Brief and Sundry Thoughts on John Michael McDonagh’s “Calvary”
January 21, 2015 1 Comment

Brief and Sundry Thoughts on John Michael McDonagh’s “Calvary”

pzZvVdwHTuvOrvdcVj-WteA9dhpevhMcX-4h3xyf9Es (Note: I won’t sum up the plot. For that, and more, see Steven Greydanus’s and Lauren Ely‘s excellent reviews of the film.)

I saw Calvary in the same week that I saw When The Game Stands Tall. Which manifested the stark and depressing contrast between the genre of well-meaning, cloyingly inspirational faith-based movies and those rare films, often made by non-believers, that searchingly and artfully wrestle with the Cross at the center of the Christian mystery.

But Calvary is a very hard film to watch. It is not for all sensibilities and is certainly not for family viewing.

To paraphrase Walker Percy, before life can be affirmed in a work of art, death-in-life must first be named. Calvary vividly and relentlessly puts on display the grotesque death-in-life of the ordinary “wellness” of contemporary man.

Flannery O’Connor: “I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.” One might say the same about McDonagh’s subject in Calvary. In one scene in the confessional Father James wonders aloud to his penitent that perhaps the medieval belief in demons and demon possession was “closer to the mark” than modern psychological theories of evil. What Calvary shows us is pandaemonium, a parade of demons taunting the representative of Christ.

Brendan Gleeson is superb as Father James. And the character of Father James is one of the finest cinematic portrayals of a priest I can recall. Not that Father James is perfect, or that all of his counsel is sound (did I misunderstand the scene in which he advises the young man struggling with purity to go to a bigger city where there’s more women with loose morals? Was this an ironic joke?). But all in all he is virtuous and wise, and it is painful to watch his struggle faithfully to minister to those who can only taunt and abuse him. Calvary is a fine example of how virtue can be depicted without being saccharine.

There were some false notes. After a gripping opening I thought the second act sagged a bit, with too many stagey, talky scenes serving only for symbolic effect. I don’t think it did much for the narrative for Father James’s bishop to be so effete, but I suppose McDonagh wanted to contrast Father James’ integrity with the complacency of the institutional Church.

I don’t find the denoument ambiguous. I believe what McDonagh is trying to say in Calvary is that Father James is both the martyr-victim of those who seek to wound the Church in the wake of the clergy abuse scandal, and the very thing such people need the most. I thought the post-climax scenes of the townspeople going about their customary business was meant to show how lost they were without the grace that Father James attempted to bring them. The final scene in the prison between Fiona and Jack confirms the enduring gift of Father James’ final sacrifice.

In the end, Calvary argues that forgiveness is the only way past the pain of betrayal.

 

The image above is reproduced courtesy of Reprisal Films.

Filed Under: At the Movies, Writing in an Apocalyptic Time Tagged: , , , ,
December 24, 2014 Leave a Comment

Movie Review, THE HOBBIT: The Battle of the Five Armies

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering what J.R.R. Tolkien himself would have thought of Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, a six-film, decade-and-half-long pop culture event culminating this Christmas Season with the finale of The Hobbit trilogy, The Battle of the Five Armies, then you should wonder no longer: he would have loathed them.

One can’t be absolutely sure, of course, but that’s the impression one gets after reading Tolkien’s Letters, in which the author comes off as rather prickly about proposed adaptations of his work (see, for example, Tolkien’s stiff opinions about possible collaboration with Walt Disney). Not that Tolkien was morally and philosophically opposed to adaptations of what he liked to call his “stuff.” Many fans of Tolkien may not be aware that in 1968 he sold to United Artists the film, stage, and (wait for it) merchandising rights to both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit for a figure of just over 100,000 pounds. That’s millions in today’s money, and it doesn’t include the 7.5% royalty interest Tolkien retained in any future adaptations.

I don’t mention this in a spirit of trying to expose a great author’s baser instincts. I think it’s perfectly natural and right in the age of cinema and television for an author, especially of Tolkien’s stature, to want to see his work translated into these media. Though it may be, as has been reported, that Tolkien’s contract with United Artists was motivated solely by tax pressures, I hope that he also saw the fittingness of adapting the world of Middle-Earth to other media, and especially the big screen. After all, if an author is going to invite us to visit another world entirely, then why not allow us to bring as many senses as we can?

That the film rights Tolkien sold to United Artists eventually came into the possession of New Line Cinema, was, contrary to what we might imagine Tolkien himself thinking, the most fortunate thing to happen to Tolkien’s literary legacy since his death in 1973. For it was, of course, New Line who hired Peter Jackson to adapt The Lord of the Rings as a trilogy of films, the enormous global success of which, ten years or so later, inspired the making of a prequel film trilogy of The Hobbit.

Peter Jackson rose to prominence as a young Kiwi filmmaker by making splatter horror films. (His very first film was the aptly named Bad Taste.) While Jackson’s first aesthetic love for the pleasures of excess has certainly been combined over the years with more mature tastes, that weakness nonetheless has remained. The decision–admittedly not Jackson’s alone–to make The Hobbit as a trilogy is a prime case in point. The Hobbit is a marvelous adventure story, primarily intended for children, with suitable material for one really good two-and-a-half hour film. Stretching the material into three movies handicapped the adaptation from the outset, inviting many ridiculous excesses on Jackson’s part. The 40-minutes or so of dwarf shenanigans preceding the first-act break in the opening installment of The Hobbit trilogy, An Unexpected Journey, is one instance that springs readily to mind. But the absolute nadir of Jackson’s entire involvement with Tolkien’s material came in the second installment of The Hobbit trilogy, The Desolation of Smaug. The absurdity of the fight sequence involving Legolas and the (invented) elf lady-warrior Tauriel in the barrel scene was outdone only by the dwarf-flight from Smaug (involving the molten gold ploy) at the climax. The Desolation of Smaug was Jacksonian excess at its most refined, an excess that was probably hard to avoid with the source material stretched, as Tolkien might say, like butter scraped over too much bread.

And yet, The Battle of the Five Armies somewhat recaptures the glories of Jackson’s approach to Tolkien, an approach that reached its zenith in the culminating film of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King. Yes, there are glories to Jackson’s approach to Tolkien. It might be thought providential that full-scale film adaptations of Tolkien’s works were not attempted until the era of CGI and the maestros at Weta Workshop were around to work their magic. With these tools at his disposal, Jackson, with a coterie of very fine actors and artists, has allowed us to experience Middle-Earth in an extraordinarily imaginative way, meanwhile inspiring myriad people to encounter Tolkien’s writing on their own. Despite its drawbacks, The Battle of the Five Armies reminds us again how exciting and edifying for us Jackson has made Tolkien’s world.

Likely because it is the third part of a trilogy, in which a storyteller is obliged to tidy up all the loose ends, The Battle of the Five Armies has less padding and fewer absurd action sequences than one would have expected after seeing its predecessors. Though the source material, in my edition of The Hobbit, is only a little less than 70 pages out of nearly 330, the film, because it has an ultimate climax to achieve, is more narratively focused. Even when it comes to the battle sequences, Jackson hits the golden mean between excess and deficiency just about right.

These battle sequences, though filled with cartoon epic violence, are more often thrilling than not, and the final confrontation between Thorin and Azog springs some welcome surprises. Moreover, though the scene in which Galadriel confronts Sauron missed its moment, and the scene of Thorin’s victory over his own gold sickness needed a dramatic correlative outside his mind, these defects are redeemed by Martin Freeman’s wonderful portrayal of Bilbo Baggins, Richard Armitage’s Thorin Oakenshield, Luke Evans’ Bard, Lee Pace’s Thranduil, and, the anchor of all six films, Sir Ian McKellan’s Gandalf. The closing scenes of The Battle of the Five Armies, in which we say goodbye to Bilbo and connect his story up to the Lord of the Rings, are a fitting end to all that Jackson has accomplished over six films.

Indeed, all things considered, Tolkien’s legacy has much to be grateful for in what Peter Jackson has done with it. Both artists, in a way, save one another’s work from its respective excesses. Jackson saves Tolkien’s novels from an excess of legendarium detail at the expense of story, while Tolkien saves Jackson by giving him material of real substance. Since 2001, thanks to both Tolkien and Peter Jackson working together, film audiences have been able to venture into a world governed by virtue, heroism, honor, the priority of home-life over power (as Thorin reminds us in his parting words), and the dignity and efficacy of the “little guy” in a culture of death. It makes one melancholy to have to leave such a golden world. But now that we’ve seen it we will surely, like Bilbo, never be able to forget it.

 

Images reproduced courtesy of New Line Cinema.

Filed Under: At the Movies Tagged: , , ,
August 16, 2014 9 Comments

What Truth Should We Take Away from “The Giver”?

The Noble Lie

The new film adaptation of Lois Lowry’s Newbery award-winning 1993 young adult novel, The Giver, directed by Phillip Noyce, follows the book in making use of the conceit of the “noble lie” first formulated by Plato in the Republic. A noble lie is a false story that leaders of a community tell the general populace “for their own good.” A noble lie obscures the truth, but eliminates potential conflict and secures harmonious political life. In the Republic Plato has the chief characters of his dialogue, Socrates, Glaucon and Adeimantus, construct an imaginary city, a “city in speech,” that is perfectly just. But the city is founded upon a lie about the natural origin of the peoples that helps maintain the three strictly-defined social classes upon which the justice of the city is based.

The elders of the apparently utopian “Community” at the center of The Giver tell a lie about the world that existed before an undescribed global disaster. They say nothing to the general populace about war, poverty, disease, starvation, or other evils, which do not exist in the Community. But they also do not permit love, strong emotion, sex, religion, even music and color–because they see these things as the sources of diversity and thus of conflict and thus of the evils they have eliminated. Within the Community, Sameness is the driving political principle. Only one elderly man, the Receiver of Memories, knows in full what the world was like before the Community came into existence. In his mind he stores all the memories from that older world, both good and the bad, so as to be a source of wisdom for the Community elders. The Giver is the story of a boy, Jonas (played by Brenton Thwaites), twelve in the book but more like sixteen in the movie, who is chosen to be the next Receiver of Memories, and so becomes apprentice to the elderly “Giver.” But when Jonas discovers from the Giver that the Community has been founded upon a noble lie, he takes it upon itself to risk everything in order to unveil the truth.

Sameness Everywhere

As a film, The Giver has a good premise but is rather lackluster in the execution. A big part of the problem is that the central conflict–lying baddie elders vs. innocent Jonas and his friends–is inherently two-dimensional. The best sci-fi narratives play with the questions of what is essential to human being and to political life, and The Giver plays with both questions and at times in interesting ways. The Community, for example, like the ideal city in Plato’s Republic, eliminates the natural family, which serves as the cause of some interesting conflict. But somehow the absence of the natural family from the Community, and even of love, color, and a sense of the horror of death, fails to generate the kind of interest that we experience when we think about the essential place of emotions in human life through the Star Trek characters of Spock and Data. The Giver tries to make the devil’s advocate argument that choice and diversity and beauty only lead to conflict and suffering, but it’s a tough argument to make and it’s never done convincingly. A big part of the problem is that Meryl Streep’s icy Chief Elder is predictable, boring, and in need of a better hairdresser, and Jeff Bridges’ Giver, even in the scene with Taylor Swift’s Rosemary, never gives us a really compelling point of emotional connection (it doesn’t help that the voice Bridges gives to the Giver is unnatural and distracting). In the end, it’s the lack of rounded characters, combined with a two-dimensional central conflict the resolution of which is never really in doubt, that causes The Giver to come off flat and disappointing, inflicted with the same malaise of Sameness which governs the Community it depicts.

Beyond the Coast of Dystopia

In the Republic, Plato engages in an exercise somewhat like the sci-fi writer–indeed, the noble lie imagined by Socrates and his friends has a certain fantasy element to it. In thinking about the question of justice, Plato plays with the questions of what is necessary to human nature and political life. The Giver does the same, but the answers the film comes up with are ones far different than the ones Plato’s characters find. What truth does Jonas discover beyond the coast of the dystopian Community? He discovers that human happiness depends upon the very things the elders of the Community have kept secret. Love can lead to war, yes, but a truly fulfilling human life without love is impossible.

But perhaps even more fundamental to love is choice. In the final confrontation between the Chief Elder and the Giver, the Chief Elder declares that the power of choice had to be taken away from the members of the Community because “when human beings are given the power to choose they always choose badly.” In vanquishing the world of Sameness The Giver upholds choice and diversity as the defining features of human nature. This is the truth Jonas struggles to make known. The good memories Jonas receives from the Giver show that religion, for example, is part of the truth of what makes us human, but it’s religion enfolded within choice that is celebrated, religion as an expression of human diversity, not religion as worship of the one true God. Jonas also receives memories that celebrate the value of traditional marriage and the family, but again, what is being valued is one among the many varied and beautiful ways in which human beings live out their loves, not the special value of this particular institution. The Giver also pays a certain homage to Christian virtue–in the Giver’s exhortation to the elders on “love, hope and faith” and in the Christmas carol in the film’s closing shot–but it is not full-blooded Christian virtue that is being honored but rather Christianity as a symbol of a  richer form of human existence. What Jonas finds beyond the coast of dystopia, in short, are the liberal virtues (understanding “liberal” in the broadly philosophical sense) of which choice, not charity, is the greatest.

And Yet Nature Abides

It was the first-century B.C. Roman poet Horace who in one of his epistles wrote, “You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she will always come running back.” In upholding the liberal virtues The Giver drives out those certain aspects of human nature which exist prior to our choices. For Plato, and for the Christian tradition up until the late middle ages, what is most important is the direction that nature gives to our choices, not the power of choice all by itself. It is nature that directs us to the traditional understanding of the family, to love (understood in a definite ways), to the intrinsic value of all human life, to music, and to color. It is nature which celebrates (within limits) diversity. Nature directs us to our fulfillment, which makes it very difficult entirely to do away with nature even when we do our best to drive it out.

And so we see in the argument of The Giver, in its condemnation of the values of the Community, a clear affirmation of nature’s ways: biological reproduction, the natural family, the value of color and the fine arts, the horror of euthanasia and of death generally. Though the movie itself is ambiguous on the point, the finest truth we can receive from The Giver is that the grandeur of human choice is only realized when we choose according to the direction given by our shared human nature.

What did you think of The Giver (film or book)? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Looking for more dystopian sci-fi? Take a look at my short story, “The Bureau of Myths,” available at Amazon for just 99 cents.

 

The stills from The Giver above are reproduced courtesy of Walden Media and The Weinstein Company.

Filed Under: At the Movies, The Craft of Screenwriting Tagged: , , , , , , , ,