Son of Rambow (2008)

Directed by Garth Jennings. Bill Milner, Will Poulter, Jessica Stevenson, Neil Dudgeon, Jules Sitruk, Ed Westwick. Paramount Vantage.

By Steven D. Greydanus

Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) and Lee Carter (Will Poulter) first meet in the school corridor one day when neither is in class. Lee is in the corridor because he’s a young hooligan who’s been thrown out of the classroom. Will is in the corridor because his science class is watching a documentary videotape, and his ultra-conservative religious persuasion — Plymouth Brethren — doesn’t permit him to watch movies or television. The next day both boys are out in the same corridor again, for the same reasons.

There’s a Darwinian ruthlessness in the events that follow as Lee remorselessly bullies, cons and domineers Will, who’s so sheltered and isolated (turns out fish in a barrel are easier to shoot) that he doesn’t even understand that he’s being abused, and before long Will comes to regard Lee as a friend. Yet the two boys have more in common than first appears, and zero-sum attrition is ultimately not the final word on their relationship.

After making his feature debut with the rather inspiration-challenged big-screen Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, director Garth Jennings wisely shifts to a more intimate and personal canvas with Son of Rambow, a quirky British indie, set in the early 1980s, that made a splash at Sundance. Although somewhat scattered and uneven, Rambow has enough heart and wit to sustain its 96-minute running time.

Both Will and Lee live inside their heads, and seek creative outlet in image-making. Lee’s inner world is populated by mainstream culture images and icons, such as Sly Stallone’s hero John Rambo in First Blood, which Lee pirates with a clunky camcorder at a theater screening. Will, of course, has never experienced anything like that, but at Lee’s house he has an electrifying encounter with those contraband images of Stallone battling law-enforcement officials in the mountain wilderness of Washington State.

Read the full review on Friday, May 4 at Christianity Today Movies

Some bullying, shoving and such as well as fantasy combat; children engaging in various physically dangerous and otherwise irresponsible actions, from smoking and shoplifting to playing in a hazardous industrial area and performing dangerous stunts; some crass language and a few instances of profanity; a scene in which two characters deliberately cut their palms to become “blood brothers.”

Iron Man (2008)

Directed by Jon Favreau. Robert Downey Jr., Terrence Howard, Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow, Leslie Bibb, Shaun Toub, Faran Tahir. Paramount.

From a National Catholic Register review

By Steven D. Greydanus

Smart, sardonic and more than a little silly, Iron Man is a successful super-hero movie that never takes itself too seriously. Here is a popcorn movie with a will to entertain, at turns evoking James Bond, Batman Begins and Transformers; if it’s not in the same league as Batman Begins, it’s better (and shorter) than Transformers, with a redemptive angle foreign to James Bond.

Directed by Jon Favreau (Zathura), Iron Man is a rare superhero origin story that is also a conversion story. Peter Parker, Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne are sympathetic characters from the first time we meet them. Peter Parker might go through a selfish phase and have to learn the hard way about power and responsibility, but that’s because his sudden acquisition of spider-powers proves too much for his adolescent maturity level.

By contrast, Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) is pushing middle age, but like many super-rich jet-setters he’s never gotten past that high-powered adolescence. A brilliant industrialist entrepreneur and a tabloid celebrity, Tony is a sort of cross between George Clooney and Bill Gates — a figure more like Howard Hughes than anyone that’s come along since, which isn’t surprising, since Hughes was allegedly one of the principal inspirations for the character. Catholic blogger Mark Shea sometimes files blog posts under the topic “Paris Hilton people in an apocalyptic world.” That’s Tony to a T. His armor may be iron, but underneath he has feet of clay.

Although the armored Marvel Comics hero is often considered something of a counterpart to DC icon Batman, James Bond is in some ways a more apt comparison. Superficially Tony might resemble Bruce Wayne: a ultra-wealthy industrialist entrepreneur and media celebrity with a reputation as a ladies’ man, a hero without innate powers, who relies on high-tech arsenals of his own devising.

Yet Bruce Wayne’s millionaire-playboy persona is a subterfuge, much like Clark Kent’s nervous milquetoast shtick. Casinos, cocktails and beautiful celebrities are Bruce’s alibi, his cover story; he is in that world, but never of it. Tony, like Bond, is at one with that world. For Bond, seducing the villain’s woman is an end in itself, no less important in its own way than saving the free world. Tony doesn’t personally set out to save the free world, but he manufactures and sells weapons to the military, which he conveniently figures is the next best thing.

If Tony Stark leads something of a James Bond lifestyle, the movie he’s in is capable of critiquing that lifestyle in a way 007’s films aren’t known for. An early scene shows Tony casually seducing a beautiful reporter with a couple of suggestive lines during a passing interview, as Bond might do.

But the next morning the reporter, Christine Everhart (Leslie Bibb), wakes up alone in the cavernous emptiness of Tony Stark’s cliffside mansion in Malibu. Instead of Tony, she finds only his executive secretary Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), who is authorized to offer her a ride wherever she wishes to go. Belatedly feeling used, Tony’s latest conquest takes a swipe at Pepper’s relationship with Tony — prompting Pepper to observe that her duties include doing whatever Mr. Stark needs done, “including occasionally taking out the trash.”

Once Christine is gone, we learn that Tony was in fact working in his basement workshop the whole time. “How’d she take it?” Tony asks neutrally, and Pepper, though clearly disapproving, gives the cad the answer he wants. All this morning-after discomfiture would have no place in a 007 film.

Nor would anyone in Bond’s circle chide him as insightfully as his friend and military liaison Jim Rhodes (Terrence Howard): “You don’t respect yourself,” Rhodey says ruefully, “so I know you don’t respect me.” Only Tony’s right-hand man, Obadiah Stane (a bald and bearded Jeff Bridges), is completely supportive — perhaps too supportive.

Tony’s lifestyle is more dramatically cross-examined when, during a trip to Afghanistan pitching his latest weapons line to the military, he is kidnapped by Afghani insurgents armed with his own products. In the mêlée Tony is nearly killed by shrapnel from one of his own missiles, and shrapnel buried in his chest threatens to work its way to his heart.

Fortunately, a fellow prisoner, a medical doctor named Yinsen (Shaun Toub) saves his life with a rather grisly bit of comic-book field surgery: Tony now has an electromagnet implanted in his chest, powered by an old car battery. Understandably concerned about the stability of this power supply, Tony cannibalizes the bad guys’ supply of Stark Enterprises tech to whip up a high-tech “arc reactor,” an ultra-powerful generator device his company has been working on. Then he gets to thinking that that arc reactor could power other things besides the electromagnet in his chest… things that might get him out of his predicament.

As the captives work together, Yinsen, a family man, asks Tony whether he has a family. No, Tony replies. “Ah,” Yinsen replies. “The man who has everything… and nothing.” In the end, Yinsen urges Tony not to waste his new lease on life.

The whole experience opens Tony’s eyes, not least because he sees his own merchandise being used against American troops. When he returns from his ordeal, he wants to take his life — and his company — in a new direction… much to the consternation of the board of directors, not to mention the stock market.

Before long, Tony begins to suspect that his company is being used for illicit profiteering. What political implications there are include bones for both sides of the aisle: The film suggests the dangers of ill-advised American meddling in the Middle East, but also underscores the barbarity of the insurgents, above all in a fantasy-fulfilling set piece in which Iron Man drops into an Afghan town under assault and takes matters into his own gauntleted hands.

Throughout all this, Iron Man’s biggest asset is the gusto of Downey Jr’s performance. The actor chews his snappy lines with relish, embracing Tony’s take-charge personality without losing sight of hints of insecurity beneath the façade. Paltrow gives Pepper more strength and personality than Batman Begins’s Rachel Dawes or Spider‑Man’s Mary Jane Watson; there’s real chemistry between Tony and Pepper, something missing in many recent comic book movies. Bridges, too, brings cunning and charisma to Obadiah Stane; only soft-spoken Terrence Howard makes little impression as Rhodey, though to be fair he isn’t given much to work with.

Fans will enjoy a number of in-jokes, most obviously a scene during a crisis in which Rhodey looks fleetingly at a spare Iron Man suit and says regretfully, “Next time, baby.” In the comics, Rhodey takes over as Iron Man for an extended time while Tony succumbs to his longtime Achilles’ heel, alcohol — falling off the wagon, becoming a homeless wino, and losing his empire to a ruthless rival.

The film draws on this storyline (notably for its chief villain), but although Tony drinks a fair bit, his alcoholism has been omitted, at least for now. Perhaps Rhodey’s line foreshadows that darker plotline as well. (Another possible in-joke: Toward the end of the first-act soirée scene I noticed that the band was playing what sounded like an orchestral version of the theme song of the cheesy old TV cartoon: As Iron Man, all jets ablaze / He fights and smites with repulsor rays!)

Like most super-hero origin movies, Iron Man falls a bit short in the final act. Having spent most of the film establishing the hero, the film has no time left to do justice to the villain and their third-act confrontation. (The same pitfall can be seen in Spider‑Man and the 1978 Superman film; the best efforts to overcome the problem remain the first X‑Men movie and Batman Begins.)

Still, the first two acts are strong enough to power Iron Man above most recent Marvel adaptations, placing it comfortably beside Spider‑Man among the more enjoyable superhero origin stories — and, with the origin out of the way, opening the door wide for an even better sequel.

Realistic and comic-book war-zone violence; some immoderate drinking, innuendo and suggestive material, including a brief bedroom scene (no nudity); a couple of wince-inducing scenes involving Tony’s chest injury; some objectionable language, including at least one instance of profanity.

The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)

Directed by George Stevens. Max von Sydow, Dorothy McGuire, Robert Loggia, Claude Rains, José Ferrer, Marian Seldes, Charlton Heston. United Artists.

From a National Catholic Register review

By Steven D. Greydanus

The Greatest Story Ever Told was a flop with critics and audiences in its day, and is no better thought of today. Unfairly best known for a one-line cameo by John Wayne as the centurion solemnly drawling, “Truly this man was the Son of Gawd,” director George Stevens’ intended masterpiece was the most lavish Bible film ever produced. Its failure at the box office killed the Hollywood Bible-epic genre for decades.

Audiences found it impossible to suspend disbelief over the film’s parade of well-known stars in major and minor roles: Telly Savalas as Pilate, Sidney Poitier as Simon of Cyrene, Shelley Winters as the woman with the issue of blood healed by touching Christ’s garment. And Max von Sydow’s austere, otherworldly Jesus was felt to be off-putting and unapproachable.

Stevens’ decision to shoot the film in the American Southwest was criticized for hurting the film’s realism. Then there’s the deliberate pacing and lengthy running time (199 minutes on DVD).

And yet, compared with most Hollywood biblical epics, The Greatest Story Ever Told manages to sustain a spirit of genuine reverence and religiosity over showmanship and pageantry. Its deliberate pacing and dreamlike, otherworldly ambiance offer neither the entertainment value of The Ten Commandments nor the comparative psychological and historical realism of Zeffirelli’s subsequent Jesus of Nazareth, yet it is arguably more evocative than either of the spirit of biblical literature.

Specifically, Greatest Story is closest to the transcendent, luminous spirit of the Gospel of John, the prologue of which is borrowed for the opening shot depicting a church fresco of Christ with arms outstretched, invoking a context of 2,000 years of tradition and faith. Much like the Fourth Gospel, dialogue is often pregnant with second meanings and Old Testament (or Christian history) resonances. Von Sydow’s impassive performance is best seen as an interpretation of John’s overtly divine and sovereign Lord, in contrast to the generally clearer indications of humanity in the Synoptics. He isn’t warm or approachable, but he’s persuasively authoritative and all-knowing.

Even when, like other biblical epics, Greatest Story strays jarringly from the biblical text, it often feels less like the contemporary revisionism or speculation of other films than like the strange alternate vision of an apocryphal gospel. The conflation of Lazarus with the rich young man is as startling as DeMille’s Moses–Rameses–Nefretiri triangle or Zeffirelli’s Magi skipping the visit to Herod’s court while Herod waxes indignant about the foreigners who don’t visit him — yet once the initial shock is past, the Lazarus scene doesn’t take me, at least, out of the story in the same way. It isn’t the biblical story, but it doesn’t feel especially like a betrayal of or foreign intrusion into the story either.

Meticulous compositions, stunning cinematography and dramatic Renaissance–esque chiaroscuro lighting and shadow create a stunningly beautiful onscreen world, complemented by the ethereal score by Alfred Newman, Fred Steiner and Hugo Friedhofer. With its dramatic landscapes and sets, this world is obviously a flagrantly Hollywood creation — but so what? The medieval and Renaissance masters painted Gospel scenes with overtly European landscapes, fashions and architecture. This is merely a cultural fact, not an objection or criticism. In the same way, Greatest Story looks like what it is, a Hollywood film — stars and all. What does it matter if Death Valley doesn’t look much like Israel, or if a cast of unknowns might have evoked greater “realism”?

There are flaws. The generally ultra-serious mood works on its own terms, but occasional lapses into mundane conversational naturalism seem out of place. (James: “Jesus… that’s a good name.” Jesus: “Thank you.”) Some of the departures, such as the semi-exoneration of Judas (less pure than Zeffirelli’s innocent dupe, but still indignantly protesting that he’s “not interested in the money” when the New Testament record indicates otherwise), hurt the film more than others.

While the personalities of the Hollywood stars seldom overwhelm the film, one that does is Charlton Heston’s John the Baptist. Although Wayne’s much-ridiculed line reading at the cross is the film’s most famously dicey moment, it doesn’t hold a candle to Heston’s silliest scene, so campy that it’s hard to believe it wasn’t deliberate.

Heston plays the Baptist not with ultra-reverence, à la The Ten Commandments’s post–burning bush Moses, but in macho, defiant “Get your stinking paws off me” Planet of the Apes mode. When the leader of a Herodian force sent to arrest him barks, “We have orders to bring you to Herod,” Heston scornfully flings back: “I have orders to bring you to God.” The confrontation climaxes in a moment of near-Pythonesque absurdity as the soldiers leap upon the Baptist in the river, whereupon he seizes them and begins forcibly ducking them in a virtual parody of baptism, thundering, “Repent! Repent!”

Fortunately, this isn’t indicative of the 198 other minutes. Prayerful voiceovers, chanted prayers and constant allusions to Old Testament prophecy create a palpable, poetic sense of meditative awareness, with characters often artificially conscious of the significance of the events they enact (Savalas’s Pilate even has a moment of foreboding in which the words of the Creed seem to come to his mind unbidden: “suffered under Pontius Pilate…”). It’s almost closer in spirit to a church pageant than a Hollywood spectacle — and I mean that in a good way.

The high point is probably the raising of Lazarus, with bold but effective use of the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah. The Resurrection sequence repeats this approach, to mitigated effect, but still with real transcendence far surpassing the tacked-on resurrection coda of Jesus of Nazareth. If not the greatest, it’s still a remarkable and heartfelt cinematic telling of the greatest story ever told.

Restrained depiction of the Passion; some potentially confusing Gospel revisionism.

Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! (2008)

Directed by Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino. Jim Carrey, Steve Carell, Carol Burnett, Will Arnett, Isla Fisher, Amy Poehler, Seth Rogen, Charles Osgood.

From a National Catholic Register review

By Steven D. Greydanus

In the wide world of Seuss, from the white Sneech-beach sands
Out to sleepy Far Foodle, and throughout the lands
Of the Yooks and the Zooks, no hero is braver
Than Horton, egg-hatcher and Who life-saver.

No one’s heart’s bigger, even Thidwick the Moose
And even the Lorax took less abuse.
One book can’t contain Horton’s dogged heroics!
His stoical pluck shows up all other stoics!

He wants every voice to be clearly heard
And he sticks up for those who can’t yet say a word.
Even those unhatched and forsook by their mothers
Or too small to see and denied by most others.

But the last time Who-ville came to the screen
Seuss-ian magic was not to be seen.
Jim Carrey’s Grinch was nothing to relish
And Mike Myer’s Hat Cat was no more Geisel-ish.

Could La-La Land ever give Horton his due?
A pro-life pachyderm who’s trusty and true?
And with Jim Carrey back! As Horton’s own voice!
The Grinch! Could there be a peculiarer choice?

But… what’s this? From Blue Sky? Creators of Manny
The Mammoth, Ice Age’s pachyderm nanny?
The makers of Robots? Could they get it right?
Could they pull off Horton? You know, they just might…

And they have! Their Horton’s playful and kind
Responsible, long-suffering, stout in a bind.
And, as if atoning, even Jim Carrey…
He’s not at all grinchy! He’s Horton-y! Very!

Steve Carell makes a great Mayor of Who
And Carol Burnett is the sour kangaroo.
And narrator Charles Osgood goes to town
And he has anapestic tetrameter down.

And it comes without latex! Without ribald joshing!
Without key-party games or rave-party moshing!
And it gets even better! I’m pleased to relate
That Horton’s the very best Blue Sky to date.

This isn’t the first time this tale’s been retold
And it’s grown in the telling, like fables of old.
The Chuck Jones short, written by Seuss, broke the news
That the big world beyond was unknown to the Whos.

Then in Seussical, little twerp Jo-jo made good
As the Mayor’s son, soulful but misunderstood.
They take here and there from each form of the fable
But Blue Sky’s own strengths bring a lot to the table.

All their films shine with slapstick and wit
And Rube Goldberg flair that makes Seuss a good fit.
Their stories and characters don’t always jell
But with something to work with, their work is quite swell.

They know how to use Horton’s ears and his nose
And they’ve got good ideas about all his woes.
Turns out Horton mentors the young jungle critters
And that gives that kangaroo bully the jitters.

Finding life on a speck, too tiny to see
Prompts Horton to wonder if our world might be
Just a speck in some much larger world beyond ours —
But the kangaroo sees a fool talking to flowers.

(There’s one slip, the kangaroo’s passing snipe
About how she “pouch-schools” to avoid Horton’s type.
That’s backwards for sure. That officious old grouch
Has N.E.A. written all over her pouch.)

An empirical sort, she’s no patience to spare
For what others think when she’s sure nothing’s there.
But the last straw is when the tykes start going on
About their own flowers, and the “worlds” thereupon.

Meanwhile, in Who-ville, life’s full of song.
Everyone’s cheerful and nothing goes wrong.
There are 96 girls in the Mayor’s happy brood
But Jo-jo, the boy, seems rather subdued.

With hair in his eyes and a sad little frown
He’s the first sulky kid ever born in that town.
But the Mayor, meanwhile, has got his own trouble:
Only he knows or cares what’s outside the Who-bubble.

The kidding is gentle, touched with affection
And no mean-spiritedness or rejection.
Like Horton, the film doesn’t hold any grudges.
In the end, no one’s judged and nobody judges.

But the message that comes through the clearest of all
Is: A person’s a person, no matter how small.
And it should be, it should be, it SHOULD be that way!
Horton’s own faithfulness carries the day!

Some mild rudeness and mild animated menace. Blue Sky/20th Century Fox.

Once (2007)

Directed by John Carney. Glen Handard, Markéta Irglová. Fox Searchlight.

From a National Catholic Register review

By Steven D. Greydanus

At once delicate and gritty, wistful and deeply satisfying, John Carney’s Once is a intimate little film that, like a favorite song, you would rather play for someone than try to describe. Not just because the experience loses in the telling, but also because the joy is in the discovery, the in-the-moment immediacy, the barely perceptible tension that leaves you holding your breath for the last twenty minutes, not wanting a single misstep to mar the story.

Not a story so much as an incident that becomes a turning point in two people’s lives, Once relates a brief but memorable encounter between a bearded Dublin street musician (Glen Handard of the Irish band the Frames) and a young, ponytailed Czech pianist (19-year-old singer-songwriter Markéta Irglová).

He plays guitar on street corners; she notices his playing and is intrigued. She observes that he plays edgy, heartfelt songs only at night; he explains that he makes his money during the day from passersby who only want to hear popular songs they know. He works in his father’s vacuum cleaner repair shop; she has, yes, a broken vacuum cleaner. She plays piano, but doesn’t own one; a shop owner lets her use the store piano during lunch hour. They play together and collaborate on a song.

She is lovely; he is lonely. Both are wounded souls, and their connection is emotional as well as creative, but she has a clear, untroubled sense of who she is, and won’t let things go too far. We never learn their names, and never need to know. It’s not inconceivable that they never learn one another’s names.

Those are the notes, or some of them. What I’ve left out is the music. To call Once a musical is both entirely accurate and thoroughly misleading. It would almost be better to call it the antidote to the musical, or at least the antithesis, whether you love musicals or hate them.

If Once is a musical, then every musician lives in a musical, every painter in an art gallery and every film critic in a film festival. The actual folk-rock they play may or may not be your thing; it doesn’t matter. It’s their thing, and they live and breathe it. Nothing has been staged for our benefit; there’s no offscreen conductor or choreographer in the wings, no show-stopping production number, no artifice or razzle-dazzle. The unrehearsed quality of their first-time collaboration, of his impromptu, semi-comic musical lament on the bus, feels like the real thing. (It just about is. The film was shot in 17 days on a negligible budget.)

Watching Once, one may wonder what the title refers to. Is their chance encounter a once-in-a-lifetime experience? What is or happens once? Is it a fleeting once, like a convergence of celestial bodies? Or is it a lingering once, like true love? As the film draws to a close, it finds the one right note to resolve its lingering tensions. It could easily have gone differently, but it doesn’t misstep — not even once.

Like the personal songs the street musician sings at night, Once doesn’t play to the crowds looking for disposable mainstream fare. It comes from the heart, and for those with an ear out for something new it lingers in the heart and mind.

Frequent casual obscenity (sexual and nonsexual); romantic complications; a depiction of single parenthood.

Be Kind Rewind (2008)

Directed by Michel Gondry. Jack Black, Mos Def, Danny Glover, Mia Farrow, Melonie Diaz, Irv Gooch. New Line.

A Christianity Today Movies review

By Steven D. Greydanus

The operative words are “Be Kind.”

Rewinding figures too, both literally and metaphorically, with Be Kind Rewind’s nostalgic neighborhood video-rental shop setting (for the Blu‑Ray generation, that’s video as in VHS videotape) and utterly silly first-act conceit straight out of a 1980s paranormal comedy like Zapped! or Modern Problems.

But Be Kind Rewind is not only a far kinder (and, yeah, gentler) film than its 1980s predecessors, it’s also writer–director Michel Gondry’s sweetest and most accessible film to date, with none of the narrative convolutions and isolation of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep.

If I had to put Be Kind Rewind in a box, which is emphatically not where any Gondry film belongs, I might be tempted to call it Lars and the Real Girl by way of Bowfinger — the latter for its comic guerrilla filmmaking, but the former for its similarity of spirit, its gentle absurdism in an ode to benevolence and community togetherness.

Goodwill more than nostalgia is the prevailing sentiment. The goodwill that nutty Jerry (Jack Black) and gentle Mike (Mos Def) bring to their ludicrous scheme to save the video shop after a freak disaster wipes out its entire stock. The goodwill with which their efforts are received, and the larger goodwill ultimately occasioned by the whole business. Not least of all, the goodwill that the viewer brings, or does not bring, to the film itself.

It would be easy — far too easy — to pull Be Kind to bits; Gondry offers not the least resistance. He seems almost to relish his house-of-cards approach, so much so that the uncharmed critic might reasonably feel it a waste of breath to blow it down. I would agree. Hold your breath, let Gondry stack his cards for you, and when the topmost tier is complete I think you’ll be glad you did.

The story, set in my backyard in downtown Passaic, New Jersey, revolves around a video shop named “Be Kind Rewind” that could kindly be called struggling, if that isn’t too vigorous a term for the shop’s nearly comatose business. Mike lives above and works at the shop. Jerry, his childhood friend, lives across the street in a trailer on a vacant lot in the shadow of a crackling, humming power plant that causes Jerry no end of anxiety.

The shop belongs to soft-spoken old Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover), who takes quiet pride in his deteriorating neighborhood and rundown shop, and regales Mike and Jerry with stories about jazz great Fats Waller’s little-known connection with that very neighborhood and address. Alas, like most such institutions in most such films, Be Kind Rewind is in imminent danger — the death sentence, in this case, made out in triplicate. Not only is Be Kind financially insolvent, the building itself has been condemned, and there are plans to raze the entire block and build condos on the spot.

In an 11th-hour bid to save the shop, Mr. Fletcher reluctantly contemplates adapting to the business models of competing DVD chain outlets, and surreptitiously researches his competitors’ methods: more copies of fewer films, with the most popular mainstream titles and genres (action and comedy) shouldering aside works of more specific interest (documentaries, classics and so on).

Keeping shop in Mr. Fletcher’s absence, Mike has been told to keep unpredictable Jerry out of Be Kind — and, when a rare customer ventures into the shop while Jerry is there, we see why. But Jerry’s presence in the shop turns out to have even more disastrous consequences, due to his own botched sabotage attempt at the power station (which he’s convinced emits mind-controlling microwaves). Unwittingly, inexplicably, Jerry has become magnetized — and as he wanders through the shop, well, you know what happens when magnetic tape is exposed to powerful magnetic waves.

Suddenly the few customers who come into the shop are back in short order, wanting exchanges or refunds. Before long Mike figures out that it isn’t one or two bad tapes, but the whole stock. Of course, he doesn’t need the whole stock right this minute — he just needs to produce a copy of Ghostbusters for Miss Falewicz (Mia Farrow), an odd bird who happens to be a friend of Mr. Fletcher’s.

Panicking, Mike does what anyone in his position would do: He downloads a pirated Ghostbusters rip from a torrent site and copies it over the blank tape. No wait, I mean he rents the DVD from a local competitor and copies it onto the tape. No wait, he doesn’t do that either.

Instead, Mike hatches a scheme that only a character in a Gondry movie would dream up: He and Jerry will produce Ghostbusters the old-fashioned way… themselves. After all, they reason, Miss Falewicz has never seen it, so how does she know it isn’t a rock-bottom YouTube-level goof with no plot, a couple of guys humming their own theme song and a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man made of real marshmallows?

It’s so crazy it just might have worked — but then the ersatz remake winds up in the wrong hands… with unexpected results. And of course Ghostbusters isn’t the only film people want to see. Pressed to come up with more titles, Mike and Jerry stall as long as they can, explaining that the wanted films are, um, hard-to-find imports from Sweden, yeah, that’s the ticket.

Although it’s pretty much instantly obvious what’s really happening, for some reason the Swedish connection sticks, and eventually the “Sweded” remakes become a local cult phenomenon. With only Jerry’s mechanic (Irv Gooch) standing in for all supporting characters — including women — the collaborators quickly feel the pinch of their limited cast, and begin scouting for a more kissable leading lady. Although Jerry’s first choice, a Latina clerk at a cleaner’s, is unavailable, her sister Alma (Melonie Diaz) turns out to be much more than another pretty face, and soon the à la carte filmmakers have a third partner.

In a slick Hollywood comedy like Bowfinger, the “Sweding” process would be wackier and more over-the-top, with more gags and possibly more laughs. Gondry is content to go for naive charm and conceptual inspiration, which will delight some viewers while leaving others cool. Certainly the more familiar you are with the original films, the funnier the “Sweding” scenes are. My favorite bits include brilliantly low-budget special effects for King Kong, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Men in Black, as well as Jerry and Mike’s impersonations of Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker in Rush Hour 2.

In all this absurdism, there are a couple of bits of hard reality pushing back, both involving the inexorability of bureaucracy and the legal process. There’s also an emotional speed bump when Mike’s last-minute inspiration to save the shop unexpectedly opens the door to a melancholy truth he would rather not have known.

Be Kind is escapist fantasy, but its escapism is self-consciously so; the hardness of the world lightly papered over, but not really covered up or forgotten. “Our history belongs to us — we can change it if we want to,” someone goes so far as to say at one point. But Be Kind never forgets that there are limits to what we can change, realities we can’t remake, erase or rewind.

What we can do… is be kind.

A few instances of crass sexual references and body-function humor; a few depictions of vandalism; brief minor profanity.

In the Shadow of the Moon (2007)

Directed by David Sington. Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, Eugene Cernan, Michael Collins, Charles Duke, Jim Lovell, Edgar D. Mitchell, Harrison Schmitt, Dave Scott, John Young. ThinkFilm.

From a National Catholic Register review

By Steven D. Greydanus

Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft once said that the terror Pascal felt looking into the “eternal silence” of the night sky was fear of his own shadow. The sense of paltriness and insignificance man feels in the face of the vastness of the universe is itself a mark of his greatness.

Man’s own shadow, as much as the moon’s, lies across In the Shadow of the Moon, David Sington’s moving documentary of the U.S. Apollo program. An eloquent testament to the grandeur of creation as well as man’s unique place in it, In the Shadow of the Moon offers a remarkable look at the history and technology of the Apollo program, but an even more extraordinary glimpse of the men who lived it and made it happen.

Ten of the eleven surviving Apollo astronauts, including Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins of Apollo 11 and Jim Lovell of Apollo 8 and the ill-fated Apollo 13 (played in Ron Howard’s film by Tom Hanks), were interviewed for the film. Archival NASA footage, some never before seen, is spectacular and frequently transporting, but the film’s soul is the memories, insights and reflections of the astronauts, whom the filmmakers allow to speak for themselves, avoiding intrusive outside narration and using only minimal titles.

With gratifying humility and grace, the astronauts convey their awe and wonder at leaving the planet of our birth; at seeing with their own eyes, for the first time in history, the whole rim of the earth; at visiting our nearest celestial neighbor and leaving their footprints in its unshifting dust.

The failures and tragedies of the program are also discussed, from explosively abortive test launches, to the tragic fire that killed the crew of the Apollo 1 on the launch pad to the near-disastrous Apollo 13 mission. Belying the familiarity of the history, the film succeeds in evoking the very real threat of failure, underscoring the audacity of the whole enterprise.

It was one thing for President Kennedy, responding to national consternation over the Soviets’ early successes in launching the first satellite and the first manned mission to space, to literally promise the moon by the decade’s end. It was another thing for an intrepid team of brilliant scientists and daredevil pilots to tackle the unknown challenges of improvising a means of actually doing it.

“That’s science fiction!” exclaims Gene Cernan of his actual experiences, and if those under half a century old can’t fully appreciate that sentiment, the achievement it bespeaks is no less singular four decades later, as the fraternity of men who have been to the moon still stands at twelve members. (In the comic strip Peanuts, Linus van Pelt once said he would never want to be the first, second or even third man on the moon because of the pressure and expectations; I don’t remember the exact number where he hit his comfort zone, but I think it was something like 18 or 23. He never would have made it.)

Even at the moment of greatest triumph, as Armstrong and Aldrin took those first small steps, the risk of disaster loomed. While negotiating a suitable landing spot, Armstrong had come within seconds of expending too much fuel to break free of the moon’s gravity. Would the first moon pioneers return from their mission? The White House, it turns out, was ready for the worst, having taped a speech by Nixon to be aired if the lunar blastoff failed.

Perhaps fittingly, much of the screen time goes to Collins, the Apollo 11 crew member left behind in orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin went down to the moon’s surface. Collins was dubbed “the loneliest man in the universe” during that first moonwalk, a moniker he dismisses here. By contrast, the famously reclusive Armstrong is present only in the respectful accolades of his colleagues (“I can’t think of a negative thing about Neil Armstrong,” notes Alan Dean).

In addition to rocks and photographs and data, the astronauts have brought back from the moon something even more valuable: perspective. Their reflections speak to a sense of order and purpose in the universe, the fragility of the earth and the triviality of our terrestrial squabbles in the grand scheme of things, and the importance of our responsibility for the welfare of our planet. The Apollo 8 crew, the first to orbit the moon, recall their Christmas 1968 transmission, the most widely viewed television broadcast at that time, in which they read from Genesis 1. And Charlie Duke, the yougest of the lunar club and a devout Christian, discusses finding God on earth after traveling through the heavens: “My walk on the moon lasted three days… My walk with God will last forever.”

The shadow of human cupidity, failure and tragedy lies dark across the landscape of documentary filmmaking. Exposés, polemics and historical inquiries explore corruption, war, assassinations, negligence and every kind of disaster. These are important and have their place. But we also need documentaries like In the Shadow of the Moon, films that showcase the shadow of man’s potential for collaboration, achievement and even greatness, not just frailty. It wasn’t space or the moon that made the Apollo astronauts remarkable. It was the earth.

A couple of mild profanities; footage of wartime bombings; a mild body-function reference; a few images of cigarette smoking.

Caramel (2007)

Directed by Nadine Labaki. Labaki, Yasmine Elmasri, Joanna Moukarzel, Gisèle Aouad, Adel Karam, Sihame Haddad. Roadside Attractions.

A Christianity Today Movies review

By Steven D. Greydanus

If Caramel were a Hollywood big-studio chick flick, instead of a Lebanese chick flick set in Beirut, it would come with a PG‑13 rating rather than a PG, peppered with brassy sex-related dialogue and class/race/gender-baiting humor.

The story could still be centered on a beauty salon as the hub of activity in the lives of a mostly female ensemble cast, although plot needs would probably require some creaky, contrived crisis, such as a threat to the salon’s future. One of the characters might still learn a hard lesson about getting involved with the wrong man, but “the wrong man” would be a generic creep rather than, say, a married man.

Instead of Muslims and Christians, the social mix would be largely black and white — and characters would discuss this constantly, with little epiphanies of racial enlightenment along the way (hopefully for members of both groups, if the filmmakers could manage it). There would also be a more or less binary division of good characters and bad characters, with slimy men and snobby women in the latter group.

No one would smoke, religion would be invisible, and every plotline would be neatly tied up by the film’s end.

All of this wouldn’t necessarily make it a bad movie, for example, if it starred Queen Latifah and was called Beauty Shop. But if there’s a reason to see Lebanese actress–director Nadine Labaki’s Caramel, and there is, the film’s Middle-eastern cultural milieu, providing more than just exotic flavor, is a substantial part of that reason.

As the name implies, Caramel is a gooey, insubstantial confection, often sweet, occasionally cloying, sometimes sticky — in many respects about on a par with the likes of Beauty Shop. The humor is broad, characters stereotypical, the situations formulaic. Yet there’s no good–bad character divide, no requisite A-story conflict, and few tidy resolutions. Milder in presentation than Beauty Shop, Caramel is more mature in content, touching on dicey subjects from adultery to same-sex attraction without the adolescent brashness of the home-grown product.

The beauty salon in Caramel is run by Layale (Labaki), who is having an affair with a married man and struggles with the shamefaced jealousy and curious envy of the Other Woman. Even more than last year’s Waitress, Caramel confronts the potential homewrecker with the domestic side of the equation.

Meanwhile, Layale fends off the attentions of a reserved but handsome traffic cop who routinely calls her short on her frequent traffic and parking violations, giving her tickets he knows she won’t pay, just to spend a minute with her. This subplot provides one of the film’s most delicate scenes as the officer, wistfully watching from afar as Layale steals a few minutes on the phone with her lover, imagines himself on the other end of the line, and offers self-deprecating responses to what he supposes she might be saying.

Stylist Nisrine (Yasmine Al Masri) is engaged to a young man who’s liberal enough to fondle his fiancée’s knee under the table during a family dinner — much to the inquisitive astonishment of the young boy hiding under the table — and to foolishly risk trouble with Beirut’s morality police by sitting with her in a parked car at night outside her house. Yet is he open-minded enough to be able to deal with the revelation that Nisrine isn’t a virgin? To what lengths would Nisrine go to avoid such a crisis?

Frequent client Jamale (Gisele Aouad) is an unwillingly aging never-was actress still trying out for bit parts in TV spots, doing her best to hide her years with coiffure and sartorial choices, even bits of strategically hidden Scotch tape in lieu of an eye job. Jamale tryouts are uncomfortably embarrassing, but ostensibly even more embarrassing is the preempting of a scheduled tryout by a female hygiene predicament — though a later revelation puts her situation in a more pathetic light.

Here and elsewhere, Caramel touches on the intractable grip of the cult of beauty on female self-worth: the endless pains to which women go to look their best; the deep pride and satisfaction that even a withered old woman may take in making herself up for the first time in years; the delight in the unforeseen charm of a completely new look. (The film’s title refers to a sugar confection treatment for hair removal, a jarringly methodical process that quickly dispels the aura of sumptuous decadence promised by the appetizing opening montage.)

At a shop across the street, elderly seamstress Rose (Sihame Haddad) caring for a sister with dementia (Aziza Semaan) may have a twilight opportunity for love with a courtly client. That leaves Rima (Joanna Moukarzel), a pixie-tressed shampoo girl whose same-sex infatuation with a long-haired beauty (Fatmeh Safa) who takes to coming in to have her hair washed is one of Caramel’s stickier ingredients. In Beauty Shop, homosexual traits are roundly mocked, which some may feel more comfortable with than Caramel’s tolerant approach. Others may feel that stigmatizing mockery has more to do with disrespecting persons than with traditional Judeo-Christian teaching, which affirms both the disordered and sinful character of homosexual acts and also the personal dignity of individuals who experience same-sex attraction and/or engage in homosexual acts.

With the exception of Nisrine, who is Muslim, nearly all the women appear to be Maronite Catholic — though only elderly Rose and Lili, who pray a somewhat unruly rosary in bed at night, show much sign of practicing their faith. Icons of the Holy Family and the Madonna and Child adorn the wall in Rose’s shop, and crosses, crucifixes, and rosaries hang from necklaces, walls and rearview mirrors. Layale finds a holy card of a saint (I think it was Thérèse of Lisieux) in her lover’s wallet. In one scene a religious procession with a statue of the Virgin Mary makes its way down the street, even taking a detour into the salon, and the Christian women cross themselves and join in the hymn. But religion isn’t shown having a role in informing the characters’ decisions or their thoughts about them.

At the same time, Caramel depicts Middle-eastern Christians and Muslims living and working side by side with no trace of religious conflict or tension. The religious mix is a fact about the characters and their society, not a plot point or a topic for provocative or outrageous banter. Labaki dedicated the film to “my Beirut,” and it’s heartening to see “her” city as she does, as a place where people live and work and face more or less the same sorts of problems as they do in American studio comedies.

Mild sensuality; brief crass language and mild profanity; an implied same-sex attraction.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007)

Directed by Cristian Mungiu. Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasiliu, Vlad Ivanov. IFC.

From a National Catholic Register review

By Steven D. Greydanus

In a key scene of Romanian writer–director Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Gabita Dragut (Laura Vasiliu) and her college roommate and friend Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) agree never again to discuss the horrific events of that day.

To draw a shroud of silence over certain overwhelming experiences, to treat them as unmentionable, is a natural impulse, and perhaps a necessary one. By consigning them to silence, we confine them to the past and allow ourselves to move on. What can scarcely be borne as private memory becomes unendurable if brought into the shared present by a spoken word. Yet such silence, whether personal or social, can also be a form of dishonesty, a tacit unwillingness to confront the implications of an unwanted truth. We avert our eyes, like urban pedestrians avoiding the gaze of a derelict on the sidewalk.

Like previous Romanian export The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, 4 Months compels us not to avert our eyes. Even though the actual events remain out of sight — apart from a single, indelible shot not unlike images seen in some types of pro-life materials — its confrontation of the unmentionable is no less devastating.

Points of contact between 4 Months and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu go further. Each film depicts events of a single day in Bucharest, filmed by director of photography Oleg Mutu with an eye to the dreariness of urban decay. Each is a bleak, quietly appalling chronicle of a nearly unnoticed tragedy that is also an atrocity — a slow-motion train wreck in an ennervated and decaying urban world too far gone to care.

Both films involve a death, and indeed allude to a death in their titles, though the death is less the focus than the circumstances and transactions surrounding it. Indeed, the focus is not so much on the more directly affected party as on a sympathetic would-be advocate — in Lazarescu, a conscientious nurse; in 4 Months, a caring college roommate.

Still, the final minutes of both films are overshadowed by death, like a pall — except that there is no pall, literally or figuratively. Pleas for some measure of dignity for the victim are not realized, compounding the naked sense of loss.

The two deaths involve opposite stages in life and diametrically opposed crises. The earlier title refers to a terminally ill 63-year-old man whom an increasingly desperate nurse is trying to get admitted to a hospital. The latter title indicates the gestational age of the fetus whose procured termination involves Gabita and Otilia in even more desperate straits.

4 Months is set in 1987, in the last years of the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu, during which abortion was illegal (and divorce discouraged) in an effort to promote population growth. As with anything else, of course, black-market forces dictate that where demand is great enough, those willing to pay the price can find a potential supplier.

Like Lazarescu, 4 Months is deliberately mundane in its naturalism, with its blighted urban decline, low-key performances and exchanges that sound like snatches of conversation overheard in a corridor. Sequences are crafted with inconspicuous but exacting formal rigor, with each scene filmed without cuts in a single unbroken shot. The effect is as close to “fly on the wall” filmmaking as movies can get, and embodies the humanistic perspective — apparently characteristic of the new Romanian cinema — that simply to relate the story of a significant human event, to tell the truth without gloss or commentary, has value in itself.

Dramatically, given the crucial event in 4 Months, this approach is fraught with difficulty. Although the film is dominated by circumstances surrounding an abortion, abortion itself must not dominate the film. Mungiu cannily bypasses arguments and talking points by relating the events of the crucial day, with the decision already made — a narrative strategy formally similar to, say, United 93. Yet for precisely that reason any conflict must come from elsewhere, as the conflict in United 93 centers on the crisis of the passengers’ resistance, not the hijacking. But the enormity of abortion and the controversy around it threatens to overwhelm almost any other conceivable crisis.

Astonishingly, a ghastly twist midway through 4 Months, though organic to the story, succeeds in raising the stakes to a sickening new level. The abortionist, Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), is the polar opposite of the titular protagonist of Vera Drake, who performs backroom abortions as acts of intended humanitarianism. Bebe is a repellently convincing monster, a remorseless victimizer whose crimes are all the more dreadful for the spark of humanity and even something like solicitude that he manifests in the very end.

It is fair to say that these sequences, and others that follow, throw into relief the terrible collateral of illegal backroom abortion. Pro-choice viewers may be quick to point out all the suffering and risk that could have been avoided if abortion were legal, and rightly so.

Yet the pathos of 4 Months is not exhausted by the degrading and dangerous consequences of its black-market circumstances. There is a final moment of truth in which what had been a problem to be gotten rid at any cost of is given a face, and the human dimension of the proceedings is squarely confronted. At that point, it is felt to be no longer possible to treat the fetus as a piece of tissue, to be disposed of like so much waste. Or is it? After all, isn’t that what would have happened in a clinic, with a legal abortion?

4 Months comes closest to commentary in the final scene, which finds one of the main characters sitting down to a meal in the restaurant of the hotel where the abortion was performed. A wedding reception is in full swing in the next room, but a fight has broken out in the party. The waiter brings a dish from the reception menu: beef, liver, kidneys, breaded brains. What happens when human beings treat one another as no more than this? 4 Months offers queasy but meaty food for thought.

Extensive depiction of the procuring of an illegal abortion, including a non-explicit shot of the insertion of a probe into the vaginal canal; coercive sexual demands and offscreen sexual assault; brief below-the-waist female frontal and rear nudity; a lingering shot of a post-abortion fetus; some obscene and profane language.

Juno (2007)

Directed by Jason Reitman. Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, J. K. Simmons, Allison Janney, Olivia Thirlby, Valerie Tian. Fox Searchlight.

By Steven D. Greydanus

“Just out dealing with things way beyond my maturity level” is 16-year-old Juno’s mature if bitter reply to her father’s query about where she’s been.

It’s a funny thing about maturity levels. Maturity and immaturity can be combined in unexpected ways, like a hulking teenager with a baby face. At a certain age, youthful hubris, naivete and sheer foolishness can blithely coexist with keen insight, practical realism and steely common sense. Equally, juvenile narcissism and unreadiness for the demands of adulthood can survive well into middle age and beyond. A childlike spirit can be winsome or wearisome at any age, and some seem born readier for real life than others, alas, ever become.

With her blue slushies and layered grunge couture, Juno (Ellen Page) is definitely a kid… and she’s mature enough to know it. She also thinks of herself as knowing and worldly-wise, always ready with a cutting quip or witty aside — yet she’s naive enough to be unconvinced of her condition after two pregnancy tests and a single encounter with Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), who is not exactly her boyfriend, and so we are back to the immaturity thing.

“It started with a chair,” Juno tells us in the opening voiceover. Well, no, it started a year earlier in Spanish class, when Juno first decided, reading a note from Bleeker, that someday she would have sex with him. That must have been some note.

Two pregnancy tests later, there she is in the convenience store staring at the third positive test, shaking it as if hoping for a different result. “That ain’t no Etch-a-Sketch — that’s one doodle that can’t be undid, homeskillet,” observes the smugly opprobrious clerk in a zinger typical of first-time screenwriter Diablo Cody’s immoderately quotable sensibility.

Without any real decision, Juno makes what is probably the only “choice” readily available to a girl with her socialization and background: She schedules an appointment to ”procure a hasty abortion.” (The same course of action is taken for granted by a friend who, in a show of support, offers to make the call for Juno, having done the same for another classmate.)

But a funny thing happens on the way to the clinic. Standing in the parking lot is a lone abortion protester — an ultra-shy, soft-spoken girl named Su‑Chin (Valerie Tian) whom, in a disarming twist, Juno knows from school.

“All babies want to get borned!” Su‑Chin timidly chants as Juno approaches. The girls make brief, awkward small talk about school — but then, as Juno turns to head into the clinic, Su‑Chin ventures to call after her with some salient pro-life facts: ”Your baby probably has a beating heart… it can feel pain… and it has fingernails!”

It’s that last detail that hooks Juno’s imagination: “Really? Fingernails?” She briefly considers this, then heads into the clinic. But Juno (who has earlier mentioned her proneness to involuntary intrusive thoughts in connection with other unseen bodily members) now finds that she is unable to stop thinking about fingernails. Combined with the off-putting seediness of the clinic, it’s too much for her, and soon she’s running out the door — much to the approval of Su‑Chin, not to mention (as Su‑Chin calls after her) God.

Although the shy, awkward Su‑Chin is far from the most compelling face for the pro-life movement, the film reinforces rather than undermines her basic stance, and her pleas regarding the fetus’s humanity play a key role in persuading Juno to not to go through with the abortion. In this cinematic year of the unborn child, Juno is perhaps the most striking and significant in its pro-life implications.

Her consciousness expanded, Juno is now able to contemplate the possibility of giving up her baby for adoption, and she sets out to find the perfect couple to raise her baby. She finds her candidates of choice in affluent, childless Mark and Vanessa Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner).

At this point there are certain scenes and developments we can see coming. Juno has to tell her father and stepmother (J. K. Simmons and Alison Janney) about the pregnancy. We’ll see her in school, at the mall and about town with her slowly swelling belly. Chances are she’ll break up with Bleeker and make up with him by the end (though they may or may not be dating).

Yet it’s right around this point that Juno, which has been clever and insightful, unexpectedly reveals hidden layers of complexity and depth.

A bit prim and subtly needy, Vanessa is a little taken aback by Juno’s casual flippancy, and it seems possible that Vanessa’s stuffiness could somehow queer the deal she wants so desperately. But Mark is more relaxed and personable, and if there are hints that he may not entirely share his wife’s eagerness for a child, he seems at least supportive, and his easy interaction with Juno smooths over any awkwardness between her and Vanessa.

But then, gradually, subtly, a very different picture begins to reveal itself. One individual’s peccadilloes come into sharper focus, slowly betraying significant character issues, while another character’s foibles recede in importance. And Juno, who at this point isn’t speaking to Bleeker, is blindsided by painful truths about maturity and commitment, and the gaping chasm between the way things ought to be and the way they are.

Juno’s blind spot, ironically, is a side effect of her own fundamentally sensible outlook, which in her inexperience and naivete she makes the mistake of taking for granted. Even sage words of caution from a sensible grownup fall on deaf ears; it’s a lesson the young can only learn by experience.

Ellen Page’s performance is the key to Juno’s journey, and she unerringly nuances her character’s blithe self-assuredness with just the right notes of uncertainty and innocence. Bateman and Garner do equally textured work as the very different spouses, while Simmons and especially Janney make Juno’s father and stepmother more interesting than they might have been.

Critic Peter Chattaway rightly notes that Juno empathizes with all of its characters, which is not to say that its sympathies are equally with all of them, and certainly not that it approves of or excuses all their choices. But while imperfect decisions by imperfect people lead to imperfect outcomes, the film doesn’t lose sight of the way things should be.

“I need to know that it’s possible for two people to stay happy together forever,” Juno says plaintively to her father in a key exchange. It’s a difficult moment, because Juno’s father is divorced and remarried. His answer isn’t all that profound, but Juno gets the message, and is almost surprised to learn that wiser isn’t always sadder. Here is a film of rare wisdom, one that knows that following your bliss is often another name for selfishness and immaturity, and the secret to lasting happiness is often a matter of taking what you have and deciding to make it work.

A brief sexual encounter (no explicit nudity); frequent crass language and sexual references; references to divorce and to remarriage.

Enchanted (2007)

Directed by Kevin Lima. Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey, James Marsden, Susan Sarandon, Rachel Covey. Disney.

By Suzanne E. Greydanus

My four-year-old daughter Anna would love the first 10 minutes or so of Enchanted, an over-the-top animated prologue with a fairy-tale princess named Giselle (Amy Adams) who is Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, the Little Mermaid and Snow White all rolled into one.

To Anna, this would play as straight fairy tale; she wouldn’t recognize the exaggerated sugary sweetness of this opening as a satire of fairy tales in general and the Disney canon in particular. Nor is she old enough to be disappointed that Prince Edward (James Marsden) turns out to be an arrogant, air-headed buffoon. (Hey, at least he has a name — unlike the princes in the original stories.)

When Prince Edward’s evil stepmother (Susan Sarandon) sends poor Giselle from cartoon fairy-land into live-action New York City for the rest of the movie, though, my preschool princess-to-be would become bored. Despite the opening, Enchanted is clearly aimed at tweens, not preschoolers.

Wide-eyed and innocent, Giselle is surprised and disappointed at how mean everyone is to her in the Big Apple. Fortunately, she is spotted by 6-year-old princess wanna-be Morgan (Rachel Covey), whose father Robert (Patrick Dempsey) reluctantly agrees to take the confused woman home to get her out of the rain.

It turns out that the preternatural goodness of fairy-tale princesses can turn to such real-world uses as using animal friends to help clean house (in NYC, means replacing cute woodland animals with pigeons and roaches), sewing clothes out of curtains — and patching up separating couples.

Meanwhile, Prince Edwards’ fairy-tale prince “skills” turn to stabbing at city buses with his sword, talking to TVs as “magic mirrors” and not even knowing that the kiss of true love is what is supposed to wake the princess from her mystical sleep.

Since my own princess wanna-be wasn’t at the theater with me, I did not have to explain to her what a “divorce lawyer” is, or what happened to the little girl’s mommy. Nor did I have to worry that she was wondering what the girlfriend (Idina Menzel) meant when she complains that she never gets to sleep over at the apartment because of the little girl.

Giselle, waiting for her true love to come rescue her, begins to have feelings for Robert. Why? Because he makes her angry for saying that Prince Edward won’t come. She finds this exciting. When her prince finally shows himself and bursts into song for her, she is no longer singing her part of the song.

Where is the real man here? Giselle’s rapport with Morgan and sweet naiveté are endearing; are we supposed to find Edward’s incompetence and arrogance equally so? Do our female hearts swoon when he checks his teeth in his sword, or boorishly flails it about at everything that moves? Why can’t the prince be an idealized example of chivalry, bravery, strength and honor, as Giselle is of sweetness and goodness?

And what of Robert? Divorced from his daughter’s mother, and with his current girlfriend less than satisfied with their relationship, why should he be considered Prince Charming? Giselle even orchestrates a romantic gesture to help Robert to show his love for Rachel, and poor Rachel is so starved for romance that by the end she is willing to take drastic measures.

In the end, all Giselle needs to be the ideal woman in the real world is a skin-tight dress (I liked the big puffy one better) and the discovery of dating. But the ideal man? Is there even such a thing? Prince Edward continues to be consumed with himself, and while I was sure that Robert would have eventually to do something really heroic in order to deserve Giselle’s love, in the end, alas, it is she who must save him. “I guess this makes you the damsel in distress,” quips the wicked stepmother, speaking to Robert.

Sigh. My youngest daughter, like her counterpart in this movie, is still unsophisticated enough to aspire to be the princess, and whatever ideas she may have about as-yet-unknown princes, I imagine she wouldn’t want them to be damsels in distress. I have no problem with princesses being empowered rather than passively waiting to be rescued, but that doesn’t have to mean un-heroing the prince.

Enchanted does have its charming points. We do enjoy Giselle. She’s untainted by cynicism and believes the best in people, and that’s refreshing. She is all things good — her taste in men aside — and people are drawn to her. And I loved the song-and-dance number in Central Park, where the street musicians and other New Yorkers join in the song.

The real problem with Enchanted’s distinctly unenchanting men is that they exist within a larger cultural context that continually assaults us with the joke of bumbling, arrogant, incompetent men. Cynical, you say? If that means critical of our culture’s ideas about manhood and heroism, I plead guilty.

I want my boys to aspire to greatness and nobility, and I want my girls to not just aspire to greatness themselves — that message our culture shouts at them loud and clear — but also to expect greatness in any man that dares to try to capture their heart.

I am enough of a believer in goodness to know this is possible. My family is blessed enough to have a hero for a father and a husband. I long to see real heroes depicted on the screen. Please, enchant me with a real man. Cynic? Call me the real wide-eyed romantic.

Mild innuendo and suggestive references; fairy-tale scariness.

The Golden Compass (2007)

Directed by Chris Weitz. Dakota Blue Richards, Nicole Kidman, Ben Walker, Ian McKellan, Eva Green, Jim Carter, Sam Elliott, Freddie Highmore, Daniel Craig. New Line Cinema.

From a National Catholic Register review

By Steven D. Greydanus

Christian writer and journalist Peter Hitchens, younger brother of anti-God apologist Christopher Hitchens and in many ways his ideological opposite, has alluded to a similar opposition between Christian writer C. S. Lewis and novelist Philip Pullman, “the anti-Lewis” as the younger Hitchens has called him.

The juxtaposition of Lewis and Pullman has become a familiar one. Both are Oxford-educated authors of fantasy stories about parallel worlds with magic, talking beasts and witches in wintry landscapes, in which religious ideas are not so much allegorized as imaginatively depicted. The Lion Aslan of Narnia, and the Authority of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, are not merely God-figures; they are each meant as fictionalized representations of the actual Judeo-Christian God. The great difference is that the Christian Lewis presents Aslan as all-powerful, benevolent, and triumphant over death and evil, while the atheist Pullman presents the Authority as a fraud, an emergent being falsely claiming to be the eternal creator of all, ultimately reduced to a frail, pitiful thing killed finally by accident.

Now, with the first volumes of both series having been released as motion picture adaptations, the parallels can be extended. From a Hollywood perspective, both Pullman and Lewis wrote stories in a genre lately popularized by Peter Jackson’s wildly successful The Lord of the Rings, but with controversial religious entanglements, inconveniently important to the core fan base, but potentially threatening the broad popular success of big-budget film adaptations. Consequently, the filmmakers have sought to downplay the religious and moral specificity of their respective source material, replacing them with safely generic appeals to values like “freedom.”

That’s not to say that writer–director Chris Weitz’s The Golden Compass quite negates the anti-Christian and specifically anti-Catholic impetus of its source material — any more than Andrew Adamson’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe quite negates its Christian roots. Still, as much as possible, Weitz keeps the focus on the spectacle and intricate plotting of Pullman’s tale, an imaginative blend of Victorian intrigue, high fantasy, Wellsian and modern sci‑fi, Western, and other influences set in an alternate world parallel to our own.

Shape-changing animal alter egos, armored polar bears, clockwork insect drones, seafaring gypsies, lighter-than-air ships and a mysterious elemental substance called Dust run through a densely scripted story in which a fearless young orphan named Lyra Belaqua (newcomer Dakota Blue Richards) acquires a truth-divining alethiometer, sets off on an epic journey with mysterious femme fatale Marisa Coulter (Nicole Kidman), and variously joins forces with disgraced ursine prince Iorek Byrnison (voiced by Ian McKellen), laconic Texas aeronaut Lee Scoresby (Sam Elliott), mysterious witch Serafina Pekkala (Eva Green) and freethinking scientist Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig) as she investigates the mysteries of a rash of vanished children and the sinister experiments carried out in a remote laboratory.

In this world, every human being is mystically bound to an intelligent animal “dæmon” (“pronounced DEE‑mon,” press materials note more than once, self-consciously ducking the obvious homophone), a physical manifestation of that person’s soul. In childhood, dæmons are fluid and morph constantly from one species to another, but at puberty, a stage fraught with significance in Pullman’s mythology, a person’s dæmon assumes a single, set shape, a phenomenon that may have something to do with the relationship between puberty and Dust.

Overarching all of this is the depraved caricature that the books call “the Church” or “the Magisterium,” but is referred to in the film solely by the latter, less familiar term, which many viewers won’t recognize as a real-world reference to the teaching authority of the Catholic Church. Obsessed with preserving “centuries of teaching” from the dangers of “heresy” and “freethinkers,” by deadly means if necessary, the film’s Magisterium is not just oppressive but essentially equivalent to the forces of darkness, akin to Tolkien’s Mordor or the Empire in Star Wars. I would almost call it satanic, except in Pullman’s universe Satan is a heroic rebel — though that point, along with Pullman’s direct polemic against God, isn’t broached in the first volume, or in this film.

Production design for the film’s Magisterium is for the most part only vaguely ecclesiastical, with a blend of Gothic and Baroque architecture and a suggestion rather than a real evocation of clerical vestments. In other scenes, ornamental chalices adorn a magisterial headquarters, and a magisterial coat of arms features a cross-like shape and a prominent “M,” presumably for Magisterium; John Paul II’s coat of arms also featured a cross and a less prominent “M,” for Mary. The most striking striking connection with real-world Christian aesthetics is the unmistakeably Byzantine iconography of saints painted on the exterior of a local clerical house — an iconostasis-like structure gratuitously shattered by Iorek Byrnison as he reclaims his stolen armor.

Like the word Church, references to popes and the papacy, bishops, and the Vatican have carefully been excised, though fleeting references to friars and priests remain. The film also dodges a key discussion from the book’s final chapters regarding original sin and Adam and Eve by wrapping up the story early and deferring the original finale to the planned sequel.

Even with this abbreviated storyline, there’s a lot of ground to cover — especially in under two hours, easily the shortest running time of any fantasy feature in recent memory. Considering the sprawling run times New Line allowed Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, as well as that trilogy’s groundbreaking back-to-back production arrangement, the slightness of The Golden Compass and the studio’s wait-and-see attitude regarding possible sequels seems to suggest doubt regarding the film’s reception.

Weitz brings a basic competence to the proceedings, treating his material with a fundamental respect that sometimes eluded Adamson’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. (There are no groan-inducing camp lines here like “Nice of you to drop by” or “Put that sword down; someone could get hurt.”) The cast is apt, especially Elliott as Scoresby and Green as Sarafina. As Mrs. Coulter, Kidman is suitably slinky and chilly, if a bit cartoony and bloodless, without the unnerving impact of Tilda Swinton’s White Witch. Special effects are well used, serving the needs of the film’s world and plot without getting in the way; a couple of ambitious action sequences in the second half are spectacularly staged.

Yet as the film rushes to cover key events and plot points, neophytes may be left in the dust for lack of narrative connections and clarifications, while Pullman admirers of all stripes may feel short-changed on mood and atmosphere. Being casually but not intimately familiar with Pullman’s world, I may have fared better than most, supplying much of what was missing without feeling its absence too acutely. On the whole, I found Lyra’s world more interesting than anything that happened in it, or for that matter than Lyra herself.

For better and worse, the movie resembles its protagonist: quick but reserved, agreeable but nondescript, competent but less than engaging. On the plus side, Lyra is plucky and formidable, with the makings of a much better heroine than the Narnia film’s lame, self-doubting Peter Pevensie was a hero. On the down side, as critic Jeff Overstreet aptly observes, Lyra falls well short of the winsome charm of Georgie Henley’s Lucy Pevensie.

If anything, Lyra is too plucky, to the point that it stops making sense. On a number of occasions, menaced by some overwhelming deadly force that ought to check even the bravest hero, Lyra defies her enemies, as if she has some ace up her sleeve. She doesn’t — but that doesn’t stop some ally from appearing out of nowhere and saving her at the last moment. These deus ex machina appearances don’t work, either because the ally’s sudden appearance can’t be explained at all, or else because help could have come at any time rather than conveniently delaying till the last possible moment.

All in all, without entirely drawing one in, the material works well enough on its own terms — in part because its source, the first of Pullman’s trilogy, is possibly the best written and least problematic of the three, and certainly the least didactic and overtly anti-religious. And therein lies the problem.

Viewed in isolation, in terms of what is actually on the screen, The Golden Compass is nothing like as objectionable as, say, Elizabeth: The Golden Age or The Da Vinci Code. But of course the film doesn’t exist in a vacuum. One can no more consider it purely in isolation than one could ignore the source of, say, a quasi-sanitized adaptation of The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. Or, to cite an actual film, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation significantly toned down the racism of its source material, Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansmen, but it still helped to promote the novel’s white-supremacist milieu, substantially contributing to the resurgent 20th-century Ku Klux Klan.

The critic, as a critic, can only evaluate the film as a film. Yet no responsible, thinking adult can ignore the larger cultural context to which a film belongs. Weitz’s The Golden Compass is now a pivotal property in a franchise that includes the three novels to date, the future films that may (depending on this film’s performance) be made, and the additional novels that Pullman plans to write, exposure and sales of which would inevitably benefit from this and any future films, if successful. This also, not just the images on the screen, is part of the reality of the film.

In marked contrast to the Narnia filmmakers, who have never been anything but evasive and squirrelly when it comes to Lewis’s religious themes, Weitz is vocally committed in any movie sequels to a greater level of fidelity to Pullman’s message and themes. The comparative coyness of this first film, Weitz has said, is a strategic necessity; once the franchise is established, future films will mirror the books themselves in becoming more explicit and overt. If only the Narnia filmmakers showed anything like a similar interest and respect for Lewis’s religious themes, either in person or onscreen.

It’s some comfort that although Weitz’s film is entertaining enough, like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe before it The Golden Compass doesn’t remotely approach the brilliance of New Line’s first big fantasy hit, The Lord of the Rings — the first and still the only cinematic high fantasy of the first order. The Lord of the Rings continues to stand alone; with every fantasy or medieval epic to come along in its wake, the singular distinction and achievement of Jackson and his collaborators stands out more starkly than ever.

Anti-religious themes; intense action violence; fantasy presentation of witches; references to a character’s out-of-wedlock parentage.

Bella (2006)

Directed by Alejandro Gomez Monteverde. Eduardo Verástegui, Tammy Blanchard, Manny Perez, Ali Landry, Angélica Aragón, Jaime Tirelli, Ramon Rodriguez. Roadside/Metanoia.

From a National Catholic Register review

By Steven D. Greydanus

“Put yourself in my shoes.” So says Nina, without enough hope to call it pleading, in a key scene in Bella.

One of the winsome things about Bella, Alejandro Gomez Monteverde’s intimate, appealing feature debut, is that it listens to Nina instead of preaching — to her or to us.

Nina (Tammy Blanchard) works as a waitress with José (Eduardo Verastegui), the line chef, whose brother Manny (Manny Perez) owns the restaurant. Nina is in trouble, of a sort that many movies would be very vocal about what should happen — and why viewers who think otherwise are bad people.

José’s views aren’t hard to guess, but Nina doesn’t ask him for advice, and he offers none. Instead, he offers her what she really needs: understanding, compassion, support, and ultimately something much more.

Bolstered by engaging performances and an appealing Latin milieu, Bella tells a simple, idealistic story with considerable style and charm. Shot in just three weeks in New York City, the film unfolds largely over the course of a single day, interspersed with glimpses of past and future events in a way that allows viewers to discover for themselves the relationships between persons and events.

For instance, an early shot shows a bearded man sitting alone on a beach watching a young girl playing alone. Passers‑by observe the scene with concern, and the viewer may feel some apprehension. Later, though, the scene appears in a different light.

Bella opens and closes with scenes set at the seashore, with one other notable scene in the middle on the beach. The sea, incalculable and eternal, surrounds the city in which the story is set, unseen for the most part, but never entirely absent. A popular proverb, quoted in the opening moments of the film, sets the stage: “My grandmother always said, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”

José was once a rising star with the Real Madrid soccer club before his budding career took an unexpected turn. Nina, already struggling at work, discovers that she is faced with an unwanted pregnancy. When she arrives at work, Manny fires her for being late one too many times (and because he attributes previous performance problems to being hung over rather than to morning sickness).

When Nina — standing in a subway, speaking through steel bars like a prisoner — begins to open up to José, the solicitude with which he responds suggests an obvious explanation. Later, further revelations invite us to reevaluate the nature of his concern and support.

José and Nina are each, in their own way, damaged goods. Although José is ultra-simpatico, a dark side comes through occasionally, as when he deliberately holds his hand to the flame over the restaurant kitchen stove. The scruffy beard obscuring Verastegui’s heartthrob looks (the actor started in telenovelas, Mexican soap operas) is likewise a sort of stigma, a literal self-effacement related to a flashback in which his whole head is shaved. In another scene José inadvertently steps off a sidewalk into the path of an oncoming car. He’s distracted and upset, but not only by the events of the moment.

The screenplay, despite some missteps, is attentive to the realities of its characters’ lives. Autographing a battered old ball for young fans, rising star José takes the time to ask them where they play. In the street? What about cars? A bit later, when Nina goes to the drugstore to pick up a pregnancy test, she finds herself at the cash register without enough money to pay for it, and has to plead with the cashier to trust her to bring the money later.

Verastegui, last seen in Chasing Papi, has charisma and presence as the one-time soccer star. With his out-of-control beard, he oddly resembles Jim Caviezel’s Jesus. Blanchard shines in the most difficult role, vulnerable, winsome, bitter, wounded. Her monologue on the beach could have been distractingly talky, but the strength of her performance makes the scene a standout. Under Monteverde’s direction, some of the best moments are wordless, notably a wrenching point-of-view shot with a camera turned sideways, a low-key scene involving jostling elbows at a breakfast table and a luminously playful shot toward the very end.

Bella is at least the third film this year about a young woman dealing with an unexpected or unwanted pregnancy — and the second independent film about an unhappily pregnant waitress, after Adrienne Shelly’s problematic but heartfelt Waitress. (The same theme was also the premise for the raunchy comedy Knocked Up.)

Intriguingly, while none of these films is a polemic against abortion (although in Waitress Keri Russell does affirm her unborn baby’s “right to thrive”), to one degree or another a life-affirming or pro-life sensibility runs through each of them, even Knocked Up.

In fact, National Post columnist Chris Knight wrote a grumpy column complaining that abortion wasn’t more seriously considered in the two earlier films. Will Knight be more appeased by Bella, in which the prospect of abortion is considered at greater length? Or is does he really want to see movies with characters that make one particular choice?

Like the earlier films, Bella is not about the pro-life and pro-abortion “positions,” movements or causes, nor does it address the question of laws permitting or outlawing abortion. It is a drama about specific characters, relationships, events and decisions; broader issues are present only implicitly. José is Catholic, and his family, highlighted in a delightful domestic sequence, seems to take their faith seriously. José is clearly troubled by Nina’s decision — but he shows his commitment to life not in word, but in touching and heroic deed.

From a pro-choice perspective, Nina has all the reasons in the world to want an abortion. She rattles off a litany of them to José over lunch. They are understandable reasons. Over against this, Bella ultimately interposes, not more words or arguments, but a moment of revelation — a transcendent affirmation of life in its incalculable value.

In the end, Bella has something to challenge everyone, pro-life or otherwise. For pro-lifers, the inspiring ending represents a call to love of neighbor. It isn’t enough just to oppose abortion: We are called to love those in need with the love of Christ, potentially at a cost to ourselves. For those who favor abortion, the ending represents a challenge to recognize that life is a beautiful and precious gift even in far from ideal circumstances, and the choice to embrace life, even when it involves great sacrifice, is also beautiful.

References to out-of-wedlock pregnancy and abortion; brief disturbing images; brief crass language.

Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

Directed by Craig Gillespie. Ryan Gosling, Patricia Clarkson, Emily Mortimer, Kelli Garner, Paul Schneider. MGM.

By Steven D. Greydanus

Lars Lindstrom goes through life doing his utmost not to. Every day he negotiates his world as an obstacle course, and the obstacles are other people. The awkwardness of proximity that many people feel in a crowded elevator as they avoid eye contact with strangers and put conversations on hold is how Lars feels with anybody, anywhere. You could say he is socially maladjusted, except I’m not sure he could be called anything with “socially” in it.

Lars (Ryan Gosling, The Notebook) and his older brother Gus (Paul Schneider, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) have both moved back home to their small Midwestern hometown following the death of their father. Gus and his wife Karin (Emily Mortimer, Match Point, Dear Frankie), who is pregnant, live in the family homestead; Lars lives in the garage apartment. The car, alas, is parked in the driveway outside, which means that Lars’s first challenge of the day is getting from the garage to the car without being ambushed in the driveway by Karin with an invitation to breakfast or supper.

As many brothers would, Gus is willing to give Lars the space to live how he wants, whether it is good for him or not. Karin, like many good-hearted women who know better than other people, isn’t willing to leave well enough alone.

It’s shocking enough when Lars unexpectedly shows up on the doorstep, of his own free will, neatly dressed and groomed. Then comes the real shocker: Lars announces that he’s met a girl. Gus and Karen are delighted by the news, and aren’t fazed when Lars explains that they met on the Internet, and that Bianca doesn’t speak much English. Oh yes, and she’s in a wheelchair.

Then Lars brings Bianca to dinner. Okay, so we hadn’t actually gotten to the real shocker yet.

It turns out that Bianca is made of plastic. She’s a lifesize doll, and while her manufacture and marketing are clearly aimed at consumers with prurient intent, Lars is interested in Bianca for other reasons entirely. Lars’s social pathology has morphed into full-fledged delusion: In his mind, Bianca is a real person. If you’re weirded out at this point, just think how Gus and Karin feel.

This might sound like the setup for another in Hollywood’s new wave of grossout/heartfelt sentimental sex comedies (“the Crude Romanticism,” to borrow a conceit from critic Stephen Whitty) like Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which use raunch in part to ward off mawkishness as they go for the idealistic happy ending.

Yet somehow Lars and the Real Girl manages to be — yes — sweet and sincere without ever tipping over either into saccharine schmaltz on the one hand or grossout territory on the other. It’s a remarkable balancing act, and director Craig Gillespie and his collaborators, including the uniformly excellent cast, pull it off with grace and economy. Gosling in particular triumphs in a very difficult role; one can easily imagine his character in a very slightly different film as the butt of the filmmakers’ contempt.

Although Lars himself unpacked Bianca from the box she arrived in, his mind has begun to elide reality so as to maintain the illusion that she is a real woman. After cutting up Bianca’s food at dinner, Lars simply doesn’t notice that he is the one who eats it. Even when Gus, stunned by the unexpected new low to which his brother has sunk, tries to confront him with the facts, Lars has no ears to hear. Karin, equally taken aback by Lars’s behavior, struggles to understand and wonders how he can be helped.

Gus and Karin take Lars — and Bianca — to see the local doctor, Dagmar (Patricia Clarkson, Pieces of April), a general practitioner who says she is also a psychologist “because when you’re that far north you have to be.” Ascertaining that Lars is functional, not violent, not schizophrenic, Dagmar recommends that Gus and Karin do the only thing they can in any case: Allow Lars his delusion, go along with it for now, until such time as he doesn’t need it any more and is ready to give it up. Dagmar also comes up with a clever subterfuge for continuing to see Lars and Bianca without acknowledging to Lars that he, not Bianca, is the patient.

In this scenario is a remarkable blend of compassion and understanding with a kind of moral realism and practical concern. Lars may feel that Bianca is a fit partner for him, but the film knows that she isn’t, whatever he thinks. There is a reason the film is called Lars and the Real Girl. Bianca may be a Real Doll™, but she isn’t a real girl. There is a real girl in the film, a coworker at Lars’s office named Margo, who as played by Kelli Garner (The Aviator) is the only girl imaginable who is both winsome and interested in Lars. For now, though, Bianca is as real a girl as Lars can handle.

Margo and a male coworker named Kurt (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) are engaged in an ongoing feud over workplace toys; she swipes his action figures, he menaces her teddy bear. The icons of childhood, like a snatch of 1 Corinthians 13 overheard at Lars’s Lutheran church (“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things”), reinforce the theme of maturity and immaturity.

Lars’s issue, like Kurt’s Internet porn habit, is rooted in a form of affective immaturity, one unprepared for the mutuality of a real relationship with a real woman. (The same symptom crops up in the half-joking remarks of some of local men, one of whom cites Bianca's inability to speak as a desirable quality in a woman.)

Bianca is as real to Lars as a teddy bear to a three-year-old. But what is a normal, healthy part of a three-year-old’s social development in a grown man is a pathological dysfunction. A three-year-old with a teddy bear is practicing social interactions with a “safe” partner whose reactions are never unexpected or inscrutable. Even when three-year-olds play together, it can easily happen that there is no real shared game, and each unknowingly plays an illusory role in the other’s imagination — though here an unfortunate word or act may ruin either game or both.

Even among adolescents or adults, I think many of us have had the uncomfortable sense of talking to people who seem to be acting out a drama in which we may or may not be assigned roles, but in any case are not free to be ourselves. In such scenarios, of course, we may refuse to play — may insist on being taken on our own terms or not at all. Bianca cannot. That, of course, is why Biancas, like pornography, exist. In Lars’s case, he doesn’t want Bianca for her body, but the principle is the same. (A churchgoing Lutheran, Lars insists that Bianca sleep in the spare bedroom in the house, to avoid any appearance of impropriety.)

Lars isn’t sure what maturity is, but he suspects he hasn’t gotten there yet. “How’d you know you were a man?” he asks his older brother, almost shyly. Gus stumbles, hemming and hawing for awhile, before coming up with a pretty good answer: Being a man means doing right even when it hurts; not cheating on your woman; admitting when you’re wrong.

Gus and Karin — and eventually the whole community — come to accept Lars’s relationship with Bianca, or rather to accept Lars’s condition and Bianca’s place in it. However, the unexpected ways in which this plays out wind up challenging rather than enabling Lars’s brittle shadow play. As time goes by, like it or not, Lars begins to experience a semblance of the truth that a relationship means that everything isn’t always about you.

Only Gus balks at the prospect of going along with Lars’s delusion. “Everyone is going to laugh at him,” he protests.

“And at you,” Dagmar nods judiciously. This is good psychology and good character development, though the prediction never comes to pass. Despite a few tense moments where it looks like Lars may be in for a hard time, pretty much everyone is nothing but supportive. I don’t know what town Lars is supposed to live in, but it’s got to be the most warm-hearted community on the planet. I’m not sure the film couldn’t have benefited from a scene in which Lars had to endure at least a little cruelty.

On the plus side, the film’s warmhearted humanism extends to everyone. Gus bears the burden of the audience’s skepticism for the whole business, but he’s a decent guy, and his struggles with big-brother guilt past and present are sympathetically depicted; you can see what Karin sees in him. Incidentally, Karin is pregnant through the whole film; there’s no build‑up to a big childbirth scene. Her pregnancy is simply part of married life and love — part of a real relationship between two real warm-blooded human beings.

Almost incredibly, the theme of religiosity isn’t played for cheap laughs. The members of Lars’s Lutheran church struggle with how to respond to his issues but eventually recognize in his foibles a mirror of their own. Apart from a single scene in the church in which the pretense of Bianca’s reality really is taken too far (though only to absurdity, not sacrilege), the film almost never missteps.

Lars and the Real Girl has been compared to the popular 1950 film Harvey starring Jimmy Stewart, which I am among the minority in disliking, in part because Harvey, unlike Lars, doesn’t ask its protagonist to change. Gosling, in a New York press event, mentioned The Velveteen Rabbit as another touchstone, prompting me to observe that The Velveteen Rabbit was about how a boy who loved a toy helped it to become Real, while Lars and the Real Girl was about how a toy helped a boy who loved it to become Real.

In reality, though, it isn’t Bianca that helps Lars. What makes Lars real, like the Velveteen Rabbit, is love — not Bianca’s love, for she has none, nor Lars’s love for her, but the love of others for Lars.

Some innuendo and sexually related comments, including references to pornography and oblique references the use of sex dolls; a couple of profanities; an inappropriate mock event held in a church (not a simulated sacrament).

Things We Lost in the Fire (2007)

Directed by Susanne Bier. Halle Berry, Benicio Del Toro, David Duchovny, Alexis Llewellyn, Micah Berry, John Carroll Lynch, Alison Lohman. DreamWorks.

A Christianity Today Movies review

By Steven D. Greydanus

My brother-in-law died this year. His name was David, and he wasn’t far in age from David Duchovny, whose character Brian is killed in Things We Lost in the Fire. Like Brian in the film, David’s death was both unexpected and sudden — there was no chance for goodbyes. Brian’s wife Audrey is played by Halle Berry, who is close in age to my wife Suzanne, David’s younger sister — who happens to have the same name as the film’s director, Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier.

I can’t really imagine what it would have been like to watch Things We Lost in the Fire last year, or the year before. It’s one thing to bury a grandparent or even a parent. An immediate family member of one’s own stage in life — one young to die — is very different.

Death puts life in perspective. Brian’s death is unrelated to the titular fire; the fire occurs years before the events depicted in the film. The point of the title is that the things that were lost in the fire — which to Audrey seemed at the time so important — were just things. “We still have each other,” she remembers Brian reminding her even then (I keep starting to type David). Yes, they did, until they didn’t. It’s strange how that happens.

Death is not a single traumatic event. Like a wedding, it is a thousand mundane tasks. There are distant family members, long-neglected friends, acquaintances and business partners to be notified; arrangements to be made, flowers to be ordered, a large gathering to be prepared for; and always all the minutiae of ordinary life to be attended to.

Email and voicemail continues to trickle in from people who haven’t heard, like an old college buddy of Steven’s who writes on the day of the funeral to chat about the Sonics’ new power forward. “What did he think of him?” Audrey asks her brother Neal (Omar Benson Miller), who sits at Steven’s computer. Good rebounder, Neal replies slowly, somewhat abashed by the triviality of the subject. Outside jump needed work. “Well then, write that,” Audrey decides.

Even when you think everyone has been told, there’s always someone else. Just before the funeral Audrey remembers someone who must be notified right away—someone with no phone, who must be told in person, and if he wishes brought to the funeral.

This would be Jerry (Benicio Del Toro), Steven’s friend since second grade. In the film’s somewhat nonlinear storytelling, we meet Jerry at the post-funeral gathering first, and only later see him first receiving the news of Steven’s death. Jerry drags nervously on a cigarette, and has another tucked behind his ear like a pencil. Only later is it clear the extent to which the cigarettes are less a vice than a lifeline.

“I hated you for so many years,” Audrey confesses to Jerry. “Now it seems so silly.”

The missing bit of information that connects all these dots is that Jerry, a one-time lawyer, is a heroin addict living on skid row. For years, Steven was Jerry’s only connection to his former life. To Audrey’s chagrin, Steven makes regular visits to Jerry’s skid row apartment, on one occasion tearing himself away from a very amorous moment with his wife to make a birthday visit to Jerry—which, when your wife looks like Halle Berry, says a lot about you as a friend.

Other than Steven, Jerry doesn’t want to see anyone until he’s clean—a goal to which he vaguely aspires, though there is currently no action in that direction, no progress toward that goal. Someday, perhaps, he will be ready. But life doesn’t always wait for you to decide to be ready. One day there is a knock at the door, and there is Audrey’s brother Neal telling Jerry that Steven is dead. He has to say it a number of times; people don’t always take in something of that magnitude when you say it once. Ready or not, Jerry must decide then and there which way to go.

For Audrey, Jerry is both a tenuous link to her missing husband and also the one wall between them. C. S. Lewis once noted that when a friend died, Lewis himself lost not only the friend but also something in other mutual friends that only the lost friend brought out. By reaching out to Jerry, Audrey seeks to connect with a part of her husband that she never entirely understood and was never reconciled to.

At the same time, Audrey can’t figure out whether she wants to be David for Jerry, or Jerry to be David for her. Certainly having Jerry around is good for the kids, six-year-old Dory (Micah Berry) and nine-year-old Harper (Alexis Llewellyn), whom Jerry knows by osmosis even before they meet. To the children as well as to Audrey, Jerry represents that part of Steven which he knew; but then comes a moment when Jerry fleetingly outdoes the departed, which is more than Audrey can bear.

The emotional territory is similar to Bier’s Danish-language film Brothers, in which a responsible family man is struck down, leaving a prodigal brother to do his best to step up to the plate and try to offer the hurting family whatever consolation and support he can. In both films, the black-sheep character is at least partly a surrogate for the fallen man, and the issue of emotional entanglements between the wife and the other man is at least raised, though fortunately Bier seems to be more interested in tense emotional ambiguities than in simplistic payoffs.

Both films also subject a male protagonist to a grueling trial by fire and failure before ultimately ending on a note of hope and redemption. The theme of decency, of doing the right thing, figures prominently in both films.

Things We Lost lacks some of the nuance of Brothers. Where the earlier film substantially cross-examined the family man’s uprightness, essentially reversing the brothers’ roles, in Things We Lost Steven is nearly flawless—a devoted husband and father, a loyal friend, an outstanding provider, even dying a hero’s death.

The dialogue is sometimes too explicit and on the nose, not trusting viewers to make connections on their own. In the opening lines, Steven uses the word “fluorescent,” which he explains to his six-year-old son Dory means “lit from within.” Not content with that, the screenplay has Dory ask brightly, “Am I fluorescent?” so that his daddy can assure him that, yes, he is.

Other details and moments are sharply observed: Dory’s nightmares, in which Daddy is the monster; Jerry late at night rifling through his meager belongings hoping against hope for a forgotten stash; a hilariously blunt exchange between Jerry and a neighbor over personal issues and furniture. Though not always faithful in small things, Things We Lost is faithful in much. The individual moments are sometimes off, but the large emotional resonances are right.

While there’s not a bad performance in the film, the clear standout is Del Toro, who transcends the tics and mannerisms of a junkie to play a fully felt character with a problem rather than simply playing the problem. Berry persuasively reconciles her character’s conflicting moods and reactions; Alison Lohman makes an impression in a supporting role as a member of Jerry’s NA group. Bier’s directorial style, which includes handheld cameras and intimate closeups sometimes framing a single eye, draws us into a film that is more about how grief, loss and relationships feel than what happens next.

Depictions of long-term drug abuse, including a character in a state of severe heroin intoxication, and a prolonged sequence depicting slow, painful withdrawal symptoms; recurring sexual and non-sexual obscenity; a whispered profanity; an instance of playful marital eroticism (nothing explicit); a somewhat charged but ultimately non-sexual bedroom scene.

The Ten Commandments (2007)

Directed by Bill Boyce and John Stronach. Christian Slater, Alfred Molina, Elliott Gould, Christopher Gaze, Kathleen Barr. Narrator: Ben Kingsley. Promenade.

By Steven D. Greydanus

The best that can be said for The Ten Commandments, the first in a projected series of CGI animated adaptations of Bible stories from fledgling Christian production house Promenade Films, is that it (a) sticks closer to the biblical narrative than DreamWorks’ classic The Prince of Egypt, and (b) tells more of the story. If only the worst that could be said about it were in regard to the stiff, unappealing animation.

The film’s problems start with the screenplay by Ed Naha (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids), beginning with its derivative, uninspired take on the story. Although less speculative and less freely adapted than the earlier film, The Ten Commandments shamelessly rips off interpretive conceits and even specific dramatic beats from The Prince of Egypt, from the menacing of Moses’ basket by a passing croc to the foundering of Ramses’ chariot on the shores of the Red Sea, allowing him to live to see the destruction of his army and the escape of the Hebrews.

The Ten Commandments also borrows freely from the 1956 DeMille film of the same name starring Charlton Heston, such as casting a minor biblical figure named Dathan (here Lee Tockar; Edward G. Robinson in DeMille) as the ringleader in the Israelites’ doubts and grumblings, and especially in the golden calf incident. (The character design of Dathan even owes something to Robinson.) Stealing from DeMille, though, seems less egregious than stealing from The Prince of Egypt, in part because DeMille is less accessible and less familiar to the young target audience than the deservedly well-known DreamWorks film.

A title-credits sequence, animated as a series of moving tapestry embroiderings in a device directely indebted to The Prince of Egypt’s brilliant hieroglyphics dream sequence, establishes Moses’ and young Ramses’ relationship as one of fraternal competitive rivalry.

The story proper opens with a wrestling match that ends in the toppling and breaking of some monument or other, much like the opening chariot race in The Prince of Egypt that results in the breaking of the Sphinx’s nose and a huge mess of sand in the new temple. Cut to Pharaoh scolding his two wayward sons, particularly singling out Ramses (Alfred Molina, Spider‑Man 2, The Da Vinci Code) as the heir apparent for his lack of responsible behavior. Cut to Ramses grousing at Moses (Christian Slater) for always getting him in trouble. Are they kidding?

Where The Ten Commandments most clearly distinguishes itself from its predecessor is where the latter leaves off, after the parting of the Red Sea. The Prince of Egypt gave us only a brief glimpse of Moses the lawgiver descending Sinai with the stone tablets under his arm. The Ten Commandments offers the rest of the story: the wandering (and grumbling) of the Hebrews in the wilderness, water from the rock, manna and quail, the giving of the law, the golden calf, the ark and the tabernacle; even Moses’ death and the Hebrews’ entry into the Promised Land under Joshua. Even the 3½‑hour DeMille version didn’t get all that in.

First, though, it’s a long slog through material that was better told, and vastly better animated, in the DreamWorks film. There are nice touches here and there, though, such as the uneasy reluctance on an Egyptian soldier’s face during the slaughter of the innocents as a Hebrew woman clutches at his leg in a vain effort to save her baby. And elements altered in the DreamWorks retelling, like the feminist heightening of the roles of Tzipporah and Miriam relative to Aaron, are closer to the original text here. The murder of the Egyptian is softened with a self-defense angle, but is still closer to the biblical story.

Where The Prince of Egypt went out of its way to humanize Pharaohs Seti and Rameses, The Ten Commandments takes a more conventional, less nuanced approach, casting them as unsympathetic antagonists and ultimately villains. More gratingly, the grumbling of the Hebrews in the wilderness against Moses and God is depicted with morality-play simplicity rather than psychological texture (which is a bit jarring, given the pillar of smoke plainly visible not far ahead and the parting of the Red Sea only minutes earlier).

Among the nicer touches are the visualization of the water from the rock and the shadows of the approaching quail. Catholics may note that the round, white manna has a distinctly host-like appearance — a resonance that was probably unintended in a film that (like the DeMille version) gives the traditional Protestant enumeration of the commandments, with two on idolatry and one on coveting rather than the other way around. (“Coveting,” incidentally, is given the kid-friendly rendering “want what belongs to someone else,” and “bear false witness” is simply “lie,” but “adultery” is left unexplained. Also, rather than the traditional division of tablets, with commandments relating to love of God on the first and those relating to love of neighbor on the second, this one simply puts five on each tablet.)

The voicework is a mixed bag. Easily the best thing in the film is Molina as Ramses, followed by Ben Kingsley (Moses in the TNT TV version!) as the semi-superfluous narrator. Most glaringly wrong is Slater, whose Moses lacks authority and gravitas; he should have traded places with Christopher Gaze, who has far more presence as Aaron. As the voice of God, Elliott Gould comes off sounding more like a Vulcan than the Almighty, composed and reasonable, but lacking both warmth and transcendence.

The animation is serviceable at best, which is more a limitation than a fault. Production values don’t necessarily count against a low-budget film. They just don’t count for it either. Somewhere or other you need to achieve something special, in the story if not the visuals. The Ten Commandments doesn’t get there.

Mild Exodus imagery depicting the plagues, the drowning of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea, etc.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)

Directed by Shekhar Kapur. Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Clive Owen, Abbie Cornish, Samantha Morton, Jordi Mollà.

From a National Catholic Register review

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