The Mosquito Coast

“The United States is going to hell in a handbasket,” so we’ve heard many say, including the main character of this movie, The Mosquito Coast.  The movie provides a reasonable moral warning to those who think they want to pack up to leave this country for a better land, either because the country’s going socialistic, going capitalistic, getting immoral, or any which way you think is bad.  As well, The Mosquito Coast is a commentary on the classic American ethos: self-made, independent, and always on the go.

Here the main character, Allie Fox, is a genius inventor who grumpily complains to his oldest son that America is going down the toilet.  “We eat when we’re not hungry, drink when we’re not thirsty. We buy what we don’t need and throw away everything that’s useful,” Allie complains while in a grocery chain store.  He is not a Marxist, however, but a quasi-traditionalist who believes partly in classic American values and completely in his own self-determination.  Fox’s complaints include consumer culture, the possibility of nuclear war, and increasing dependence on government.  He has an absolute trust in progress, and he demands that others adopt his pluck and inventiveness: “It’s an absolute sin to accept the decadence of obsolescence. Why do things get worse and worse? They don’t have to. They could get better and better.”

Fed up with the United States, Fox decides to pick up his family of six and move to the Mosquito Coast, manifesting his American spirit.  Even though he is sick of the U.S., Fox is thoroughly American.  He wants to enter a natural paradise and create civilization, a civilization on his own terms.   He wants the wilderness and the machine at the same time, with himself in control and as few people around as possible.

So Fox and family move to the jungle in the Caribbean and end up buying a small village in the middle of nowhere.  Along the way Fox runs into a charismatic missionary, Reverend Spellgood.  As something of an atheist, Fox demonstrates that he is the intellectual better of the two, and thereafter the two become rivals, competing for the hearts and minds of the locals.  Spellgood doesn’t much like what Fox is up to, and Fox thinks Spellgood is a charlatan.  In a sense, the movie seems to say, both are two of the same spirit: crafty leaders, one scientific and one religious, both quintessentially American.

Needless to say, Fox’s social and scientific experiments are utter failures, in stark contrast to his views on human progress.  Fox directly compares himself to Dr. Frankenstein, an apt comparison which plays out symbolically in the fate of Fox’s pet project, an enormous ice machine that uses nothing but fire and ammonia to make ice.

The story is told through the eyes of Fox’s son, Charlie Fox, a teenager who is unsure how to view his independently-minded father.  Fox’s entire family suffers from his obsessions and self-centeredness, especially in the latter stages of the movie when Fox takes them all — starving and weary — on a raft up a river, ala Heart of Darkness.  There are a number of discussion items for fathers and husbands in a study group to get out of this movie, particularly on the subject of overbearing or tyrannical family leaders.

To be sure, there are a number of flaws in the movie.  For example, the local Caribbeans are treated cinematically almost as noble savages.  Innocent and good-hearted, they are the pawns of Fox and Goodspeed.  The tribal drumbeats even serve to tempt young Charlie, who eschews the call to go native. The movie — in typical late 20th century fashion — compares the ambitious Americans with the happy-go-lucky Third Worlders.  In most respects it seems the Third Worlders are better, though the movie clearly serves to praise and critique the Fox family, while allowing the natives to only be background participants in the drama.

In spite of these and other flaws, The Mosquito Coast is intriguing enough to watch carefully.  It’s worthwhile to resurrect it in a time when your conservative or far-left friends are grumbling loudly about socialism and fascism and our national downward spiral.

Entertainment: 8

Intelligence: 7

Morality: 7 (on par with Pixar and other animated films, in terms of the lack of sex and bad language)

Fireproof

Although under high standards it deserves a trouncing, Fireproof is decent entertainment.  Realize that our bar is quite low here and that we laughed at the movie’s blunders.  Still, this is comparable to 95% of the fare you’ll find either on  the small or big screen.  It is certainly no worse, cinematically speaking, than the several dozen brainless romantic comedies released each year.

Fireproof is, above all else, a religious tract.  There is nothing wrong with making a tract movie — Hollywood is churning out several a day — though one must realize that a tract is not on par in terms of quality with a timeless theological treatise. That this tract is a full-length feature movie should point us to the obvious: that it’s ridiculously expensive for Christians to engage in making “Christian” movies.  The time and capital put into Fireproof boggles the mind. Dreams of a Christan movie industry or counterculture will continue to be dreams without billions of dollars invested.

This Fireproof tract is mostly about how to make your marriage work.  The formula for successful marriage is here: first convert to faith in Christ, listen to your parents, humble yourself, pursue your spouse. The characters fit into the formula perfectly; they are not played with subtleties, but then no one here is aiming for high praise.  The main character works through a 40-day, win-back-your-wife recipe book, which looks like it was inserted into the movie as a marketing tool to sell the Fireproof Your Marriage Devotional Guide.    Make no mistake, the suggestions in this recipe are quite good, although some require a decent income.

The pleasant surprise in this movie is that certain problems and moments are genuine.  Unlike its sister movie, Facing the Giants, Fireproof does not allow its main character to win life’s lottery immediately after conversion.  He still suffers internally, and he still faces a looming divorce.  He considers indulging in pornography.  Probably every modern American, bourgeois, Christian adult will find some problem or temptation to relate to in the movie.   Roughly 50% of Christian marriages end in divorce, so this movie should hit a nerve with the greater population.

Yet the movie is nearly ruined by its sideshows.  The main character is a firefighter, which calls for two unnecessary action scenes that have relatively little to do with the rest of the plot (yes, we get it: he saves total strangers but can’t love his wife; he needs to “fireproof” his marriage just as he does his job, etc.).

Those action scenes are acceptable given what Fireproof is, but the firefighter practical joke scenes are ridiculous.  This has to be the first serious movie about a dissolving marriage that’s interrupted by a hot sauce eating competition.  What exactly is it about mainstream evangelical culture that loves goofiness for goofiness’ sake?  Nothing else can explain the character of Wayne Floyd except that occasionally acting juvenile — e.g., imitating Adam Sandlar, performing silly dances, etc. — is a virtue for American Christians.

Entertainment: 7

Intelligence: 2

Morality: 10

The Dresser

The Dresser is about a dynamic master/servant relationship, much like the relationship between the Fool and King Lear in Shakespeare’s famous play.  In Lear, the relationship is  reversed.  The Fool is the wise man, and Lear, the powerful ruler and king, becomes a senile fool.  So it is in this movie, and it is fitting that the backdrop of this story is a stage production of Lear.

The impossible task for the servant, Norman the “dresser,” is that his friend and employer, a great actor who we only know by “Sir,” has had a senile episode.  “Sir” is supposed to play King Lear that evening, but his ravings combined with his egomania make this seemingly impossible.  Yet the effeminate Norman perseveres, enduring the selfishness of his employer.   What’s in it for Norman?  This is one of the central questions of the movie, and it is not certain that we ever fully find out, though there are several possibilities.

Perhaps the reason is simply what “Sir” calls “struggle and survival.”  That, Norman reminds him, sums up life.  The two are engaged in a production of King Lear during WWII-era Britain.  German rockets land perilously close to the theater.   Lear was the most popular Shakespeare play of the twentieth century, perhaps primarily for its powerful grimness.

The movie focuses on the backstage preparations, and then production, of this version of Lear.  “Sir” has acted in the play 227 times, but he has never been less prepared or more prepared to play Lear.  Less prepared, because his mania overwhelms him.  More prepared, because he is senile and manic.  Off-stage, Norman prods “Sir” to apply his makeup, to put on his frocks, to remember the lines.  Norman is as much a moral supporter as he is a personal assistant.  The other actors, fearing or disdaining “Sir,” couldn’t possibly understand Norman’s drive to get “Sir” onstage.  The show should be cancelled, but Norman persists.

What transpires during and after the production of Lear is for you to find out, but we recommend being familiar with King Lear before watching this movie.  It is an acting tour de force, centering on long scenes with the two men, Norman and “Sir.”  You must beware: this movie is extremely rich, but it is also exhausting.  It feels like a Wagnerian opera, invoking so many emotions over a short span that it feels longer than it is.  It is very funny, but as a tragicomedy, it has what might be called a grim worldview.  Yet the final emotion offered here, like the one Lear invokes, is perfectly reasonable, as long as it is not meant to be overwhelming.

Yes, the movie is rich. It goes deep into the following topics:  senility, servanthood, egomania, male-male bonding, aging, death, romantic longing, and acting versus being.  A far from exhaustive list.    Watch “Sir” apply his makeup for the part of Lear, and you watch a man age quickly.  He knows it.

Entertainment: 9

Intelligence: 10

Morality: see above

The Spirit of St. Louis

It was just a plane trip across the Atlantic ocean.  So a simple viewer might think of The Spirit of St. Louis, the story of the first flight across the Atlantic, made by Charles Lindbergh in 1927.  It’s quite easy to take Lindbergh’s flight lightly.  After all, dozens if not hundreds of planes now cross the Atlantic each day.

Back in ‘27, however, Lindbergh had to endure almost forty hours of nonstop flying, in a plane he couldn’t see out the front of, with technology that no one was sure about.  Before Lindbergh, several flights across the Atlantic had been attempted — there was a $25,000 prize for completing the flight — but none obviously succeeded.  Most that didn’t succeed resulted in death, so when Lindbergh took his plane up, he was taking the ultimate risk.

The movie honors this risk in a glorified way, and we admit we were sucked into it.  Lindbergh exemplified the best of American pluck and determination, which is what this movie celebrates.  Lindbergh even put his own money into his plane — $2000 of the $15,000 cost, according to the movie.  The story begins with Lindbergh seeking private investors for his plane, then the construction of the special plane, then Lindbergh’s gritty, mostly boring but harrowing at times, flight.  This movie is all about how private risk earns bountiful rewards, and how a determined soul can push creative and geographical boundaries.  Good grief, we wish people nowadays could catch this fever.  If they made an exemplary biopic of the 2000s, it would be of some greedy banker begging at the feet of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve.  Give us Lindbergh and the pre-WWII generation any day.  These people had a much better understanding of what it was to be free and responsible.  This movie, and not To Kill a Mockingbird, should be required viewing in American classrooms.

Jimmy Stewart plays Lindbergh here, and though he’s too old and his toupee is quite bad, his agitated determination and jittery voice are perfect for a role that could otherwise be dull.  Half the movie takes place in the tiny cockpit of a one-man plane, so Stewart had to deal with not being able to move.  Much of the movie is propelled by his voiceover narration, which heightens the suspense considerably even though you know the result of the flight.  Lindbergh indeed deserved the nickname “Lucky Lindy.”  What disasters he avoided during his transatlantic flight are amazing to behold. It is fitting that he, though not apparently a praying man, utters a pray to God right before he lands.

The movie is based on Lindbergh’s Pulitzer-Prize winning memoir of the flight, and it is surely ten times better than this movie.  YetThe Spirit of St. Louis does offer the visualization of the event, and this at least got us thinking.  What would it have been like to be a shepherd in Ireland, watching Lindbergh’s plane come from the ocean?  Or what would it have been like to have lacked sleep for 72 hours, only to be mobbed by 200,000 people after you landed your plane?  These and dozens of other intriguing circumstances make Lindbergh’s more than just a simple flight across the Atlantic.

Though the movie probably would lose its power during a second and third viewing — one of our qualifications for deeming a movie “great” is its rewatchability — we make an exception for this.   Surely not all viewers will care for it as much as we did.  But no doubt, it is a great movie.

Entertainment: 9

Intelligence: 5

Morality: 10

Quiz Show

Quiz Show is a fine morality play about lying and its consequences.  What’s even better is that it binds this moral problem to the medium of television.  You see, as TV watchers we don’t even realize the fiction of television.  It’s quite easy to get sucked into passive-viewing mode when watching the TV.  In that mode, we believe everything we see.  But everything on TV is carefully constructed for entertainment purposes, for the sake of ratings, which means advertising money.  That includes reality shows and real-time events.  But we rarely watch TV with that in mind.  We are mere consumers of TV programs, which means we set ourselves up to be suckers.

In Quiz Show, Charles Van Doren has been sucked into the world of game shows.  As a contestant on Twenty One, he finds instant celebrity.  He likes the attention, the cameras, the cover of Time Magazine. What’s worse, Van Doren chooses to be part of Twenty One’s rigged outcomes.  The producers of the game show choose which contestants will win the show, in order to boost the ratings.  They like Van Doren, and Van Doren likes being on the show.  So he cheats.

But Van Doren is the latest in a line of old New England WASPs, and as a literature instructor at Columbia with a master’s degree in astrophysics and a Ph.D. in literature, he also realizes that game shows are silly entertainment.  His father is a Pultizer-Prize winning writer, his mother a famous novelist herself.  Van Doren’s fame is different than theirs, inferior in every way, and he feels it.  Public scandal would bring the family dishonor, and so Van Doren tries his best to lie to cover up the game show fraud. Lying here begets more lying.

Pushing Van Doren to reveal the truth is Dick Goodwin, a government agent who’s investigating quiz shows.  Goodwin befriends Van Doren while pursuing him, and this complicates Goodwin’s investigation.  Goodwin has to use witnesses such as Herbert Stimpel, a former Twenty One contestant and a doofus who loves the limelight.  Goodwin hates having to side with the likes of Stimpel — at one point he vomits after hearing Stimpel’s egotistical ravings — but Goodwin would rather not publically implicate his friend, Van Doren.

Quiz Show’s strengths are numerous — acting, directing, writing — which is why it’s imminently watchable.  Best of all, perhaps, is the melancholy outcome.  Justice is served, but not in the way which implicates the big boys.  Quiz Show intimates that the government (here, Congress) and the highest levels of corporations are in cahoots, and that — at least at the show trials known as Congressional hearings — the truthtellers are only those who feel the weight of their own guilt.  Consequently, when money is on the line, personal guilt is a rare thing.  Goodwin’s summary of the hearings is apt: “We were supposed to get television, but television got us.”  His statement implies that television will continue to get us, and here in 2008, this seems accurate.

It is worth mentioning that there are moments of incoherence in Quiz Show.  Goodwin’s one-man investigation has no motivation, apart from the fact that he seems to have nothing else to do.  Worse, the end of the movie suggests that government regulation of the television industry would be a good solution to the problem of rigged gameshows.  This makes little sense.  If Congress can’t conduct a show trial honorably, would it regulate gameshows more honorably than NBC and Geritol?  Of course not.  But the idea that government regulation of communication networks and freedom of speech can even co-exist is a joke.  When the government regulates a medium, it has the authority to say what can and cannot be said or aired.  Liberals like Robert Redford (the director) have never figured out this contradiction.   Give them a government hostile to their views, and they’re all for freedom of speech.  Give them a government favorable to their views, and they’re for regulation.  Same for so-called conservatives.  The nerve.

Quiz Show is based on a real scandal from the 1950s, but we don’t take it to be accurate history.  We prefer not to even consider its relation to history at all.  Goodwin, for example, became a speechwriter for John F. Kennedy, and any presidential speechwriter is not exactly the kind of person we’d expect to be the exemplar hero who strives for truth and justice.  The movie should’ve changed the names of its characters — if you aren’t striving for accuracy, why characterize living people as something they are not?  At least the movie tries to put game shows, and TV for that matter, in a proper perspective.

Entertainment: 8

Intelligence: 6

Morality: 9 (about six unnecessary words)

Ace in the Hole

It’s only a matter of time before Ace in the Hole gets resurrected and put in the Film Canon of film canons.  It’s already in ours.  This cynical movie covers ground already staked out by some culturally conservative political and religious groups.  It would not work for any group intertwined with the powers-that-be, since it is a firm indictment of any reigning media establishment. But it is so biting, and so true, that we highly recommend it for anyone with a countercultural mindset.  That includes those of you who have gladly taken an axe to your TV set and are slightly cynical about present-day politics.

The irony is that Ace in the Hole — like so many classic movies from the first half of the twentieth century — was originally a liberal critique.  Back then, in the 1950s, liberals were only mild hypocrites with a good sense of Christian morality.  So while Ace in the Hole is a critique of capitalism, it actually critiques it on the basis of Christian morality, and not for multicultural tolerance or just because.

Ace in the Hole is the story of Chuck Tatum, a newspaper reporter on the lookout for number one.  Tatum seeks instant fame for himself, and, having been kicked out of the major cities on the east coast for his drive and determination to get The Story, he winds up in New Mexico.  Tatum takes a job at an Albuquerque newspaper, whose editor has an embroidered sign outside his door that says “Tell the Truth.”  Tatum sneers at this, complains about being in the desert, where nothing happens, and heads off to do another story.

On the way to that story, Tatum finds another one.  He learns that a man is stuck in a remote cave, an old Indian burial ground.  Smelling a major human-interest piece, Tatum crawls inside the cave to talk to the man.  Here there is little wrong, the man is only trapped in a cave-in, but the rescue job should take just a few hours.  But Tatum sees something in this situation he cannot resist: opportunity.

Here is where things get interesting.  Tatum stalls the rescue job.  After sending a piece to his newspaper about a man trapped in the mystical Mountain of the Seven Vultures, Tatum convinces the local sheriff to drill from the top instead of the bottom.  This will take days, as opposed to hours, but the benefit is that Tatum will make this a national story and turn the sheriff into the hero.  Not coincidentally, the sheriff is up for a tough re-election very soon.

The conspiracy further escalates.  The trapped man’s wife runs a diner nearby.  Like Tatum, she hates the remoteness of New Mexico.  When Tatum’s story breaks nationally, and tourists arrive in droves, her business increases exponentially.  She begins to be attracted to Tatum.  He’s an icon, a rockstar, the lone reporter who has access to the cave and the man who provides the scoop to the entire country.  She wants to run away with him to New York, and forgets about her trapped husband.

And then there are the tourists.  These naive people begin arriving at the cave-in after Tatum’s story breaks.  Soon, the cave is surrounded by commerce.  Ferris wheels, food vendors, impromptu concerts, and hundreds of people.  This cave-in, thanks to Tatum, is big business.

Everyone seems concerned about the trapped man, or is that the real concern?  The tourists, like good sheep, do not realize they are simple, manipulated consumers.   They think the trapped man will be rescued in a few days.  The other newspaper reporters feed their respective papers with information.  But the entire situation is a money machine, engineered by Tatum, who resigns from his New Mexican newspaper and earns a thousand a day working as an independent journalist.

So this movie is cynical about the following: consumerism, celebrity culture, media power, political electioneering, the purpose of human interest stories, and the neutrality of journalism.  But it is cynical in a morally critical way.  Watch how Christian iconography is used at the end, as the trapped man nears the end of the drilling and the end of his life.  Will he die?  This question is not as important as, what does that really mean for Tatum?

This is a movie that regular readers of this blog will definitely want to see.

Entertainment: 8

Intelligence: 8

Morality: 9

The Accidental Tourist

Hey, finally!  A movie that isn’t hyperemotional. If you want a quiet character study, in which the themes are grief, miscommunication, and martial separation, we hold out The Accidental Tourist to you.  This movie was a welcome relief to us, since we’ve been bombarded all our lives by outrageous characters, flashy effects, soaring music, and basically anything else that will get our attention.

Here there are no outrageous characters, only well-developed ones.  The main one, Macon Leary, writes travel books for businessmen.  Just like his customers, Leary does not like to travel, which means there’s a low-level reluctance to do what his job requires.  Yet give advice he does, but only in print.  The movie opens with Leary’s wife revealing to him that she wants a divorce.  The couple has undergone great stress in the last year, ever since their only son was killed in an armed robbery.

So Leary is left alone in a large house, with a dog named Edward, who (watch how the camera does this) is a main character in his own right.  Edward grieves too, and in a chance meeting, Leary runs into a dogtrainer named Muriel Pritchett.  Pritchett begins to train the dog to sit and be silent.  She is aggressive and assertive, but makes offers with no-strings-attached.  Leary does not want to see her, then he does not want to go to dinner, and then . . . he finds himself being slowly trained by her.

This story is not formulaic, and once Leary and Pritchett find a bit of joy in one another, we proceed to further complications involving Leary’s wife.  The key in this story is Leary’s motivations and culpability.  His character flaws are obvious, which makes you constantly question his judgment.  And yet you see him pulled into numerous situations which he was reluctant to enter to begin with — just like his job as a travel writer.  Every word that Leary utters is complicated by every circumstance he is in, every bit of information he knows, every character he is around.  The same can be said for all of the minor characters, too, and that’s what makes this a good movie.  (The subplots, not mentioned here, do great work too.)

There are two flaws.  The first one is formal.  Since the subjects at hand are love and marriage, the absence of Christ as the only firm anchor in marriage is obvious.  The movie is necessarily sad, though it contains a wide range of tones within that sadness.  We bring up this point just to bring it up.  You, dear, mature reader, can find plenty worthwhile material to discuss in this movie.  Between the two of us, we chatted during the entire movie about character motivations and complexities.  That’s a good thing.

But then the other flaw.  John Williams scored the movie.  For all the accolades this guy gets, we can’t understand why people don’t point out that he also ruins movies!  He comes close here.  His little six-note theme plays over and over and over and over and over again.  And over again and over again.  Six notes, repeatedly.  Did he score this movie for torture chambers?

Even worse, Williams has a bad habit of swelling music in certain scenes that do not need swelling music at all.  Swelling music is fine for action-adventure movies, which is what Williams is so well known for.  But in a multi-toned, emotionally complicated movie like this, you can’t swell the music in the final scene!  Argggghhhh.  The fact that Williams made an enormous musical crescendo in the last twenty seconds shows that he understood nothing about the movie.  We do not need a Star Wars finale to The Accidental Tourist.  So you have been warned about the last twenty seconds.

Entertainment: 7

Intelligence: 7

Morality: 3? Or 7?  Somewhere in there.

The Great Santini

Take George C. Scott’s General Patton and plop him down in a domestic family drama, and you have the The Great Santini.  As the title indicates, the focus of the movie is on the main character, Bull Meechum, a warrior and fighter pilot who happens to have a Southern belle for a wife and four interesting children.  The year is 1962, and Meechum is back home for the first time in a long time.  He and the family head to small-town South Carolina.  Then the family drama starts, and Patton is unleashed.

The movie is primarily about how military life affects families, particularly in the methods of fathers who are also trained soldiers.  For Meechum, there is little distinction between the air force base he works at and his home.  Meechum’s militarism and his just-one-of-the-boys attitude carries over into his civilian and family life, which means that he is often irascible or irresponsible, though his family at times seems to flourish because or in spite of Meechum’s bizarre leadership style.  With Meechum, we are a small step from Al Bundy and Homer Simpson, but The Great Santini is really only out to praise the nuclear family and the paternal role that heads it.

The key relationship among a number of important ones is between Meechum and his son, Ben.  Contrary to what you might guess, Ben is not introverted around or because of his father.  He flourishes fairly well, even acting like the old man in his own, particular way.  The Great Santini is a coming-of-age story for Ben, who turns 18 during the course of the movie and learns a lot of important male maturity stuff.  Ben even engages in a subplot in which he plays Huck Finn to a black teenager’s Jim,  but the way that subplot ends supports the point that this movie is about the complexities of Ben’s old man.

That subplot is indicative of the movie’s unwillingness to engage in stereotypes, and to go down the trodden roads that so many plots have gone before.  The Great Santini doesn’t always turn in the direction you think it will turn.  This is what separates it from its TV-movie brethren, even though the music and cinematography of Santini would make you believe that it first aired on CBS.

We haven’t laughed so frequently at a movie recently, mostly because of Santini’s antics and his children’s reactions to them.  But as C. says, the movie is hilarious, but it is not a funny movie. You won’t do much better with recent family-friendly fare though, so this is one worthy of your consideration.

Note: This movie does have some potentially objectionable moments.  A father lets his son get drunk, and there’s some cursing.  The ‘PG’ rating is accurate, but probably no one younger than a teenager will profit from it.

Entertainment: 8

Intelligence: 6

Morality: 7

The Secret of Roan Inish

The Secret of Roan Inish is about storytelling, particularly the Irish way, or at least the way we think the Irish should tell stories.  This mode of storytelling is at once mythmaking and truth-telling.  The stories are melancholic, but they are not to be taken as mere fairy tales.  No, these are family legends, very serious matters for young Fiona Keneally and the relatives who tell her about her family’s past.

Fiona, in fact, has just lost her mother.  Her younger brother once disappeared at sea in a bizarre accident.  Her father has sent her to her grandparents to live, while he pursues work in the city, a tough task since World War II just ended and the local economy is slow.  All this loss, but still Fiona is not alone.  Her extended family is tight-knit, and she hears the stories about her ancestral past with wonder.

The movie pursues the possibility that Fiona’s lost brother may not actually be dead.  If he’s not, he’s drifting around in his cradle, out there around the isle of Roan Inish.  The Keneallys used to live on Roan Inish, but they moved eastward, maybe because — as Fiona’s grandmother says — the way east is toward the future.  Going west, back to Roan Inish, is to head in the opposite direction.

The subtext of the movie is globalization.  Fiona’s father is absent because of market forces.  Midway through the movie, the Keneallys are told they must leave their home and move inland.  Certain rich people from America want a summer home on the Irish coast.  Fiona’s grandfather is grieved, because his way is the sea.  Perhaps, as Fiona looks at the situation, the way home is westward.

The movie is socially conservative in the sense that it favors ancient family tradition to adoption of the individualistic lifeways offered by the global marketplace.  It is similar to Whale Rider, another movie about a young Maori girl separated from her father, who learns the ways of the ancients while living with her grandparents.  Some viewers may not appreciate the privileging of quasi-pagan myths and the cinematic blending of those myths with reality.  To some extent, we agree with that negative sentiment, but the movie’s other themes and its cinematography make The Secret of Roan Inish a worthwhile view. Oh, and the storytelling.  This movie knows how to tell them.

Entertainment: 7

Intelligence: 6

Morality: 8

Stranger Than Fiction

Stranger Than Fiction is one of those movies that make people feel smart afterwards, even though three minutes of reflection or discussion would obliterate that feeling. Its main feature is an old story trick — a character who becomes aware that he is being written, that he is a part of a story that he cannot ultimately influence. That trick was novel back in 1914 when Miguel de Unamuno published Niebla. It still felt novel back when Italo Calvino was using it in the ’70s and ’80s. Today, after decades of employment, it feels no more interesting than any other cute narrative trick. But few audience members are aware of Unamuno, Calvino, Vonnegut, Foucault, or anyone else with some influence on Stranger Than Fiction, so we aren’t trying to be hard on them. It’s only to say that this trick has been done before, and it’s been done much better.

So what’s the point of it? Some Christians might say that the movie incorporates some kind of truth about the paradox of predestination and free will. The story is that Harold Crick, a nerdy IRS agent, begins to hear the voice of an omniscient narrator who describes Crick’s action in the third-person. Crick realizes that someone else is controlling him, so he goes to the most obvious person you’d go to in this situation: a college English professor. The professor asks: is Crick in a comedy or a tragedy? That’s the key question for the movie itself. You will know the answer if you know what movie audiences want and how this movie was marketed.

So people might try to allegorize this plot as the relationship between God and the creatures who he created in his image, but there are simpler explanations. Viewed through the lense of discourse theory, Stranger Than Fiction is about how people are “written” by the dominate conventions and uses of language. Rather than explain this in a complicated way, we’ll try a familiar example. Imagine the millions of people who hear about global warming on a regular basis. The way global warming is talked about shapes the thought-patterns of these people when it comes to the topic of global warming. When the subject comes up for them, they can only mimic what they’ve heard. This is as true of the anti- position as the pro- position. Now imagine this kind of mass mimicking occurring on a wide range of subjects. Imagine it happening for all of a person’s thoughts and actions in life. The theory says that the lifeways of people are shaped by dominate uses of language, its grammar, its syntax, and the ideas that it includes and excludes.

In this interpretation, it’s the writers who have the power, because obviously writers shape the language — whether they be novelists, marketers, speechwriters, or other members of mass media. Also, of secondary importance, are the intellectuals who can interpret language and the business people who sell language. Stranger Than Fiction incorporates characters of all three types — in the form of a famous novelist, a college professor, and a publishing agent. The bourgeois Crick and his hip girlfriend are basically under their control.

Crick is sort of resurrected in the end, saved from an inevitable death by the person who writes his life. He is saved to a more blissful life, to a sexual union with a tattooed entrepreneur for a girlfriend. In the Christian cosmos, this ending means tragedy — saved in order to continue a modern life of materialism — but in this movie it means comedy. We did not come away feeling smart; instead, we felt tricked.

Entertainment: 6

Intelligence: 4

Morality: 1