The Dude Abides

Themes: Movies

The Coen Brothers have a new film on the way, A Serious Man. Here’s the synopsis from the website:

Imaginatively exploring questions of faith, familial responsibility, delinquent behavior, dental phenomena, academia, mortality, and Judaism – and intersections thereof – A Serious Man is the new film from Academy Award-winning writer/directors Joel & Ethan Coen.

A Serious Man is the story of an ordinary man’s search for clarity in a universe where Jefferson Airplane is on the radio and F-Troop is on TV. It is 1967, and Larry Gopnik (Tony Award nominee Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) that she is leaving him. She has fallen in love with one of his more pompous acquaintances, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), who seems to her a more substantial person than the feckless Larry. Larry’s unemployable brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is sleeping on the couch, his son Danny (Aaron Wolff) is a discipline problem and a shirker at Hebrew school, and his daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) is filching money from his wallet in order to save up for a nose job.

While his wife and Sy Ableman blithely make new domestic arrangements, and his brother becomes more and more of a burden, an anonymous hostile letter-writer is trying to sabotage Larry’s chances for tenure at the university. Also, a graduate student seems to be trying to bribe him for a passing grade while at the same time threatening to sue him for defamation. Plus, the beautiful woman next door torments him by sunbathing nude. Struggling for equilibrium, Larry seeks advice from three different rabbis. Can anyone help him cope with his afflictions and become a righteous person – a mensch – a serious man?

Interestingly, a number of people who have seen the film have picked up parallels between Larry’s search for answers and the trials of the biblical Job. This would make sense to me, the Coen brothers have a habit of choosing texts to interact with in their films (occasionally they tell you: Homer’s Odyssey – O Brother, Where Art Thou?; sometimes you just have to think about it: Camus’ The Outsider – The Man Who Wasn’t There; and sometimes, well… Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men – No Country for Old Men.
But there is more to Job than just a handy textual basis for film exploration. The story of Job resonates with one of the key themes in the Coen brothers’ work – the problem/possibility of theodicy. The Coen brothers wrestle with a world in which apparently inexplicably evil things happen: a dude can pee on your rug, or your mate Donnie can get killed by Nihilists, who knows? It can be funny, as in The Big Lebowski, or terrifyingly bleak, as in No Country for Old Men. Always the disturbing question is, why? The humour, the tension, the tragedy, comes from people who keep asking this question in a world that refuses to answer. There is something strikingly powerful and completely absurd about the human quest for sense.
But ultimately, the only place to direct those questions is toward God, and not any kind of god – only the kind of God that Jews and Christian point to could hold out the possibility of answers. In fact, most polytheistic religions tend to create hierarchies of gods, or at least hierarchies of being, under the pressure of these dreadful questions. Many, many of the idols we have manufactured were forged under the hammer blows of this particular interrogation. In theological jargon it’s called the ‘problem of theodicy’. It is the point at which our questions inevitably becomes prayers, even if the form of prayer involves screaming in the darkness and wondering if you’ll hear an echo.

Christian philosophers have plied the world with arguments for the existence of God since before the World really thought it was a question. But the inescapable question for God is not, ‘are you there?’ But, ‘what on earth are you doing?’. Sometimes our experience of evil can be so destructive, so awful, that the only possible thing we can imagine saying to God is, ‘how dare you? How dare you BE in the light of this…’ Not, ‘can God’s existence be proven?’ But, ‘can God’s existence be justified?’ The people who wrote the Bible thought about that question. A Lot.

“But now apart from the law the righteousness of God (which is attested by the law and the prophets) has been disclosed – namely, the righteousness of God through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ for all who believe.” (Romans 3:21-22 NET)

On a different note: Zondervan has published a book about the theology of the Coen brothers. It’s called The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers.
Awesome.

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Gentlemen Broncos

Themes: Movies

Jared Hess (Napoleon from Napoleon Dynamite) has a new movie coming out: Gentlemen Broncos. If you had traumatic adolescence or ever wanted to be a science fiction writer (and frankly, who didn’t?) then you’ll probably enjoy it. It’s also got Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords who almost certainly had a very traumatic adolescence on top of having to be from New Zealand. It’s nice to see that he’s now getting something back.
The trailer made me laugh:

and there’s also a viral video of Dr Ronald Chevalier on The Art of Relaxating:

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Wilberforce – the Movie

Themes: History, Movies, Reviews

Well, the original motivation for all this writing about Wilberforce was the film Amazing Grace. It’s a new film that’s due for release on 26th July. Emma got invited to a media screening a couple of weeks ago and I tagged along.

So, What’s it like as a film?

To be honest, Amazing Grace would be a fantastic two part Sunday night feature on the ABC. It feels more like something churned out by the BBC period-piece Dickens/Austen mill, than a big screen affair.

The film opens with a fairly shameless ploy, Wilberforce’s carriage pulls up beside two (appropriately ugly) men who are beating a horse to death. Although Wilberforce is clearly ill, he is unable to turn away from the suffering of the horse and intervenes to stop the men…
…we get the point. Wilberforce is the champion of the oppressed.

And so, you are introduced to the greatest flaw in the film, it has a real penchant for cheese. It’s understandable, when you’re telling the story of truly heroic person it’s easy to touch it up with a golden dinner plate behind the head and plenty of Mozzarella.
But the fact is, really great people just seem greater when you tell their story warts and all.

Fortunately, the power of Wilberforce’s story overwhelms the defects in the storytelling.
There are some genuinely poignant moments: when Wilberforce boards a Slave Ship for the first time and is overcome by the smell; or when John Newton breaks down and confesses that he still hears the voices of the twenty thousand slaves he transported to the West Indies.
And its hard not to give a little cheer at the end when the House of Commons gives Wilberforce a standing ovation as the Bill to Abolish the Slave Trade finally passes into law.

Another positive is that the film doesn’t paper over Wilberforce’s Christian hope or minimise this as the central motivation for his determination to end the Slave Trade.
Which means that the best reason to see this film is to go away afterwards and have a good think about how when the gospel transforms individual minds its also begins to transform societies. Wilberforce was not a limp-wristed “social gospel” hippy, he was not even one of those who argue that we can best commend the gospel through acts of service. No, Wilberforce was a gospel-through-and-through-man. God’s word was at the centre of his life. As his mind was transformed by the words of God, his behaviour in the world was transformed to match. And that meant not sitting around while Africans rotted and died in stinking ships.
Wilberforce simply didn’t know how to live with the comfortable gap between belief and action.

So for all its flaws, go see Amazing Grace, and pray that God would give us more people like William Wilberforce.

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