybody’s time and money a second time? – or else it really was great, and the new version is at best a decent knockoff – so why bother? Rent the original DVD instead.

Not so with CANDIDATE. Rent the 1962 DVD, by all means – but only to see how dazzlingly inventive a remake can be. The further the story progresses, the more obvious it becomes that this really is the right movie at the right time – again. In 1962, with Cold War anxieties everywhere, McCarthyism a not-distant-enough memory and the Korean conflict a pretty good stand-in for the escalating troubles in south-east Asia, a movie about a war hero who’d been brainwashed by the Reds and placed like a time-bomb in the center of the American democratic process was close enough to plausible to send real shock-waves through a fearful nation.

In 2004, we’re again preoccupied with enemies on the home front, confronted with the very real threat of neighbors who may turn out to be terrorists, an anxiety that’s only compounded by an unsettling mistrust of governments and government agencies – not to mention multi-national corporations, who prove to be the real Bad Guys this time around. Now Manchuria isn’t a place, it’s an entity – Manchurian Global, a vast organization that buys and sells everything under the sun, presumably including private armies, biotechnology and the souls of politicians. We trust these men in suits like we trust the guys from Enron, or the organized crime families they are made to resemble. Pictures of burning Kuwait oilfields are to the Second Gulf War generation what Korean images were to almost-draftable Baby Boomers in ’62, and a street-level remake of “Fortunate Son” invokes that very specific, cynicizing Vietnam-era helplessness and rage. Our latest traumas get stirred up when video experts review security tapes of assassins making their way through metal detectors. This is a MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE for another fearful time, and it makes perfectly legitimate Cold War fears look almost naïve from the perspective of another four decades of trouble and disillusionment.

It’s eerie to revisit the highly-praised original – recently released as an affordable DVD – and realize that its scenario of covert manipulation and presidential assassination plots screened in America a year before the Kennedy shooting and the endless conspiracy theories it spawned. The savvy ’04 edition plays on all those fears and more: knowing references to lone gunmen and nuclear brinkmanship evoke Cold War worries that seem suddenly pertinent again, and one character makes a compelling (and troubling) argument when she says “Americans are terrified, and we can arm them” – with a war hero as Vice President. Set slightly in the future, the ever-present news reports ratchet up the tension with reports of international crises and War On Terror rhetoric, civil liberty suspensions, “touch screen voting” protests leading to security crackdowns, suicide bombers, and unexplained references to events like “Bloody Friday” and U.S. bombing raids on African countries pointing to an ever-edgier future.

There’s a deeper disquiet evident now that makes one nostalgic for the simple Sixties brand of paranoia. Back then, all Marco needed to do was bring forward some good rational arguments to the basically decent folks in Army Intelligence, they’d realize he wasn’t a nut after all, and right away they’d put him in charge of a co-operative team of military, CIA and FBI agents he could rely on to get the job done. These days, though, the suspicion runs deeper: even a war hero can never be entirely sure who to trust, and when he advises another troubled Gulf War veteran to take his concerns to the authorities, it sounds like very bad advice indeed.

Audiences who don’t know the original are guaranteed a tense and tricky ride, pretty much free of the gaping plot holes that usually mar these twisty suspensers. If you’re willing to suspend your disbelief to buy the admittedly goofy idea at the center of the story – “Sci-Fi Lite” in a Michael Crichton sort of way, no less implausible than the brain-washing premise of the original – the actual story mechanics and character motivations hang together remarkably well.

If you do know the original, chances are you’ll enjoy yourself even more. Apart from the fact that card games make only a token appearance, it is astonishing how many story elements are intact, how many of the memorable set pieces remain – though they’re almost always inverted or subverted somehow. The film begins with a barrage of recognizable touch-points to the original – character names and situations, slightly re-arranged or deftly adapted to the more-than-modern setting, a fireworks display of inventiveness along the lines of a Baz Luhrmann ROMEO + JULIET. The fresh-but-faithful approach is never more charming than in the Eugenie-Rosie dialogue, which comes straight from the original (in fact, it’s right out of the Richard Condon novel), right down to the Eldorado phone number she gives him, “the old-fashioned way.” In the early sixties, Senator Iselin dressed up like Abraham Lincoln: now, presidential candidates get carved into digital Mount Rushmores. We even get a nod in the direction of the “go jump in the lake” scene, with all the jokiness removed.

But just as we make this out to be a clever but essentially straightforward updating – perhaps a sort of reverent tribute by producer Tina Sinatra to Uncle Frank, who starred in the first edition – screenwriter *** takes a series of sharp, shocking turns and we realize everything’s up for grabs: the story heads wildly and unpredictably off in several of its own directions, and even when the old and new story-lines converge again in the final half hour, nothing means what it used to mean, because all the rules and roles have changed. Masterful.

Angela Lansbury was Oscar nominated for her portrayal of the character who, curiously and significantly enough, is never named, referred to only as “Raymond’s mother.” She played wonderfully against type, but even that fine performance is out-shone and out-nuanced by Meryl Streep, whose recent turns in ADAPTATION and THE HOURS mark something of a comeback for a first-rank actress who really never went away, but who again commands attention as a performer with incredible range and presence. She brings a flirty sexual energy to the role that makes just that much more sense of the novel’s Oedipal psychologizing, and she’s got the intellect to convince us that this woman can sway electoral strategy committees as readily as she can a son who mostly hates her. Her mix of sexuality and vaulting ambition is perfectly realized, just attractive enough to be all the more deeply repellant: Streep finds in Senator Shaw everything that would make for a truly great Lady Macbeth.

As her son Raymond, *** *** is at times uncanny in his resemblance to Laurence Harvey who created the role, but neither is this a carbon copy: *** finds more colors in his portrayal, and – also true for Denzel Washington over the much-appreciated Frank Sinatra – ultimately succeeds in creating a far more complex, believably human and even empathetic character than his predecessor.

The sound score is a marvel, often using collages of odd and out-of-context sounds rather than music to create a deeply disquieting atmosphere: disparate sounds suggest the thin walls and crowding of a tenement apartment, but aren’t anything quite that naturalistic, and if the ratlike rubber-on-steel squeaks of the Albanian scientist’s lab end up having a real-world source (or do they?), for the longest time they’re just disturbing squeaks and squeals. The film has loads of visual style, from the only-slightly-revved-up TV news graphics to the nods to other films and film-makers, from the Hitchcock look of the mom-and-son scene late in the movie (come to think of it, there’s more than a little Bates in the Shaws, isn’t there?) to the Coppola-pastiche of the “Your god is money” scene between Mom and the Manchurians, or the SEVEN-ish journal jottings of Corporal Melvin. (I wonder what other, deeper fears are being touched on with the MEMENTO-esque felt-penned reminders, in case of memory loss: the same fear that’s being played out in so many films this new millennium, from ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND to 50 FIRST DATES). And the “politics as show biz” themes of the Frankenheimer film – with its way-ahead-of-MTV editing of the nominating convention – comes into its own in this much-higher-tech 21st century treatment.

It’s a long time since director Jonathan Demme startled with his break-the-mold innovation that was AFTER HOURS, then claimed ascendancy with the stunning SILENCE OF THE LAMBS – a pot-boiler of a novel transmogrified into a brilliant motion picture. More recent projects failed to fulfill that early promise, and it seems nobody liked his most recent stab at retrofitting an old-model story, *** *** ***.

That all changes with THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE. Demme gets entertaining, believable and multi-faceted performances out of all his actors, he layers sound and image with tremendous assurance and inventiveness, and in every way capitalizes on a brilliant screenplay. There’s endless attention to detail that may or may not be essential to the story, but makes a rich world for the story to live in: the Elvis impersonator at the library computer terminal, Sidney Lumet’s cameo as a political pundit, beautiful presidential daughters hauled in to help campaign.

I don’t suppose this movie is telling us anything about politics, war or corruption we don’t already know: it’s entertainment, not groundbreaking political commentary. In one of the summer’s other newsy flicks Michael Moore sets out to instruct, and ends up (at best) entertaining and provoking: CANDIDATE sets out to entertain, and ends up unsettling us far more than we might have expected.

We’re too knowing to be surprised by anything this movie has to say. But that’s not necessarily a flaw: it’s not here to teach, it’s here to play. The thing is, what it’s playing on is our fears. And they’re real enough.

When one character asks if there were casualties, another replies “There’s always casualties in war, sir.” And I could only think of what somebody else said: that in war, the first casualty is always the truth.

A timely movie indeed.

*

Some second thoughts after posting this one. Darn those 15-hour deadlines. The ending of the new film just isn't right. The last thing in the world I want to do is give the least hint about the ending of a film that is so thoroughly about story, secrets and surprise, so that's all I'll say - except that it is very much of its time, and falls far short of the original. 'Nuff said.

Available at Videomatica1962 and 2004

Originally published at Christianity Today Movies