Films About Faith That Are Actually Good

There have been quite a few "faith" oriented films to come out this year, including the excellent Noah but also quite a few terrible Christian films: God's Not Dead, Heaven is For Real, Mom's Night Out, Son of God. And coming this fall: Left Behind, Nicolas Cage style. Thankfully there have been several really excellent "secular" films that have either directly or indirectly explored Christianity, God, faith and morality, and I've had the pleasure of reviewing several of them for Christianity Today:

Locke (dir. Steven Knight): Full review. Excerpt:

As the film progresses we realize, as Locke does, that as much as we desire full control, there will always be things outside of our power. Men want to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They want to earn it. But sometimes being a man means embracing one's limits, humbling yourself, and accepting the reality of a higher sovereignty.

The best moments in Locke are the brief glimpses we get of the man's vulnerability. They are few and far between, but thanks to the film's close-up camerawork and Hardy's astonishing performance, we can't miss them. They reminded me of epiphanies in other films where the "I've got it all under control" man comes to a humble awareness of his own limitation: the final moments of All is Lost; the "I wanted to be loved because I'm great" moment in The Tree of Life when Brad Pitt concludes, "I'm nothing."

These are moments of grace. They are moments when the reality becomes clear that "self-made" can only go so far, that we can never truly survive on our own, and that that's a good thing. We need grace. And while grace cannot be earned and must accepted from a humble posture, grace is not opposed to effort, as Dallas Willard says. 

The Immigrant (dir. James Gray). Full review. Excerpt:

When Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix) gets arrested and briefly jailed midway through the film, one of his other prostitutes laments to Ewa that "we are nothing without him." Ewa (Marion Cotillard) emphatically replies, "I am not nothing." Even the most depraved and lowly creatures have dignity, Ewa's faith leads her to believe, and she sees this in people even when they themselves do not. When Bruno is at his lowest moment and says "I'm nothing," Ewa repeats her earlier comment, but this time to him: "You are not nothing."

Both Emil (Jeremy Renner) and (in the film's closing moments) Bruno appear at times to be Christ figures of sorts. Yet it is Ewa herself who ultimately presents the film's best picture of Christ-like love and sacrifice. Everything she does in the film is not for herself, but for the sake of her sister. She lays aside her innocence and opens herself to the profoundest humiliation, so as to liberate her imprisoned sister. It's an imperfect parallel to be sure, but Ewa's journey reminds me a bit of what Paul says of Christ in Galatians 5:21: "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us."

Christ, of course, went further. Unlike Ewa, who grasps on to her belief that "I am not nothing," Christ relinquished all claim to pride and status (Philippians 2:6-8) and became "nothing" on a cross, for our sake. God vindicated Christ's humility by exalting him to the highest place (Philippians 2:9-11).

Other recent films I recommend that deal with matters of faith, God, and morality: Ida (dir. Pawel Pawlikowski) and Night Moves (dir. Kelley Reichardt).

The Roman Road and The Tree of Life

I grew in Oklahoma and Kansas, in a very conservative Baptist church culture. My family went to church twice on Sunday and at least once during the week. As a kid I was heavily involved in Sunday School and Bible clubs, memorizing scripture for various rewards: stickers, medals and recognition.

One thing that was ingrained into my Bible memory from an early age was something called “the Roman Road.” The Roman Road, as I understood it, was a series of 6 or 7 Bible verses from Romans--though I think John 3:16 was also in the mix--that collectively spelled out exactly what individuals like me needed to do to get saved.

As a kid I knew the Roman Road well—I had it down pat—but I had no concept at all about what a “Roman road” actually was or how it played into the historical narrative of the world in which Jesus lived. I had no idea that “Romans” was actually a letter written by Paul to actual early Christians in an actual city called Rome.

The Roman Road I knew was about decontextualized concepts packaged for an individualistic purpose, not enfleshed reality within a big picture story. Christianity was about feelings and morals and me escaping hell. The phrase “moralistic therapeutic deism,” coined by sociologist Christian Smith to describe the faith of today’s American teenagers, was a pretty accurate description of my youth group upbringing.

It wasn’t until years later that I had any idea that the broader story of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation and everything in between, was indispensable to my understanding of God … and that the most important thing about the Bible was not my individual salvation, but rather the bigger story of God’s redemptive purposes in the world.

Fast forward to January of this year: My wife and I were in Rome as part of a two week trip to Italy. It was amazing. We were walking among ruins of buildings that stood in Jesus’ day. We saw structures that Paul saw, the prison where Peter was held, the location where Paul may or may not be buried; we learned about the actual Roman Roads that were a key part of the infrastructure of the Roman empire which aided in Christianity’s fast growth.

All of it was real; tangible; a reminder that the Bible shouldn’t be read as just isolated ideas and ethereal concepts, but a tangible narrative that actually happened, in actual locations, with actual people whose stories are part of a continuum in which I am a part.

Going to the Vatican Museum was also powerful: Seeing the entire history of Christianity told through art, culminating in Michelangelo's breathtaking Sistine Chapel roof. Then walking through St. Peter’s Basilica, built on the site of the Circus of Nero, historically believed to be where Peter was martyred. It was all a reminder of the grand drama of history that surrounds and gives meaning to the theology behind our faith.

Walt Russell, a New Testament professor of mine at Talbot School of Theology, likes to say that western Christianity often erroneously reads the narrative of Scripture through a vertical framework: It’s about us as individuals, and God above, and how we can “get right” with him through the atoning work of Jesus.

The way Scripture ought to be read, says Russell, is not primarily vertically but rather horizontally, as one big narrative that begins in Eden, builds through Israel, climaxes with Christ, includes the church and moves forward until Christ returns.

Yes, our individual stories matter, but mostly because they are subplots and microcosms of the BIG story God is telling. Each of our lives can be a reflection of the redemptive story God authors on a massive scale. Each is a compelling chapter in the epic of creation.

A movie that I think illustrates this well is Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life.

Malick's film is essentially about the birth and death of the universe, with an intimate story of a Texas family in between. It’s a powerful juxtaposition of the micro and macro… a “small s” story of the O’Brien family’s struggles with grief, love, sin and redemption, set against the “Big S” backdrop of God’s handiwork in the cosmos. One minute the film shows us the intimate moments of a mother grieving the loss of her son; the next minute we’re taken on a 20 minute tour of the creation of the universe.

The elliptical structure of the Tree of Life reflects its title, which is a nod to a biblical image--the “tree of life” that appears both in Genesis (in the Garden of Eden) and in Revelation 22 with Eden restored in the new creation.

All of our stories, like that of the O’Brien family in The Tree of Life, take place between these two trees: Paradise lost and paradise regained. All of our stories groan for restoration, for a return to the garden.

This unsettledness and in-betweenness fuels our desire to make art and tell stories, to express the the longings of life between the two trees.

Story is an incredibly powerful force in our world. It’s our DNA as human beings. It’s realm Christians must exist within, and be excellent within. And yet I’d suggest that the trajectory our culture is on when it comes to story is something we should resist. The more fragmented and isolated and self-oriented our stories become in this “iWorld,” the less impact they will have.

Our stories matter not because they are our stories, but because they are God’s. And this is countercultural in our self-obsessed, YOU-Tube, I-Phone, FACEbook culture. When we have the vertical orientation of seeing our story only in terms of “me and Jesus,” we miss out on the grandeur and drama of the big story, and our narrative impact will be relatively minor.

But when we situate ourselves within the horizontal story, connecting ourselves to tradition and meaning and struggle all the way back to the fall and forward to restoration, our storytelling will pulsate with a transcendent energy.

These are the types of stories we need to tell.

We transcend the “iWorld” when we begin to see how our own “ordinary” stories rehearse and reflect the Extraordinary story of God;  when we can see the Roman Road not a conceptual roadmap for individual salvation, but as a real historical plot point in God’s ongoing narrative.

For Christian storytellers it’s crucial that we can give eloquent form to the big story. If we are educators or pastors or parents, we must teach our students, congregations and children the BIG picture of God’s story, grounded in theological depth and historical breadth. Part of the reason so many young people are abandoning Christianity in America is precisely because the Christianity they’ve known is primarily about disconnected “moral lessons” and a vague, de-storied therapeutic Deism that is untethered to anything other than individual salvation and individual happiness.

It behooves us push back against this. It behooves us to re-story the church.

Artists of faith play a crucial role in this too. We must resist the tendency of contemporary art-making to be primarily about SELF expression for the sake of self expression. Instead we must paint, photograph, film, compose, create and re-create work that glimpses the greater narrative— a narrative that includes us, but is bigger than us.

It’s a narrative that is marginalized in a world overwhelmed and exhausted by a million stories a minute; but it’s a narrative we need more than ever.

Note: The text of this post is from a talk I delivered at the 2014 Razor's Edge Conference, which was themed, "Transcending the iWorld: Extraordinary Stories in a Fragmented Age." 

Review: Noah

Excerpt from my review of Noah for Converge Magazine:

One of the images that lingers from Darren Aronofsky’s Noah is that of a huge rock protruding from the sea, with hundreds of screaming people climbing desperately to its top, being swept off like toys by mighty waves. In the background we see the massive wooden ark, peaceful and secure amidst the deadly raging sea. Inside, Noah (Russell Crowe) and his family are safe, but they can hear the screams of the dying outside.

Among other things, this horrific scene underscores the darkness of the Noah story. Though many children reared in Sunday School remember Noah’s ark through a cheerfully colourful flannelgraph lens, the tale is actually quite sobering. Aronfosky (Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan) — not exactly a flannelgraph sort of filmmaker — does the story justice by confronting its disturbing darkness head-on...

Does Noah take liberties with the biblical account? Does it embellish and expand upon what’s there in the text? Yes and yes. And it must. The Noah account in the Bible covers four chapters in Genesis for a grand total of about 2,500 words. Everything that happened is surely not recorded. Furthermore, the film’s setting — a mere ten generations removed from Eden — is so unknown to history and so charged with mystery and the miraculous; it’s difficult to tell any sort of story in this context without lots of educated guesses as to what it was like.

Noah’s filmmakers must fill in the gaps to fill out a coherent cinematic story, speculating as to things we don’t know about. What was the mindset of Noah (who, apart from Gen. 9:25-27, never actually speaks in the biblical narrative) during this crazy episode in his life? What did his family think? What were the interactions between Noah and the wicked population doomed for destruction? Did Noah have a relationship with his grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins)? The film explores all of this in the spirit of midrashic interpretation, and takes the story far beyond the source material. Some of it works and some of it doesn’t, but (as far as I can tell) none of it directly contradicts anything in the biblical account. Most importantly I believe the film — which ends up being an epic somewhere between Tolkien’s The Two Towers and Shakespeare’s Hamlet — retains the theological themes of the Noah story, powerfully bringing to life a “second Eden” tale that highlights both the justice and mercy of the Creator, a God of grace and second chances.

Read the rest of my review for Converge, in which I discuss the film's environmentalism and drawn upon Tim Keller and Charles Spurgeon, here.

Also, read this piece I wrote for TGC on the question of what Christians should think about biblical movies made by secular filmmakers.

For a few other reviews of the film, check out those by Alissa Wilkinson and Steven Greydanus.

If you've seen Noah, what were your thoughts?

12 Films for Lent

A few years ago I thought it would an interesting challenge to think of films that reflected the heart of the season of Advent. You can see that list of “10 Films for Advent” here. But what about Lent? What makes a film “Lenten”? As I thought about it, I first thought of images: films of desert, spartan landscapes; faces of lament and suffering; gray and drab color palettes. Then I thought of tone:  somber, contemplative, quiet, yet with a glimmer of hope or a moment of catharsis. Finally I thought of themes: suffering, isolation, hunger, penance, hope. I came up with the list below (in alphabetical order).

Ballast (2008): Lance Hammer’s debut film is a quiet (indeed, sometimes silent) look at the hard times of a downtrodden family in Mississippi. Amidst the film’s pervasive squalor, destitution, and grim grayness, there is an affirmation of life and a building towards hope. It’s a film about people on the brink getting a second chance, gradually finding their bearings and ballast as they move through the mire of life’s hard knocks.

Diary of a Country Priest (1951): French director Robert Bresson’s Priest charts the everyday struggles of a young priest trying his best to follow God’s will in shepherding a small parish in rural France. Quiet, contemplative, lonely, quotidian and yet transcendent (Paul Schrader would say), Priest is a gorgeous picture of a devoted-yet-imperfect believer leaning on God in the mundane isolation of modern life.

Gerry (2002): Gus Van Sant’s avant garde film is essentially a silent observation of two hikers (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck) who get lost in the unforgiving deserts of the American Southwest. There are scant more than a couple dozen lines of dialogue to be found in its 103 minutes, nothing like a “plot” to speak of, and yet the film is utterly spellbinding. The desolate, waterless wilderness is ominous but strangely beautiful.

Hunger (2008): The debut feature from Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), Hunger is a raw, visceral depiction of IRA leader Bobby Sands’ 1981 prison hunger strike. Less political than existential, Hunger is about self-imposed suffering for a cause. Bleak, brutal, hard to watch, Hunger nevertheless ends with a note of hope/catharsis.

Into Great Silence (2007): Philip Gröning’s film is nearly three hours long, pretty much silent, actionless, and repetitive. But all of this is appropriate for a documentary about the ascetic life of monks. The film, like Lent, is quiet, contemplative, beautiful in its simplicity and a truly worshipful experience.

Last Days in the Desert (2015): Rodrigo García's film is perhaps the most literal Lent film on the list. It's a film about Jesus (Ewan McGregor) in his 40 days of prayer and fasting in the desert, where he is tempted by Satan (also played by Ewan McGregor). Spare, quiet, perceptive and provocative, this is contemplative religious cinema at its best.

L’enfant (2005): I was debating which Dardenne brothers film to include here, because I think many of their films have a Lenten feel to them. I chose L’enfant (The Child) because of its cold, stark tone and its exploration of sin, suffering and penance. The “penance” part comes really only as a hint, in the final cathartic minutes, but what a powerful climax it is.

The New World (2005): Terrence Malick’s The New World centers on the story of Pocahontas (Q’Orianka Kilcher), whose journey in the film is decidedly Lenten. At one point she has her own “ashes to ashes” moment when she covers her face in ash and dirt as she grieves the supposed death of John Smith. She undergoes profound suffering in the film but is beautifully resilient, learning from every up and down and growing “towards the light” like a tree even when a branch breaks off.

Of Gods and Men (2011): A true story about monks in North Africa who risk it all in pursuit of their mission, Gods is one of the most inspiring films about faith, sacrifice, and community that I’ve ever seen. A quiet, austere, but utterly transcendent film, Gods paints a picture of what it means to be faithfully present as Christ’s ambassadors in hostile world. It’s a film about joy in suffering, and the beauty of picking up one’s cross in pursuit of Christ.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928): This silent masterpiece from Danish director Carl Dreyer provides an amazingly artful and moving account of the suffering and martyrdom of Joan of Arc. Shot almost entirely in close-up, the film’s striking images—especially Joan’s face—are gripping and evoke the holy, even in their spartan simplicity.

The Road (2009): John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel is a dark, gray, horrifying film about suffering and survival in a bleak post-apocalyptic landscape. This was actually the first film that came to mind when I thought about “Lenten films.” As dark and painful as the film is to watch, there is a quietness and slowness to it that engenders contemplation. And though 90% of the film feels like Good Friday, its hopeful ending nods in direction of Easter.

Silence (2016): Martin Scorsese's adaptation of Shusaku Endo's novel is a film about knowing Jesus Christ in and through suffering. A film about persecution, doubt, temptation, and the struggles of the flesh, Silence pulls the viewer into a quiet, contemplative space that focuses on our weakness and the sufficiency of Christ.

R.I.P. Philip Seymour Hoffman

It's always tragic when a great talent dies young. The death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman at age 46, however, hits me especially hard. As actors go, Hoffman wasn't just great. He was a genius. He was the type of dynamic, passionate actor who gave it his all in every role, making even small roles utterly huge. His career happened to coincide largely with my own awakening to the beauty of what cinema could be. I first noticed him when I saw Twister in fifth grade. It sounds silly now, but I remember thinking he was the best part of the film. In high school, he blew me away in films like Magnolia, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Almost Famous. As I eased into a part-time career as a film critic in college and after, Hoffman was a frequent force in some of my favorite films: 25th Hour, Capote, Synecdoche, New York, Moneyball, The Master. His filmography really does read like a greatest hits of the contemporary indie/auteur boom.

My favorite Hoffman film is probably Capote (2005), for which he won the Oscar for best actor. Not only is it his best performance in a career full of exceptional performances, but it's the performance that I think I'll remember him by. His take on Truman Capote is so very humane, yet so tortured, like the actor himself. The film itself is cold, bleak and beautiful, set on the harsh plains of my native state (Kansas). Its quiet spirit and yet foreboding nature makes Capote a film that ultimately feels like an elegy to Hoffman's own life: a artist in pursuit of beauty, committed to excellence and the elusive masterpiece, yet haunted by the immensity of the existential questions he so thoroughly excavated in his work. Like many artists, including some he portrayed—Capote for instance, or Synecdoche's Caden Cotard—Hoffman was clearly present in his work, fully immersed to the point that greatness was possible, but not without great personal cost.

We'll never know what brilliance could have come in Hoffman's middle and old age, but we do know that he gave the world some beautiful things in his time. I'm thankful for that, and thankful for his life.

My Alternate Oscar Nominations

The Oscar nominations were released this morning, and as usual it was a mix of good, bad and ugly. Mostly it was a predictable list, following way too closely the media hype about certain Oscar bait movies. For me the biggest overall snubs were: No best actor nomination for Robert Redford (All is Lost); no best supporting actress nomination for Scarlett Johansson (Her); no best actress nomination for Julie Delply (Before Midnight); no big nominations for Inside Llewyn Davis.

If I had my way, this is what I would have nominated in some of the main categories:

Best Picture: Before Midnight, Her, To the Wonder, Gravity, Inside Llewyn Davis, Museum Hours, Frances Ha, 12 Years a Slave, All is Lost, Short Term 12. 

Best Director: Richard Linklater, Before Midnight; Spike Jonze, Her; Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity; Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave; Destin Cretton, Short Term 12. 

Best Actor: Robert Redford, All is Lost; Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave; Joaquin Phoenix, Her; Ethan Hawke, Before Midnight; Mads Mikkelsen, The Hunt.

Best Actress: Brie Larson, Short Term 12; Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine; Barbara Sukowa, Hannah Arendt; Greta Gerwig, Frances Ha; Julie Delpy, Before Midnight.

Best Supporting Actor: Michael Fassbender, 12 Years a Slave; Will Forte, Nebraska; Nathan Fillion, Much Ado About Nothing; Keith Stanfield; Short Term 12; James Gandolfini, Enough Said. 

Best Supporting Actress: Scarlett Johansson, Her; Lupita Nyong'o, 12 Years a Slave; June Squibb, Nebraska; Sally Hawkins, Blue Jasmine; Leslie Mann, The Bling Ring.

Best Film Moments of 2013

I've found that in most great movies, even the greatest masterpieces, it's not the film in its entirety that makes it great as much as a handful (or even just one or two) of brilliant moments. These are what we remember: sequences, shots, "holy moments" when a film manages to express the inexpressible. They are the moments where we feel lost in the film, contemplative, arrested. They are cathartic glimpses of transcendence.

Yesterday I posted my list of the best overall films of 2013; today I'm focusing on my picks for the best moments. The following are 15 of the most memorable and compelling moments from the year in cinema, in no particular order:

• Before Midnight: “Still there, still there, still there … gone.” (watch here)
• The Spectacular Now: Sutter and Aimee walk in the woods, share their first kiss (watch part of the scene here)
• Short Term 12: Marcus shares the cathartic rap he’s been working on (Watch bits and pieces of it in this teaser for the film. Warning: graphic language.)
• Captain Phillips: Tom Hanks gets evaluated by a nurse after the harrowing climax
• 12 Years a Slave: Singing the spiritual, “Roll, Jordan, Roll”
• Gravity: The opening (17 minutes long) uninterrupted shot
• Post Tenebras Lux: Opening scene (watch here)
• Hannah Arendt: Barbara Sukowa’s final speech in the lecture hall
• To the Wonder: From Paris to the plains (watch here)
• Her: The final scene on the roof with Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams
• Inside Llewyn Davis: Llewyn plays "Shoals of Herring" for his estranged, dementia-plagued father (listen to the song here).
• To the Wonder: Javier Bardem recites St. Patrick’s Lorica (watch here)
• Museum Hours: Mary Margaret O’Hara sings “Dear, Dark Heart” to her cousin who is in a coma
• The Bling Ring: Long take of Audrina Partridge’s house being robbed (watch here)
• Frances Ha: “What I want out of a relationship” monologue (watch here)

What moments from 2013 films have been your favorite?

Best Films of 2013

Dislocation. When I consider the films that I loved the most in 2013, this is the word I think of. The theme of dislocation—uprootedness, geographical and emotional lostness, unstable notions of "home"'—was present in various forms in many films this year. Characters were lost in space (Gravity) and at sea (All is Lost); they slept on couches to get by (Frances Ha, Inside Llewyn Davis) and dwelled in all manor of temporary residences: group homes (Short Term 12), slave quarters (Short Term 12), tents in a burned-out forests (Prince Avalanche), and so on. Several films were about characters in foreign lands, whether Greece (Before Midnight), Vienna (Museum Hours), or Europeans in America (Philomena, To the Wonder). Other films were set in part or in whole on transportation vessels at sea: Captain Phillips, Kon-tiki, even the Huck Finn river drama Mud. Alexander Payne's Nebraska, meanwhile, was a classic road movie about how a place we've lived can feel both alien and familiar when we return.

I don't know why this theme kept showing up—perhaps we're all just nostalgic for a sense of rootedness and home in the midst of so much cultural and technological change. But I'm glad it did because it's a theme that lends itself well to powerful cinematic storytelling.

Below are my picks for the best ten films of the year, plus ten honorable mentions. What were your favorites this year?

10) Short Term 12: Destin Cretton's film about life inside a short-term foster care facility is a beautifully made, tender film about weary, broken, love-hungry kids trying to beat the odds stacked so heavily against them. Almost every character in this movie is under the age of 30 (including Brie Larson in a career-making role) and each has their own sort of baggage. The film suggests that what these kids need is a deep, unconditional, relentless love--which is to say a love that models Christ.

9) All is Lost: Who knew a film with only one actor (Robert Redford) and no dialogue could be so compelling? Yet J.C. Chandor's lost-at-sea adventure story is breathtaking from start to finish. We don't know much about Redford's character, but we sympathize with him. In its tableaus and archetypes the film becomes a symbol for all human struggle: between being and nothingness, man and nature and, yes, man and God.

8) 12 Years a Slave: One of the most indelible images of Steve McQueen's unflinching slavery epic is a prolonged, agonizing scene in which Solomon Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) hangs by a noose from a tree, his toes just barely touching the ground, enough to shift his weight around slightly but not enough to relieve the suffocating pull at his neck. McQueen’s camera stays on this painful scene for what seems like an eternity. It’s hard to watch, yet McQueen forces us to watch, contemplating the horrifying humiliation and degradation of a human body in the midst of the beauty of a genteel plantation and cathedrals of Spanish moss. It's a powerful film, radical in its straightforwardness and almost documentary gaze.

7) Frances Ha: Shot in black and white with an airy, guerilla feel, Noah Baumbach's NYC-set film is a clear homage to the French New Wave. Yet as throwback as it may feel, Frances Ha is also thoroughly modern, exploring (among other things) contemporary hipsterdom, the economic crisis and the relational disconnection of our hyper-connected age. Greta Gerwig delivers one of the year's best performances in a film that is funny, whipsmart and yet refreshingly uncynical. (my review)

6) Museum Hours: Ten years ago I meandered around Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Art Museum, taking in the vast array of masterpieces from Rembrandt, Rubens, Caravaggio, Bruegel and the like. This is more or less what Jem Cohen's Museum Hours (set in the Kunsthistorisches) is about: looking at life's aesthetic wonders, taking it all in, learning about ourselves and each other in the process. I don't think I've seen a film that has made art come alive as much as this film, save perhaps The Mill and the Cross (another Bruegel-centric film). Yet Museum Hours is about more than just fine art; it's about taking the "museum" posture of respectful, attentive observance outside and applying it to everything else.  

5) Inside Llewyn Davis: The Coen brothers have already established themselves as among the most important American auteurs, and their latest is perhaps their most mature, subtle and somber film yet. Set in the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene, Inside is both a period piece and a universal reflection on the seemingly arbitrary disbursement of luck, a common Coen theme. What kind of God divvies out favor, and blesses his "elect," so inconsistently? Why do good guys so often get beat up and left in the cold, dark alleys of this world? Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is the latest Coen character to be the unfortunate object of this existential lesson.

4) Gravity: Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is an awe-inspiring experience. With its never-seen-anything-like-this-before cinematography, its heart-pumping tension and its uncanny ability to convey the feeling of actually being in space, Gravity achieves something all too rare in cinema today: it utterly transports the audience. It draws us in so thoroughly (especially with the aid of 3D and IMAX screens) that for 90 minutes one truly does feel like they are floating and tumbling around in space. It’s dizzying, intense, wonderful, and new. But it's not all flash and dazzle. Gravity is a film with much on its mind. From where it sits above the world, humbled by the fragility of life and the grandeur of creation, how could it not? (my review)

3) To the Wonder: Far from the “minor Malick” some have labeled it (or at best: “a B-side to The Tree of Life"), Wonder is a characteristically ambitious, boundary-pushing film that builds upon the stylistic and thematic trajectories of its predecessors in the Malick oeuvre. As such, it's seen as elusive and difficult for many viewers. As Roger Ebert noted in his review (the last review he ever wrote),  Wonder is a film that "would rather evoke than supply." Like Museum Hours, Wonder is a film about seeing: perceiving the beauty in the pretty and the ugly, the thrilling and the mundane, the personal and universal. It's a film about seeing ourselves rightly within the cosmos and loving others, and God, more than we love ourselves. "Show us how to seek you," prays the melancholic priest (Javier Bardem) at the film's conclusion. "We were made to see you." (my review)

2) Her: Like To the Wonder, Spike Jonze's masterful film is about the pain of relationships and yet the lessons they teach us about loving and seeing well, waking up to the incarnational glory all around us. The whole "man falls in love with an OS" plot is fascinating, and the not-so-unlikely future depicted in the film is provocative and instructive in all sorts of ways. But at its heart this is a film about being present in one's own life; being aware and compelled by the miracle of daily living. (my review)

1) Before Midnight: To me the best overall film of a year is not only a film of near-perfect quality but also one I know I'll return to decades from now. Before Midnight, small and largely overlooked as it has been, is for me that film. The third in Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy's exquisite "Before" series (see also 1995's Before Sunrise and 2004's Before Sunset), Midnight is an existential pleasure. Set in a sumptuous, sun-bathed Greece, the film is deceptively simple--mostly a man and a woman talking and arguing, working through the complexities of their relationship. Yet it's more profound, more punch-you-in-the-gut tragic, than any film I've seen in years. Why? Partially it's because the writing and acting are so real. But it's also because the film captures better than most the beauty and pain of time going by, of our own temporary presence in this world. Like the late summer sun that drops ever so gradually below the horizon, “We appear, and we disappear. We are just passing through.” (my review)

Honorable Mention (in alphabetical order): The Bling Ring, Blue Jasmine, Captain Phillips, Mud, Nebraska, This is Martin Bonner, Prince Avalanche, Room 237, The Spectacular Now, Stories We Tell.

Nebraska

Alexander Payne’s Nebraska is road movie. It’s about a father and son (Bruce Dern and Will Forte) who travel to Nebraska from Montana, in hopes of redeeming a “You’ve won $1 million!” mailing that everyone but the old man knows is a scam. The comical plot conceit aside, Nebraska is really a movie about going home, and understanding home. Like Payne’s other movies, which probe the idiosyncrasies of middle class America in places like Omaha (Election), Colorado (About Schmidt), Hawaii (The Descendants) and California’s wine country (Sideways), Nebraska is about small-town life in the Cornhusker State. Its title should indicate as much.

Filmed in black and white (a choice that both heightens the drab blah-ness of flyover country and accentuates its minimalist beauty), Nebraska has been called a minor addition to Alexander’s body of work. I think it may actually be his best film yet.  Perhaps I’m biased as a Midwesterner myself. The suburban Oklahoma and Kansas of my youth are evocatively construed in the tableaus of Payne’s films, particularly Nebraska (Payne grew up in Omaha). Watching Nebraska, I recognize and identify with Payne’s love/hate relationship with the places he is from. On one hand there is a sort of “I’ve moved on” distaste, which dwells on the provincial smallness and embarrassing insulation of the yokel customs. On the other is a profound affection and nostalgia for its simplicity, slow pace and settledness in rhythms and rootedness.

Both of these perspectives are on full display in Nebraska, a film that skewers small-town life and provokes groans and grimaces throughout, yet maintains a respect and even love for its subjects. The film leads the audience to laugh at the small-minded ridiculousness of its characters, but in a way that sympathizes with them too. We almost feel guilty for laughing at them. Payne’s gaze is neither condescending nor reverent. If anything it’s a gaze that sees in others a sort of universal quirkiness; a mirror reflecting back to us the familiar flaws of a people just trying to do the best that they can.

The world of Nebraska is realistically drab, harsh, often bleak. The fictitious small town, Hawthorne, in which most action unfolds is a struggling farm community hit hard by the recession. Almost the whole populace spends their time watching football or drinking together in bars (there’s not much else to do, notes one character), reminiscing about times gone by. There’s a pervasive sense of “the best days are behind us.” Everywhere there are shuttered small businesses, rusted old machinery and dilapidated homesteads of once-great farms.

The sense of place at the heart of Nebraska is also a sense of loss. It’s a confrontation with the harsh indifference of time: generations passing, buildings crumbling, man’s finest glories fading as decades go by. Payne’s film captures, perhaps better than any I’ve seen, the feeling of returning home after a long absence and observing the hard facts of change.

For me, returning to the home of my childhood (as I am this week for Thanksgiving), is always a strange mix of continuity and discontinuity. So much is the same: the meals, the traditions, some of the neighbors and many of the local businesses. But every time I go back, so much has changed. And perhaps most jarringly: I have changed too.  Nothing can call us to itself more convincingly than the memory of home, even while few things can feel so alien as time goes by.

All things are ephemeral: the places we’re from, the people we were. Nebraska captures this beautifully. It’s about the way the world around us changes, faster — but not by much — than even our own rapid aging. But Payne's film also offers hope, reminding us that love and care for one another make our struggles more manageable. In the midst of dizzying change, and our own stubborn resistance to the reality of mortality, the small kindnesses of friends and family are what give us ballast.

8 Tips for Watching "Art Films"

For many moviegoers, watching a so-called “art film” can be an arduous task. But it doesn’t have to be. The following (taken from my new book, Gray Matters) are some tips for how to enjoy films that might at first glance seem difficult, esoteric, or painfully slow.

1. Don’t try to understand everything immediately. Let the film happen to you. Let yourself be taken in, without feeling obligated to understand where it is taking you. You can think about all that later.
2. Embrace ambiguity. Be OK with open-endedness, unresolved conflict, unexplained images or plot points. View it as an opportunity to provide your own reading/interpretation without being spoon-fed everything.
3. Read critics. Both before and after you see a film. Don’t feel obligated to agree with them, but be open to letting them show you things you might not have noticed.
4. Let yourself be moved. There’s no shame in crying in a movie theater, or being physically shaken, or laughing uncontrollably. That’s the power of cinema. It doesn't have to be educational. It is sometimes simply visceral.
5. Allow for simplicity. Not every art film is as complex as you may think. It doesn’t have to make your brain hurt to be good.
6. Spend some time getting to know old films. The classics. The French New Wave. Italian neorealism. The more you discover about what has come before and been significant in film history, the more you will appreciate film in the present.
7. Art can be pleasurable too! Don't feel guilty if you actually enjoy the film or if it is (gasp!) highly entertaining. We often mistake "art" for something that is necessarily bookish, stale and cerebral. But sometimes the best art is even more funny, scary, thrilling and altogether entertaining than the "popcorn" blockbusters.
8. Don’t let the discussion end by the time you reach the car in the parking lot. Rather, let the film sit for awhile before you discuss it. Don’t rush to snap judgments or simplistic assessments: “I liked it” or “What was that??” Set time aside at home or at a meal to discuss and digest the film’s complexity.

Captain Phillips

The final fifteen minutes of Paul Greengrass's Captain Phillips are among the most intense I have seen in any movie in years (particularly the final scene). Certainly, the whole 134 minutes—though it feels like 90 minutes or less—is intense. But its climax and catharsis are breathtaking. It left me feeling shaken, inspired, grieved, and shell shocked, with a distinct sense of "what just happened?!"

And that's an all-too-rare feeling in movies today.

I felt the same way seven years ago when I sat in a theater watching another film by Paul Greengrass that ended with a breathless bang and a similar, albeit more tragic, climactic catharsis: United 93. That film, one of the decade's best, left me so shaken I could hardly move from my seat when the credits began to roll.

The final moments of Captain Phillips include a career-best acting moment from Tom Hanks, but its final scene also reminded me of what Paul Schrader, in Transcendental Style in Film, calls stasis: the moment at the end of the film (usually the last shot) when the "abundant," loud, and chaotic give way to "sparse," quiet, and contemplative finality. To put it another way: Captain Phillips is hardly Ozu in form or in content. But the way it ends certainly leads the viewer to place of stasis that reminds one of the Japanese director's work: "a frozen view of life," notes Schrader, "which does not resolve the disparity but transcends it."

The amazing thing is that Captain Phillips, like United 93, is based on a true story that most of the audience knows. That a story with a known ending can be so gripping—even sublime—is a testament both to the filmmakers' talents and film's inherent power to narrate real stories more viscerally than the newspaper or a Wikipedia page.

[Read the rest of my review for Christianity Today here.]

Four Ways Christians Approach Film

Jack Hafer has been a Christian working in the film industry since the 1980s (you may have seen his 2003 film To End All Wars). He’s also the current chair of the film department at Biola University, an evangelical college with an impressive track record for producing graduates who find success in Hollywood. For my book Gray Matters I asked Hafer to categorize different approaches Christians have taken to film & filmmaking, and he described three. Below I’ve summarized his three approaches, plus a fourth that I have personally observed.

Which do you most resonate with?

1) Message-centric: Some Christians are only interested in films insofar as they explicitly preach the gospel or relay an unmistakably biblical message. This approach typically downplays aesthetics in favor of unmissable morals, preferring didactic direct-ness to subtlety. Good films are evangelistic films. Examples: Thief in the Night; Fireproof.

2) For the common good: This approach doesn’t focus on evangelism as much as whether or not a film has overall positive values for the common good. “In Hollywood it’s easy to make temptation look enticing, but challenging to make goodness look attractive,” notes Hafer, but “that’s a challenge this approach takes on.” These are films not made for the church but for wide audiences, espousing broad but generally Judeo-Christian values, where good triumphs over evil. Examples: Indiana Jones, The Blind Side.

3) Religious in content: This approach favors films that feature religious elements or plotlines: movies about Christians, preachers, nuns, monks, Joan of Arc, etc. This approach sees value in films that make religious sentiments look attractive, or create a sense of awe, longing, and wonder about the transcendent. These films need not be preachy, but often compellingly portray stories of faith. Examples: The Way, The Diary of a Country Priest.

4) Aesthetically transcendent: In this approach, “sacred” films are those which — through style, exceptional artistry or powerful narrative — evoke feelings of transcendental longing akin to what Germans call sehnsucht. They are films so beautiful and evocative that the viewer is brought to a place of sublime stasis or spiritual contemplation. Christians who favor this approach are less interested in specifically Christian messages or plotlines than they are with true, powerful portrayals of beauty and longing. Examples: Tokyo Story, The Tree of Life.

Gravity

Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity is an awe-inspiring experience. With its never-seen-anything-like-this-before cinematography, its heart-pumping tension and its uncanny ability to convey the feeling of actually being in space, Gravity achieves something all too rare in cinema today: it utterly transports the audience. It draws us in so thoroughly (especially with the aid of 3D and IMAX screens) that for 90 minutes one truly does feel like they are floating and tumbling around in space. It's dizzying, intense, and wonderful.

The power of art that immerses the viewer so thoroughly in its world is that it forces a posture of contemplation. In the moments when we're not clutching our seats with white knuckles in Gravity, we are gazing at earth from a vantage point we've never seen: far enough to see its globe curvature but close enough to make out the Nile, the Sinai, the Ganges. In this liminal space between earth and the vast nothingness beyond, eerily quiet and reverse-claustrophobic, one has a hard time escaping existential reflection.

My own reflections as I watched Gravity centered on the dual notions of human capacity and limitation. The film's jaw-dropping artistry (its 17-minute single take opening should itself win an Academy Award) and "how'd they do that?" technological wizardry testify to the former. So do the mechanics of human space travel: the shuttles, space stations, satellites and suits that humans concocted so that they could explore the harsh, unlivable environs of the final frontier. Five decades after the first humans traveled to space, it's still mind-boggling to imagine that it's possible (and that we have the minds to come up with stuff like this). Finally, the ingenuity and survival skills of the film's heroine (Sandra Bullock) showcase not only humanity's capacity to dream but also its capacity to improvise and adapt in the face of extinction.

And yet Gravity is also very much a film about limitations. From its foreboding opening text about how nothing can survive in space, through its 90 minutes of harrowing death and near-death, Gravity is on one level a cautionary tale about the limits of human power in the fact of the far-more-powerful forces of the natural world.

Sure, space opens up some capacities that we don't have on earth. Zero gravity means that in space we can fly. We can't do that on earth. And yet "life in space" (oxymoron?) introduces new limitations, all exploited to dramatic effect in Gravity: wild temperature fluctuations, no oxygen, debris/shrapnel flying at you at the speed of a bullet, etc. Humans, however brilliant they may be, are tiny, vulnerable blips on the radar of the universe. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki underscores this with stunning shots of tiny white dots (NASA astronauts) against the vast black nothing of space.

The film's existential posture reflects a sobering sense of man's smallness and vulnerability. At the end of the day, man's ability to control his fate and ensure his safety is limited. At any moment a random accident can kill any of us off, whether on earth (as happens to Bullock's daughter) or in space (the ill fated NASA crew in Gravity). And while earth is certainly a more conducive environment for life (human or otherwise), it is by no means an easy world to survive. The harshness of terra firma--where the indifference of a hostile planet and its various deathtraps (weather, terrain, etc.) is just part of the challenge for humans--reminds us in the film's final moments that humans are vulnerable even on our home planet.

What, then, is it that helps humans survive? If the odds are so stacked against our survival, with even the environments of our home planet pushing the limits of our biological and existential resilience, how do any of us survive?

Perhaps it is grace. Perhaps it is a benevolent force from above the heavens that gives us a chance at survival. It's either that or blind randomness; pure luck. Are we on our own in a thoroughly random universe, or is there a God who stands supreme over it all? Gravity forces us to contemplate this question, and the way we interpret the film's final line ("thank you") likely reflects how we would answer that question.

Prisoners

Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners begins with a foreboding prologue in which we heard the Lord's Prayer as suburban dad Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) helps his teenage son track and shoot a deer from a distance. Photographed with quiet, slow zooms and a wintry ambience (cinematographer Roger Deakins has never been better), this cryptic scene sets the tone for the tense, contemplative, and oddly beautiful 150 minutes that follow in what is one of the year's most surprising films.

Prisoners is about imprisonment on a number of levels. First, the literal sense: in addition to the young kidnapping victims around which the plot revolves, at least four other major characters find themselves imprisoned at various points in the film. The physical imprisonment of one character in the film's genius final shot is especially jarring.

But the film is also about how we are prisoners in other ways: prisoners to our notion of happiness; prisoners to our job or cause (see Jake Gyllenhaal's Detective Loki); prisoners to our need for retributive justice and—perhaps most importantly—prisoners to our own guilt and shame.

The film suggests that, in a sense, human existence is one big imprisonment. We're constantly locking up our depravity and protecting ourselves from ourselves. We try to keep our more sordid tendencies hidden and our propensity for evil at bay. But this is easier said than done. In one sequence, snakes escape from formerly locked-tight containers—and similarly, evil is always desperate to break free and roam wild. It wants to infect the good. Part of the power of Prisoners is that it depicts the insidious tactics of evil in a manner that feels utterly close to home. It's not just about big, bad, nightmarish villains. It's about the little ways that all of us get infected.

Read the rest of my review of Prisoners here.

“Parents Screwed Us Up” Movies

As I’ve reflected on a few of my favorite films of 2013 so far—The Place Beyond the Pines, The Spectacular Now and Short Term 12—one thing that I’ve thought about is the way that each of these films is in some way about the damage inflicted from one generation upon another. They are films about kids and their parents (mostly their dads) who messed them up.

In Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines, Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper play two men from very different backgrounds who make choices that have a decided impact on their offspring. The movie is very clear (perhaps too clear) about its themes of fathers, sons, and the woes they bestow on each other through inherited sin. The film does raise interesting questions about one’s freedom to break out of the cycle and chart a new path (the “open road” last shot pretty much sums it up), and in many ways it inverts the logic of the “we are cursed by our forebears” approach. But it’s still a film that hammers home the havoc that is wrought in families based on decisions made higher up the family tree.

On the surface, James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now seems mostly to be a simple, sweet high school love story. And it is that. But the film’s second half spends a good deal of time explaining the brokenness of its protagonist, Sutter (Miles Teller), by--you guessed it--revealing the utter deadbeat-ness of his deadbeat dad (Kyle Chandler). The film makes a point of noting that these kids are part of a generation of divorce and broken homes. Sutter has a hard time thinking of any friends whose parents aren’t divorced. He and Aimee (Shailene Woodley, whose parents we never even see on screen) must succeed in spite of that fact. When it comes to healthy relationships, their parents didn’t give them much to work with, did they? Or so the film suggests.

Destin Daniel Cretten’s Short Term 12 is perhaps the most explicit and wrenching in its depiction of the way parents screw up their kids. Set in a group home, where abandoned, orphaned, and abused kids reside temporarily before the “system” figures out a permanent solution, Short Term 12 is about how weary, broken, love-hungry kids can beat the odds stacked so heavily against them. Almost every character in this movie is under the age of 30, and every single one of them has major issues on account of their negligent, absent, abusive or otherwise imperfect parents. Even the film’s heroine (Brie Larson), whose job it is to help heal the broken young people under her care, is majorly struggling with her own parents’ despicable failures.

What gives? Why all the movies about parents going wrong in parenting and children doing their best to compensate for the missteps of their upbringing?

Even in Sofia Coppola's underrated The Bling Ring, which (unlike the three films discussed above) does not condone or sympathize with the behavior of its young subjects, parents are depicted as disturbingly negligent, enabling and foolish (see Leslie Mann's Secret-quoting "cool mom"). Coppola isn't as direct in tracing her teen characters' troubles to their bad parents as opposed to their own bad choices, but the connection is still there.

Part of this trend surely has to do with the fact that today's young people have grown up in a world of therapy and psychology, where a sophisticated understanding of how one is shaped by one's family (particularly one's parents) is not only normal but expected. We are a generation that has grown up more fascinated by nurture than nature. We are told we are living a "story" and that we are our story is both an offshoot of our parents' stories and ours to continue in whatever direction we'd like. The simultaneous belief in both the determinative power of the cards we've been dealt and our sovereign power to reinvent and redeem ourselves is a tension we hold dear (sometimes favoring one belief over the other, when it's convenient). In any case, it makes for good drama and good stories (hence all these movies).

Sarah Polley's excellent documentary, Stories We Tell, is another example of a recent film exploring the ways our parents' stories shape our own, for good or ill.  As she tries to find out who her parents are and were, Polley shows us just how captivated we are by our own heritage and how much love, resentment, anger, confusion and hope can be bound up within our understanding of being someone's son or daughter.

All of these films suggest that an individual's brokenness, frailty and failings are in large part a product of the brokenness, frailty and failings of their parents. An obvious enough point. Sin is a generationally perpetuating thing, after all. But sin is also something to be owned individually. And let's face it: brokenness is often just a softer way of saying sin. Even as I empathize with the young people in Place, Spectacular, and Short Term 12, and understand how rough their paths have been made by their parents, I know that they are ultimately accountable for what they do with what they've been given, just as I am. We can only blame our parents so much. All of us have problems. All of us are problems. But in spite of ourselves and in spite of our families, new life is possible. Thanks be to God.

Christians & Hollywood: 20 Moments of Tension

25 years ago this week, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ came out in theaters. It was controversial in the truest, non-“manufactured publicity stunt” sense of the word. Many, many Christians were up in arms about the film. In his Christianity Today article looking back on the controversial film, Ken Morefield writes that the film “wasn't simply criticized: it helped establish the battle lines. It is the prime example in the book by Michael Medved that gave this particular battlefield a name: Hollywood vs. America.”

As I write in my Gray Matters chapter on the history of Christianity’s relationship to Hollywood, the Last Temptation “battle” was, indeed, probably the single biggest clash between Christians and Hollywood in the history of cinema. But while Last Temptation might have been the high water mark of the Christians vs. Hollywood culture wars, it certainly isn’t the only example.

Below is a list of 20 "moments of tension" that I include in chapter six, "A Brief History of Christians and Movies," of Gray Matters. It's not an exhaustive list of all the films that provoked the wrath and boycotts of Christians, but it gives a general sense of the narrative, going back to the earliest decades of film history:

• King of Kings (1926)
• The Callahans and the Murphys (1927)
• Sign of the Cross (1932)
• Gone With the Wind (1939)
• The Miracle (1951)
• Lolita (1962)
• A Clockwork Orange (1971)
• Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)
• The Exorcist (1973)
• Jesus of Nazareth (1977)
• Monty Python’s Life of Bryan (1980)
• Hail Mary (1985)
• Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
• Kids (1995)
• Dogma (1999)
• The Passion of the Christ (2002)
• Saved! (2004)
• Million Dollar Baby (2004)
• The Da Vinci Code (2006)
• Religulous (2008)

Best Films of the First Half

Because movie awards season falls where it does (December-February), the films crowned as the "best of the year" are more often than not the ones that were released in the final months of any given year. Anything released prior to September often gets forgotten or (at best) a token surprise nomination or two. Which is a shame, because every year there are masterful films released in the "less prestigious" first six months of the year. And this year is no different. The following are the five films that I enjoyed most during the first half of 2013:

1) Before Midnight: The third entry into Richard Linklater's exquisite "Before" series, which began with Before Sunrise (1995) and continued with Before Sunset (2004), Before Midnight drops in on a few hours of the lives of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) as they negotiate the challenges of commitment, family, and the pangs of time lost, regretted, wished for and not-yet-had. Beautifully written and acted, deeply emotional and constantly thought-provoking, Midnight is as smart and soul-enriching a film as you're likely to see this summer. (more)

2) To the Wonder: Ben Affleck--hardly masking his less-than-pleased assessment of the final product of Terrence Malick's latest film--said that To the Wonder "makes TheTree of Life look like Transformers.” There is some truth to this. Wonder, smaller-scale and relatively mundane in comparison to the universe-spanning scope of Life, is nevertheless a more challenging film--arguably Malick pushing his maverick sensibilities to the audience's outer thresholds of tolerance. And yet given the time (and the requisite multiple viewings) and a willingness to give oneself to Malick's way of seeing, this is a film with immense power to move, provoke, and stir up thankfulness for the "Love that loves us". (more)

3) Frances Ha: Noah Baumbach's black & white, Brooklyn-set film is much more than the depressive hipster navel gazing we've come to expect from him. It's actually a vibrant, often hilarious and deeply perceptive portrait of a twentysomething liberal arts grad (the excellent Greta Gerwig) going through  a quarterlife crisis. Something of an ode to the French New Wave, the stylish film possesses a lightness of being and existential astuteness that is regrettably  rare in contemporary indie filmmaking. (more)

4) Stories We Tell: One of the best documentaries I've seen in a long time, Stories We Tell is a very personal exploration of director Sarah Polley's family. It's a film about family, legacy, generational ghosts, the passage of time, and ultimately truth and narrative itself: how the stories we tell do and do not illuminate the "reality" of what actually happened in a certain place or time. It's a fascinating re-invention of the documentary genre that is as gut-wrenching as it is thought-provoking.

5) The Bling Ring: Sofia Coppola's latest continues in the vein of her previous films, examining things like celebrity, materialism, partying, and "the ineffable sublime," mostly through the lens of the female adolescent experience. The film's ripped-from-the-headlines true story of celeb-obsessed teens turned Hollywood Hills burglars is the jumping off point for a meditation on consumerism, social media and what Douglas Rushkoff calls "present shock"--the woozy vertigo that accompanies our cultural collapse of narrativity and obsession with (and ironic distance from) the moment. For more on that, and tying it back nicelyto Before Midnight, see this article.

Honorable Mention: Mud, The Place Beyond the Pines, Much Ado About Nothing, 56 Up, Kon-tiki

Catching Up With Time in the “Before” and “Up” Films

A professor I admire once said — while discussing the films of Yasujiro Ozu, or maybe it was semiotics (can’t remember) — that watching the sun set can be both a thing of incredible beauty and deep sadness, often simultaneously. I thought of this as I watched Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight, which includes a scene of a couple sitting by the sea in Greece, watching the sun slowly dip below the horizon. It’s there, there, there — and then it’s not there. A fleeting flare of arresting orange. Present and then absent. Perhaps the beauty and sadness of a sunset has to do with the fact that it’s the process in nature we humans most identify with. Ours is a context of ephemerality.

Midnight just released in theaters, and it is certainly one of the best films of 2013 so far. But before you see it, be sure to watch the two preceding films in Linklater’s Before series: Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004). Together they comprise a trilogy that is one of the most understated and elegant in the history of cinema.

Linklater’s films follow the love story between Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) as it plays out in more or less real time in one Vienna night in 1994 (Before Sunrise), a sunset stroll in 2003 Paris (Before Sunset), and an evening jaunt in Greece in 2012 (Midnight). The films let us peek in on these two lives every nine years, witnessing only as much of their “present” as the 90-100 minutes of movie watching allows us to see. The glimpses we get into this couple’s journey together are snapshots not just of their particular world — compellingly characterized by highbrow garrulity, philosophizing and Gen X angst — but of humanity in general: how we age, how we love, how we fight and how we dream.

Similar in many ways to what Linklater, Hawke and Delpy are exploring in the Before series is what Michael Apted has done and is doing with the astonishing Up series. Beginning in 1964 as a British television documentary examining the lives of fourteen 7-year-old children representing a diverse array of socioeconomic positions in 1960s Britain, the Up series has followed its real-life characters every seven years since. 14 Up (1970) checked in on the children at age 14; 21 Up (1977) updated audiences on their lives as they each turned 21; and so on.56 Up just came out a few months ago and is now available to watch on Netflix, as are all of the other Up films.

In his review of 56 Up, the late Roger Ebert — who once called the Up series “the noblest project in cinema history” — wrote this: “It is a mystery, this business of life. I can’t think of any other cinematic undertaking that allows us to realize that more deeply.”

Indeed, I think that one of the great potentials of cinema — particularly when it is used in the way Linklater and Apted are using it in their respective series — is that it can capture some of the idiosyncrasies and mysteries of the “business of life” that we might otherwise fail to see (presumably because we are too busy wading through our own “business of life”). Things like the peculiar experience of the passage of time: simultaneously the most obvious and yet ungraspable mystery of existence.

The Before series is about love and relationships on one level, to be sure. But the real subject of these films is time, and the frequency with which it is discussed by the characters in the films hammers home that point.

“O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time,” says Jesse (Hawke) in Before Sunrise, quoting Dylan Thomas quoting W.H. Auden. At other times Jesse waxes philosophical about how surreal it is to self-consciously observe himself living in real time, or Celine shares about how she always feels like her life is either a dream of the future or a memory of the past. Meanwhile, the couple walks and talks in (more or less) real time, as the sun — that most vivid of all reminders of temporality — either rises, sets, or cedes its position to the moon. As Hawke said earlier this year when Midnight premiered at Sundance, the star of the Before series “is not Julie or [Hawke] but Father Time himself.”

The Up series is far less meta in its treatment of time; yet like the Beforefilms, Father Time is a palpable presence in every frame. There’s something compelling about observing the passage of time — 56 years, in this case — as it molds, batters, refines and weathers these people on each of their wildly divergent paths. Some of the original fourteen children grew up to be very successful; others not so much. Most started families and now have kids, grandkids, stepkids, and exes. Some (but not all) exceeded the expectations of the social class into which they were born. Some are happier than others (from what we can tell in our peeks inside, at least), and the only thing they all have in common is that none, not a one, has conquered time. They are all aging, and with every passing Up film we feel the weight of this ever more.

Cinema is unique among mediums in its ability to “sculpt in time,” as Andrey Tarkovsky wrote. It’s all about compressing, elongating, speeding up, and editing time to tell a story (that may span millennia or minutes) in the span of just a few hours. But Before and Up are especially compelling because rather than focusing on the filmmaker’s power over time, they focus on time’s power over us. Linklater tries his best to tell each Before film in real time, avoiding cinema’s manipulative power and instead foregrounding the somewhat eerie feeling of just sitting with time as it unfolds.

The Up films leverage cinema’s ability to compress time by including footage from the previous entries in each present portrait. What we get is essentially a moving-image scrapbook of each of these peoples’ 56-years, summarized in about ten minutes each. Watching it evokes the emotions of looking through an old box of photos and reliving an entire past in one quick burst of nostalgia. It confronts us with the expansiveness of what has come before; which seems large to us because our memories are painfully small and cannot hold every special moment we’ve had or beautiful thing we’ve seen, let alone the histories of other lives and lands.

Unless we have cameras there to capture every moment, our pasts are just as inaccessible to us as our futures. Memories, photos, tales of old can only reconstruct former glories up to a point (for a smart take on all this as it relates to “documenting” one’s past, see Sarah Polley’s amazing new film, Stories We Tell). And yet it could be argued that the “present” is the most elusive of all. For in reality, what we think of as the present is really just our brain processing things in the past — even if just a millisecond ago. Time is most relentless in the present because try as we might to slow it down or speed it up, it only goes by its own pace. The past and future are more malleable categories because they exist entirely in our minds, where we can elongate, embellish, or edit our recollection or vision of an experience, to our liking.

Tarkovsky puts it well in this excerpt from Sculpting In Time:

“Time is said to be irreversible. And this is true enough in the sense that ‘you can’t bring back the past’. But what exactly is this ‘past’? Is it what has passed? And what does ‘passed’ mean for a person when for each of us the past is the bearer of all that is constant in the reality of the present, of each current moment? In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight only in its recollection.”

The Before and Up films are powerful because they embody the “sand between the fingers” brevity of the present: reminding us that even the most magical moments in life are fleeting, that our “when I grow up” dreams will be here and gone before we know it, and that as a result it makes little sense to live in search of a permanent state of pleasure or satisfaction. Such a thing would be, as Solomon might say, like “chasing after the wind.” Our hearts will be restless, said Augustine, until they rest in Thee. And perhaps that is “Father” Time’s greatest gift to us: stirring up a restlessness in our souls that directs our longing to something Other, unfathomably infinite and unbound by time.

To the Wonder

Terrence Malick's sixth film, To the Wonder, released last week in select theaters, as well as on demand and on iTunes. It's a characteristically visceral experience of a film, meaning I STRONGLY suggest you try to see it on the big screen rather than on a computer screen. 

I have been following Malick's career with great interest for more than 15 years (basically since I saw The Thin Red Line in 1998), and have written quite a bit about the man and his films. See here, here, here, here and here for a sampling.

So it was with great pleasure that Christianity Today gave me the opportunity to write a lengthy review essay about the film, in which I synthesize the themes and cinematic vision of Malick's larger body of work by a taking a close look at To the Wonder (which I've already seen three times). Below is one section of the review, but if you have a bit of time and you're a fan of Malick, I'd strongly suggested reading the whole thing.

To the Wonder is about a way of seeing—both seeing the world around us, and seeing ourselves properly, something he embodies not just on screen but in his working process. It's no coincidence that it begins with the point of view of Marina and Neil's own cell phone camera (as they travel by train "to the Wonder"). It's the focusing of our attention via lenses on life: perceiving the beauty in the pretty and the ugly, the thrilling and the mundane, and seeing how it all points heavenward. Christ in all; "All things shining" (The Thin Red Line).

Malick's camera has a particular gaze. He spends more time than most on almost gratuitous beauty (puffy clouds, swimming turtles, beautiful hands). And his lens lingers on the mundane: empty rooms, walls, appliances, even a laptop displaying a Skype conversation. Everything is interesting to Malick.

Everything except himself. In both To the Wonder and The Tree of Life, the actors portraying the adult Malick (Ben Affleck and Sean Penn, respectively) come across as passive observers—quiet, contemplative, almost awkward bystanders in the movie. They are fitting representations of a man who seems far more comfortable paying attention to the world around him than bringing attention to himself.

Much has been made of Malick's tendency to hire big-name actors for his films, shoot tons of footage, and then leave them largely or entirely out of the final cut. Rachel Weisz, Michael Sheen, Amanda Peet, and Barry Pepper are among the actors ultimately cut out completely from To the Wonder. Adrien Brody famously thought his three months of intense shooting on The Thin Red Line would result in a starring role, only to find out at the premiere that his part had been reduced to a single line of dialogue. It may be a somewhat cruel trademark (from the big-ego actor's point of view), but this method is fundamental to Malick's vision of man's place in the cosmos.

In this, Malick is suggesting that it's far more important for us to see well rather than to be well seen. Insofar as cinema has a purpose, it should not be about audiences glorifying actors or actors glorifying themselves, as much as creating an environment of focused vision and contemplation wherein the beauty of this world confronts and perhaps transforms the audience.

The whole of Malick's oeuvre seems to be a call to put aside our hubris and wake to the Divine all around us. Brad Pitt's character in The Tree of Life "wanted to be loved because I was great," but by the end of the film he recognizes that he was foolish for paying no attention to "the glory all around us . . . I dishonored it all and didn't notice the glory."

But when Malick speaks of being awakened to the "glory all around us," what does he mean? Is it a sort of pantheistic deification of nature? A deistic affirmation of some vague, removed divinity? With The Tree of Life and now To the Wonder, I am convinced that he is speaking of "the glory" of the world not in the sense of being the thing to be worshipped but as pointer to the Being to be worshipped, namely the Christian God. To adopt this way of seeing is to engage with external activators of the sensus divinitatis built into our very being—an innate proclivity to suspect God's existence.

Read the full review at Christianity Today. I'd also suggest you read this fascinating piece on Malick's filmmaking process for To the Wonder.

Truth, Memory, Love: The Films of 2012

As the last in a long, exhausting, three-month parade of self-congratulatory awards shows and “best of the year” recaps, the Academy Awards sometimes come as more of a relief than a climax. Finally we can shut the door on the year that was and move on to the next big things.

When we watch the Oscars we’re often surprised to be reminded that yes, that film from a year ago was fromjust a year ago. So it goes in our hyperspeed forgetful culture, where it’s hard to remember last week’s viral YouTube clip let alone last year’s blockbuster films. It’s no wonder Academy voters tend to nominate only movies released in the last few months of a year. Everything these days — even the best movies — are so swiftly consumed and disposed. Very little lingers. I’m pleasantly surprised when Academy voters recognize anything from before October (this year’s token early-in-the-year nominee was Beasts of the Southern Wild).

It seems our collective cultural memory is ever more truncated. Who of us can remember the Best Picture winners from recent years? Or if you watch the Oscars more for the fashions, who can remember what anyone wore?

Memory can be as untrustworthy as it is beloved, as fragile and dangerous as it is indispensable. Perhaps because our frantically paced, fragmented contemporary world reinforces the tenuousness of recollection more than ever, many of this year’s films seemed to wrestle with that very theme.

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained played with our culture’s collective memories of slavery and the Civil War, wrestling with the iconography of national heroes and institutions and the lingering stains of a peculiar period in American history.

Zero Dark Thirty and Argo also explored American history, albeit much more recent episodes. The former, likeLincoln, received plenty of criticism for its portrayals of the way things happened — in this case the way torture was or was not an influential part of the quest for Osama Bin Laden. The difficulty of that question—and the feverish handwringing from politicians and commentators that accompanied it—underscores the difficulty we have as our society with truth: locating it, understanding it, reckoning with it, even when it’s such recent history.

Ang Lee’s Life of Pi dealt with this in its own (perhaps heavy-handed) way. The film ends with a postmodern monologue that acknowledges the difficulties we have with narratives of our history (who can ever know whatactually happened?) while celebrating the art of storytelling in a “who cares what’s true!” sort of way.

Ben Affleck’s Argo seems to advocate a similar stance toward truth. Both in its celebration of cinematic storytelling as a liberating force (literally) and in its own unabashed stretching of the facts in the historical episode it narrates, Argo traverses the same epistemological terrain as Life of Pi, though perhaps more unknowingly. Affleck probably didn’t set out to make a film that presents so vividly the conundrum of historical truth’s elusiveness and storytelling’s distorting power, but that’s what Argo turns out to be (and not in a good way). In his recent takedown of Argo, critic Andrew O’Hehir calls the film “a propaganda movie in the truest sense, one that claims to be innocent of all ideology.” He continues:

Affleck and Terrio are spinning a fanciful tale designed to make us feel better about the decrepit, xenophobic and belligerent Cold War America of 1980 as it toppled toward the abyss of Reaganism, and that’s a more outrageous lie than any of the contested historical points in Lincoln or Zero Dark Thirty. It’s almost hilarious that the grim and ambiguous portrayal of torture in Kathryn Bigelow’s film—torture that absolutely happened, however one judges it and whatever information it did or didn’t produce—was widely decried as propagandistic by well-meaning liberals who never noticed or didn’t care about Affleck and Terrio’s wholesale fictionalization.

It’s unfortunate that Argo appears to be on track to become the next Crash (that is: an extremely undeserving Best Picture winner). Because there were many other 2012 films that more eloquently wrestled with the preoccupations and eccentricities of our present age.

One I commend to you is Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a Turkish drama from Nuri Bilge Ceylan that explores the theme of the elusiveness of truth in a beautifully restrained, curiously ambivalent manner—one that leaves you unsettled precisely because it hits so close to home. The Imposter is another deeply unnerving, absolutely gripping film from 2012 that explores the tension between truth and storytelling. It’s a documentary that depicts a stranger-than-fiction story of identity theft, breached security, and (most disturbingly) one family’s willful self-deception.

The anxieties about truth on display in all of these films seem fitting for a year like 2012 — a politically charged, rhetoric-saturated election year. A year in which the hiddenness of truth and the reality that there are very few “no-spin zones” left in this world became depressingly pronounced. Ours is a world where subjective narratives of every sort — whether 140 character tweets, cable news talking head banter, or blog commentary — bombard us from every which way at nearly all hours of the day. It’s no wonder skepticism about truth and uneasiness about narrative reliability thread through so many of our films.

This present awareness of our weak connections to truth and our fragility in a world so crazed and chaotic has a positive consequence in film as well: a renewed emphasis on the power of human connection and love as a coping mechanism. This can be seen in 2012 films like Moonrise Kingdom, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Silver Linings Playbook, Amour, and Rust and Bone—movies where terrible things happen and suffering abounds, but love for one another becomes an almost salvific balm. This is also evident in my favorite film of 2012, The Dardenne Brothers’ The Kid With a Bike (read my review), which powerfully depicts the redemptive power of sacrificial love between a single woman and an orphaned boy who stumbles into her life.

Of course, relationships can be as fragile, fickle and untrustworthy as are our connections to truth. Films like On the Road. Killing Them Softly, and The Loneliest Planet underscore this point, showing how tenuous our connections to one another can be and how quickly they can turn, especially in an environment of skepticism and “every man for himself” individualism. We live in a world where (for good reason, perhaps), people are more guarded than ever. We’ve seen tragedy and expect it. We’ve been let down too many times and will not be surprised by it again. In such a world it’s hard to open oneself up too readily to anything purporting to be substantial — whether it be love, or “truth,” or a stable family.

Some of the best films—of this year or any year—are those which chip away a bit at this guardedness and invite us to believe in things like love and truth again. For me this year, that was The Kid With the Bike. What was it for you?

Originally published on Q Ideas.