Category Archives: A Strange Review

Thesis #19: “That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened.”

Thesis #20: “He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.”

—Martin Luther

I first learned of Vera Farmiga’s directorial debut when news from Sundance leaked back in February. It was numbered among those films that wrestled with issues of Christian faith, but because those other films included Kevin Smith’s Westboro Baptist–inspired Red State and the atheist-championed The Ledge, my expectations were quite low for this tale of a small-town Christian whose born-again beliefs seem to be bleeding out of her fingernails in the midst of an insular community suffering the upheavals of the sixties and seventies.

Let me start off with my conclusion: Never before have I seen a film that so brilliantly captures the restlessness produced by the faith that promises peace beyond understanding. Higher Ground, based on the memoir by Carolyn S. Briggs and adapted for the screen by the author, is an extraordinarily intelligent, probing, disturbing, and altogether compassionate look at what it means to believe without seeing. Farmiga and Briggs treat their subject, and their central character, with respect and care, though never noncritically.

We first meet Corrine as a young girl (played by Farmiga’s younger sister, Taissa). Among the trials common to adolescents, she must also negotiate the aftermath of her giddy mother’s miscarriage and the slow disintegration of her parents’ marriage in light of that inexplicable loss. A now bitter mom (Donna Murphy) finds no consolation in religion, or even in her family, and begins to explore the possibilities of freedom from her working-class existence at the height of the sexual and women’s liberation movements.

Corrine, meanwhile, is a puzzle. Sneaking a copy of Lord of the Flies past a Church Lady of a librarian to slake her growing intellectual curiosity, she nevertheless raises her hand during an altar call at vacation Bible school, the first dip of a toe in the cleansing waters of salvation that impresses the pastor mightily but her mother not one whit.

Boys follow, as does a pregnancy from her first sexual encounter (a scene that only Peter Singer would find sexy), and an early marriage to the would-be rock star (Joshua Leonard) who knocked her up. When the band experiences an accident on the road that almost costs everyone their lives, Corrine and Ethan consider the meaning of this “rescue” — surely it was the hand of God, surely their family was saved for a reason! They soon begin to read Scripture, playing that game where you open the Bible at random to see what the Spirit has to say, only to read: “Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes.” Not an auspicious beginning. Read the rest of this entry »

Just when you think there’s nothing left to do with the boxing subgenre, someone comes along and proves you wrong. Last year The Fighter, the true story of Irish Micky Ward and his crack-addicted “coulda been a contenda” half-brother Dicky Ecklund, managed to make a mountain out of a molehill (Ward won a TKO for the WBU light welterweight championship but never defended the title), with some nice performances (both Melissa Leo and Christian Bale walked away with Oscars) doing most of the heavy punching.

Before that, Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man provided some fine spiritual uplift, with Russell Crowe as James Braddock, a Depression-era pug who went from riches to rags and back again.

And now we have Warrior, touted as this generation’s Rocky.

Not quite. Read the rest of this entry »

And by idiot, they don’t mean that kind of idiot, you know, like the kind you see on cable news shows or explaining the nature of an invisible Rapture. They mean the Prince Myshkin kind. And by that, they don’t mean a mere naïf. They mean an innocent. And by that they don’t mean like a two-year-old is innocent, not yet morally aware. Ned, our idiot hero, is aware. He simply chooses to emphasize the highest, the noblest, the bestest, in the hopes, wan as they may be, that people will live up to his expectations.

Ned is played by Paul Rudd. You know him. He’s been in more movies than the AFL-CIO logo. Let me reel off a few: Anchorman. You remember him in that don’t you? No? How about The 40-Year-Old Virgin? Walk Hard? Dinner for Schmucks? How about earlier stuff like Wet Hot American Summer? The Object of My Affection? You know you know him, and you vaguely remember—that’s the guy. Yeah. Him. Right.

Ned sells vegetables in a farmer’s market. Right up until the point where he sells some weed to a uniformed police officer, who manages to convince Ned he was strictly trying to cope with a hard week, when in fact he was laying a trap. So Ned goes inside for eight months, which leads one to believe that this is not the first time he has donned an orange jumpsuit. Once sprung, he tries to return to his old life with his dog, Willie Nelson, and his nonviolent (read passive-aggressive) girlfriend, played by Kathryn Hahn. Unfortunately, she has taken up with another affable head-in-the-clouds type and wants Ned gone. And she’s keeping the dog.

So Ned is homeless and petless in America. Where does he turn? His family: composed of his enabling mother (Shirley Knight) and three sisters: an earthy-crunchy housewife (Emily Mortimer) married to a self-important documentarian (Steve Coogan); a would-be long-form journalist looking to get her first big story in print (Parker Posey); and a struggling comedian (Zooey Deschanel) whose oh-so-supportive girlfriend (a bespectacled Rashida Jones) is a lawyer who at one point in our story joins forces with Ned in a Laverne-and-Shirley type escapade to kidnap Willie Nelson.

It doesn’t take long for Ned, in his inimitable inadvertent way, to mess up the living arrangements of his three sisters. Not because of weed or weirdness. But because he assumes people are basically decent. And by that he means fair and honest in dealings with others. Because there’s a lot of indecency going around in the way of casual sex with virtual strangers, adultery, selfishness, and a propensity to use others as a means to an end.

By film’s end, as you might expect, Ned has managed to play boy savior to his siblings, holding a mirror up to their shattered lives such that they realize he is hardly the idiot in the family. Yes, they come to the realization that they have been so mind-numbingly mindless that they could not see what was in front of them all along: they live badly. They have hidden their true natures from even themselves by means of pop-Buddhist memes, Oprah-ized domesticity, and the inevitable rationalizations that flow from all-encompassing “work.”

The moral of our story is that honesty is the best policy. And “openness” to others is the free-est form of expression. It sounds so simple and right. Except, well, this is Hollywood. And even its moralizing needs some desanitizing.

It’s possible to be so “open” to the other that one becomes a mere experiment in someone else’s “life journey.”  One can also use “honesty” as a cover for merely being frank. You know the difference between being honest and being frank, right? Abraham Lincoln was honest. Adolf Hitler was frank.

The frank person makes no bones about the fact that he is robbing you, but insists that this “admission” also makes him honest. The frank person admits to cheating you, or cheating on you, and insists that needs must be met, and what about those banks and insurance companies and Wall Streeters?

To be honest means more than calling a spade a spade. It is also means more than mere earnestness. It is a a habit of mind, heart, and soul. It is a form of personal integration — integritas — that emanates from the center and not from attempting to Crazy Glue all the broken pieces back together with hollow apologies and confessions of being merely human.

Whether Ned has that kind of integrity is hard to tell. He is self-conscious enough to know what others think of him, and also to know that he can, and often is, taken advantage of. In that respect he is more enlightened, certainly, than his truly clueless sisters and spiteful ex-girlfriend.

Which brings me to another point. The guys in this film seem to pretty much get the Big Picture. They come from a good place, as the kids use to say. The one glaring exception is Steve Coogan’s nonviolent philanderer. (He cheats on his wife but won’t allow his son to watch Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther Returns because of all the violence. It seems the kid loves the phony-baloney karate. “He’s a little boy,” says Ned. “Little boys fight. That doesn’t mean he’s going to grow up to be a fratboy rapist.”)

But almost all the women, to the extent that we get to know them, are shallow,  self-absorbed, impulsive, and desperate for affirmation. I’m not sure what that’s about. (One of the credited screenwriters is the sister of the director, so it’s not like it was put together by some boys’ club.) In fact, the film gets a lot of mileage out of pointing the finger and poking fun at their sad and phony New York lives. It’s like Sex in the City, only written by someone who thought that show was full of shit. Which, of course, it was.

Which leads me to a caveat: if you are seriously put off by crude language, there’s plenty of it here. But some of these characters lead crude lives, and there are a couple of scenes where not much is left to the imagination. So be forewarned. You may want to take a pass.

But I came to like Ned. As well as Paul Rudd’s sweet performance. He grows on you. Our Idiot Brother grows on you. It charms you. (Anyway, it charmed me.) I would like to have seen them come to an even deeper understanding of their bare naked need for redemption, but you take what you can get from a mainstream comedy (like the fact that one of the characters decides to keep a baby who she initially swears will ruin her life). And this is the first time I have seen Paul Rudd do anything with a character. It would have been easy for Ned to have disintegrated into a silly and forgettable sub-Dude, a kind of early draft of Jeff Bridges’s now iconic character. Instead, you wish Ned all good things. You wish you knew Ned. Because if you really needed help, well, Ned would be a reliable first responder. Just be careful what you say around him. He’s guileless. And he’ll probably think you are too.

Protestants, beware! Beware this supposedly innocuous summer action flick! Never before have I paid good money to see a piece of Catholic propaganda disguised so artfully! Oh my monergists! Cover your ears! Close your eyes! Shut your mouths! Better yet, just give it a rest, will ya? And wait for the Director’s Cut on Blu-Ray! Hopefully, the synergistic soteriology will have been excised by then!

To begin: One of the more anxiously anticipated shoot-em-ups in recent memory, Cowboys & Aliens, has hit the screens to poor-to-middlin’ reviews and disappointing opening-weekend box office. (I mean, it tied with The Smurfs! Smurfs! Those stupid blue spongy things with Disney-dwarf hats!)

With such stars as Daniel Craig (James Bond) and Harrison Ford (Indiana Jones); the director of Iron Man at the helm; and Ron Howard’s and Steven Spielberg’s producer cred; not to mention the already successful graphic novel, you would have thought that this was thee blockbuster to beat this miserably muggy summer. Not quite.

So it’s 1873 or so and Craig’s cowboy awakes one fine morning in the Arizona desert with his memory obliterated but a tidy slice in his side and a laser-shooting bracelet strapped to his wrist. He quickly finds himself under arrest for all manner of awful crimes, none of which he can remember committing. The town in which he is imprisoned is practically owned by a mean-spirited cattle rancher played by Harrison Ford. Craig and Ford’s son, a drunken bully (Paul Dano) who harasses the townspeople because he can, have already gotten into it, so the film’s early question is, Who’s going to get Craig first? Ford or the federal marshals? Read the rest of this entry »

My latest: a quasi sorta review of the new Captain America: The First Avenger, at FIRST THOUGHTS.

I thank you, and America thanks you.

Matt Damon is an extraordinarily likable actor. The Bourne trilogy was a smart, extremely well-crafted series of action spy thrillers, and Damon was very effective, and credible, in the role of the memory challenged spy Jason Bourne. Even in such lighthearted fare as the Oceans 11 movies and as Tina Fey’s on-again, off-again boyfriend in 30 Rock, he manages to turn on a dime and evince a vulnerable cluelessness that is both funny and charming.

And so color me extremely disappointed in The Adjustment Bureau, a calamitously stupid adaptation of a Philip K. Dick short story, about a promising and popular Brooklyn congressman, David Norris, whose hopes for a Senate seat are dashed owing to a series of impetuous and headstrong acts that cause a once adoring public to reject him for his Republican opponent (most frequently referred to as “a tool”).

On the evening of his political defeat (really the result of that damned New York Post), Norris meets up with a wedding crasher hiding out in the men’s room of the Waldorf Astoria, Elise (played by Emily Blunt). They share some banter, then a quick kiss, and the spark is struck that will burn for the rest of the film.

Once out of politics, Norris goes to work for a capital-investment group on Wall Street — one that is about to reject Norris’s advice to invest in, wait for it, solar panels. Before you know it, the “Chairman” — some mysterious hybrid of God, The Matrix‘s Architect, and the ineluctable forces of history — via his/her/its “agents,” a gaggle of fedora-lidded gentlemen who look like they just walked off the set of Mad Men, not least because they are led by John Slattery, who actually is in Mad Men, gets involved, and the brain of a decisive figure in the deal is rewired to ensure that that those solar panels get the capital they need.

God likes alternate forms of energy, it seems. Consider it a proprietary consideration, what with the sun being his/her/its creation.

Unfortunately Norris, who has just had a chance re-encounter on a bus with the irascible Elise, happens to walk in on the supernatural brainwashing session, and the agents are forced to tell him what’s really going on — not just in his life but also in everyone else’s: there is no free will, the Chairman has a master plan that must proceed apace, Norris plays an important role in it, and he must never tell anyone what he has seen lest he suffer the equivalent of a lobotomy. Oh, and he must never, ever try and meet up with the lady from the men’s room again.

In the immortal words of Rick Moranis’s Dark Helmet: Everybody got that? Read the rest of this entry »

…this awards season.* I just got around to watching it on DVD. This is the story of a 1930s-era Tennessee backwoodsman, Felix Bush, played by Robert Duvall, with a reputation for being a serious criminal and just plain crazy who decides he want to throw himself a funeral party — the purpose of which is to have everyone who knows him tell a story about him. Because he can’t. Tell his own story.

More specifically, he can’t make a good confession.

And confess is what he must do. An old friend, a preacher, a man for whom Bush built an elegant yet simple church, refuses to participate in this party until Bush confesses. Bush refuses. In fact, he later admits that he never wanted forgiveness. He wanted to hold on to his guilt, “to be sick of it every day of my life.”

And so he imprisoned himself in a wooden shack, without companionship or joy in his life. An attempt at self-atonement. But in the end, nothing was made right. Not even with himself. Which is why he cannot shake the need to finally make a public confession of a great crime.

It’s unclear whether his penitence finally is directed at God as well as one person in particular, the sister of a former love, played by Sissy Spacek, a surrogate, his priest. It’s unclear whether Bush ever comes to understand why he needed to confess to Jesus too, having claimed that “I never done anything to him.” The ambiguity of Felix Bush’s character is also part of the film’s theme and charm. He is both saint and sinner, stirrer of the pot and builder of wondrous things. While it may leave you slightly dissatisfied, it helps to be reminded that we never can really know what’s in the heart of another. Which is why such ultimate judgments must be left to the Ultimate Judge.

Now I’ll bet Duvall was overlooked in Best Actor categories because many saw in Bush another of the actor’s craggy old men looking for redemption or some such, a la Tender Mercies or The Apostle. But, of course, in Tender Mercies, he finds it. In The Apostle, he believes, falsely, that he embodies it. But in Get Low, he has no concept of it. And it is no easy trick to play the ornery and mysterious stranger with a backstory who can elicit both fear and sympathy, without it coming off as maudlin or melodramatic. That is Duvall’s gift.

Bill Murray was, I’m afraid, miscast in the role of the funeral director who helps Bush plan his funeral party. His is too modern a persona, and he is not a strong enough actor to transcend it, despite the glowing encomia from his fellow actors in the “Special Features” of the DVD.

You’ll turn away from the film thinking about the concept of self-redemption. Sometimes we feel the need to be kinder to ourselves than we feel God would be. Sometimes we feel we need to beat ourselves up more than the free offer of forgiveness entails. But in the end, forgiveness has nothing to do with our punishment, great or small, but, in the Christian construal of things, Someone else’s.

*It should be noted that the film and the actors were nominated in several categories at the Independent Spirit Awards and that Duvall received a nomination from the Screen Actors Guild. But as far as the Golden Globes and the Oscars went — pffft.

So John Nolte over at Big Hollywood has his list of the 25 Greatest Christian Films. Rather than argue about those titles I believe shouldn’t be there (Life of Brian? Night of the Hunter? Fun films, but Christian?), let me make an argument for one that most certainly should be: Sling Blade.

Now, the criteria for what makes for a Christian film can include everything from the positive portrayal of Christian clergy and a fair-minded accounting of some episode in Christian history to merely an uplifting story about someone who prays and finds strength to do the right thing. It may also include no explicitly Christian iconography or even references but merely concern the plight of a broken soul who comes up against the limits of his or her internal resources and is consequently “redeemed” by some “external” salvific force.

To me, the most explicitly Christian film ever made is Billy Bob Thornton’s Sling Blade. Consider: the central figure is Karl, who in today’s parlance who be described as mentally challenged or autistic, played by an unrecognizable Thornton himself. We meet Karl as he sits in an institution to which he has been consigned for murdering his own mother. Yet this strange, dangerous man with this creepy affect is about to be let loose on an unsuspecting society. Unsuspecting because Karl is by far the most enlightened person in any room he walks into. And that is for one good reason: he has a keen appreciation for his own capacity for evil. He is not self-deluded. He has a grasp of reality such as would drive most other people to drink.

But this self-knowledge is not born of hubris but of humility. When Karl realizes that he must commit another crime, and thus forsake his hard-won freedom for the sake of another — a little boy who is being tormented by his mother’s boyfriend and their self-destructive lifestyle — the first thing he does is ask to be baptized. He is identifying himself with the crucified Christ because he is about to sacrifice his own “righteousness” (i.e., that fragile social acceptance that permits him to live in civil society) for the sake of another, to save another. Karl knows he is a sinner. He knows he must die for his sin. But he also knows that he has a redeemer, who can save him even as he is about to descend into hell.

And so we leave Karl just as we found him. Incarcerated, but strangely free.