The Odyssey (2026)

A tree forms itself in answer
to its place and to the light.
–Wendell Berry, “Sabbaths 1999–IV”

People are made by places, I thought.
–Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads

Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s nearly 3,000-year-old story features many of the director’s typical concerns and interests: the passage of time, the frailty of memory, and the centrality of human choice, among others. Homer’s story, on its face, is a story of transience. Odysseus, away from home and at war against Troy for a decade, spends nearly that same amount of time (sometimes) trying to return. In many ways, Nolan adapts this ancient story toward his typical concerns while minimizing its core feature: the deeply human desire to be home, at rest, where we belong.

Throughout Homer’s story, the notion of going home drives Odysseus increasingly at every stage of his journey. At the end of the Trojan War, this man has done his duty to King Agamemnon, giving the king a full decade of his life, suffering through devastating loss in war while his wife sits home alone and his son grows up without his father. Home dominates his thinking. The sailing journey home is nearly as difficult, with obstacles both terrifying and (apparently) fine slowing him down. Home dominates his thinking. He finally arrives in Ithaca and finds his house crowded with suitors courting his wife and eating his stores. Home dominates his thinking.

Nolan’s film certainly contains this theme, but where home dominates the ancient story, Nolan has pushed other concerns to the center and explicitly minimized the home theme. Nolan’s film certainly maximizes anti-war messaging (an ideal to which I am sympathetic), particularly in and around the film’s climax as Odysseus narrates his regrets about the loss of life during the war. On the flip side, Nolan certainly minimizes the home theme by casting the bulk of Odysseus’s decade on the road home as a time of forgetfulness due to Calypso’s lotus flowers. Homer, in contrast, pictures Odysseus, always on the shore of Calypso’s island, weeping for the home he desires.

But Nolan’s film does more than push aside or minimize this core theme of the story. The film undermines it entirely with its exilic conclusion. Homer’s whole story is about this man going and getting home. But Nolan’s film denies Odysseus home in a fundamental sense by sending him into exile to an unknown and far off location. Will he ever actually get there?

For a man who has spent nearly a decade trying to get back to Ithaca, this conclusion is devastating rather than triumphant. Odysseus ends the film leaving without his aged father (who never actually makes it into the movie) and his son, both given rather than chosen. He leaves Ithaca, a birthplace given to him rather than chosen. He leaves with Penelope (his chosen bride) and his exile (chosen to avoid conflict—a conflict resolved by Athena in Homer’s version, by the way).

In all of this, Nolan’s concept of home carries a distinct measure of transience in its disconnection from place and non-chosen family. Further, it fits into a pretty clear sense of self-determination in Odysseus (maybe the most striking contrast with Homer’s story, where the gods exhibit direct control over all elements of his story). Nolan’s concept of home keeps Odysseus on the move, without a sense of being settled, without a network of Ithacan people who have known him his whole life. In this, we Nolan hollows out Odysseus in comparison to Homer. Nolan’s Odysseus is a man we never get to see truly at home, a man always journeying but never settled, a man who has thoughts about war but no place from which to live out his ideals. In this way, Nolan has taken Homer’s triumphant Odyssey and turned it into a tragedy.

Where Homer’s story contains some measure of hope in overcoming the struggle and arriving at home (even if it is dependent upon unreliable gods), Nolan’s film points us to look within toward human choice, to see the mess we’ve made of the world, and to grapple with the deep uncertainty of our future. There is truth in both. But in an exceedingly rare story that has all the elements to give us a positive vision of overcoming the deep suffering of the world and finding home, Nolan has instead given us something more modest and common, a mere negative vision of where we’ve lost our way.

Stalker (1979)

In the last act of Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic, Stalker, the titular character utters these arresting words: “When a man thinks of the past, he becomes kinder.” As a historian, I am never not interested when someone is saying something positive about the discipline of turning our minds toward what has come before. What is Stalker communicating here?

For a little context, Stalker follows the journey of three men into The Zone, an area of mysterious power and even more mysterious origins. Due to unexplained loss of life and birth defects, the government has closed the area entirely to both the residents and any visitors. However, rumors of a Room within the zone where one’s greatest wish will come true brings seekers looking to get into The Zone. In Stalker, the lead character sneaks two others—the Professor and the Writer—into The Zone to lead them to the Room.

Their journey is marked by dilapidated beauty (many of Tarkovsky’s and cinematographer Aleksandr Knyazhinskiy’s images are among the most beautiful ever filmed), confusing turns, and occasional conversations that reveal both Professor and Writer as deeply skeptical of the supernatural or alien power that is supposed to be present in The Zone. Their views stand in stark contrast to those of Stalker (he is never given another name), who repeatedly exhorts his charges toward belief and trust in whatever or whomever rules The Zone. The Professor and the Writer, while sometimes scared into grudging respect for whatever is going on in The Zone, are not really inclined to give their trust to this mysterious power.

This tension has been building throughout the film when Stalker points the Professor and the Writer to the past. As the group nears the Room, both men have revealed the depths of their skepticism, which reads to me as deeply modernist, albeit in different ways. The Professor, who works in the sciences, believes in the power of rationality to solve problems. The Writer, who is more connected to poetic truth, but he has looked within himself for that truth and found it wanting. In both cases, these men have thought-patterns that lead them toward dark, deeply pessimistic, and death-oriented ways of being.

Into this context, Stalker exhorts them to look to their past. In the moment, he seems to be encouraging them to think of their personal pasts. But the line lingers, pointing toward a larger and more significant way of conceiving of the past beyond simply the personal. Stalker’s point, it seems to me, is to get out of yourselves in this moment, to find that “other you” from decades ago. Both men suffer from an acute case of solipsism. Part of the beauty of history (personal or otherwise), is that it forces you out of your current moment and into the life experience of someone else somewhere else—even if the someone is you and the somewhere is more or less where you are now. In other words, Stalker is pointing to the reality that the one constant related to time is change. And change, when properly acknowledged as not only inevitable but fundamental to the human experience in the created world, keeps one from hardening and rusting into a useless antique on the verge of being discarded.

So, yeah, maybe looking to the past and noting the changing of the times and appreciating where I (or others) have been and how far I (or they) have come, makes me kinder precisely because it pulls me out of myself and into the lives and circumstances of those who have come before.

Hamnet (2025)

The best works of art point beyond themselves, drawing us into the conversation over the great mysteries of human existence such as life and desire, death and reconciliation. Chloe Zhao’s HAMNET, based on the novel of the same name, is the fictional telling of about a decade in William Shakespeare’s life that includes his courtship of and marriage to Agnes, the birth of their three children, and the tragedy that precedes the production of arguably his most famous play, Hamlet.

The film operates in something of a mythic space from its earliest moments, the quirky and mysterious Agnes curled up in line with a curving tree root. As Agnes walks and works in the forest, she returns regularly to a gnarled and expansive tree, as Zhao highlights a deep void that sits under one side of it. As this void hints at the grave, Zhao’s images remind us that in this life, all our living and growing exists alongside the real threat that all things will turn dark and we will be faced with whatever is beyond that void.

And yet, the first hour or so of Zhao’s film is filled with the joys of new love, marriage, and birthing children. As Shakespeare’s family grows, and love and life grow, so too does the potential to encounter the void. Zhao skillfully keeps this fact of death in the picture, never absent from our thoughts, even in the good times.

Something changes about the way one lives one’s life when our collective mortality is on the table. I think often of something David Foster Wallace wrote in his essay “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,”

“I claim that the fact that we are strongly encouraged to identify with characters for whom death is not a significant creative possibility has real costs. We the audience, and individual you over there and me right here, lose any sense of eschatology, thus of teleology, and live in a moment that is, paradoxically, both emptied of intrinsic meaning or end and quite literally eternal. If we’re the only animals who know in advance we’re going to die, we’re also probably the only animals who would submit so cheerfully to the sustained denial of this undeniable and very important truth. The danger is that, as entertainment’s denials of the truth get even more effective and pervasive and seductive, we will eventually forget what they’re denials of. This is scary. Because it seems transparent to me that, if we forget how to die, we’re going to forget how to live.”

One of the strengths of Zhao’s film, it seems to me, is its refusal to “submit so cheerfully to the sustained denial” that we are all subject to death and thus are all going to die. In this, it stands in the tradition of the great tragedies of western literature, including Shakespeare’s aforementioned Hamlet. HAMNET’s refusal to deny the reality of death to its characters—I think also of the brief scene in which Shakespeare’s mother, Mary (played brilliantly by Emily Watson) recounts the stories of her own lost children—creates a meaningful space in which they (and, by extension, we) can consider how to live.

The film’s final act, in which Hamlet is staged for the first time, draws its themes of life and death, brokenness and reconciliation, blindness and seeing, together in a striking portrait of continuing to live in the midst of tragic circumstances. HAMNET reveals to us that it is precisely in our vulnerability as creatures (subject to death as we are) that we can begin to see the world outside ourselves and to appreciate those interconnected roots/lives that feed and nourish us. In the end, for Agnes and William, the fact of death remains, even as the mysterious gift of life revealed in (literally) reaching beyond themselves continues to sustain.

Hit Man (2024)

Richard Linklater has been making feature films for over thirty years, and from the beginning the writer/director has shown a predilection for having his characters wax philosophically on the nature of our existence as humans. So, it should come as no surprise when Linklater’s most recent film, Hit Man, opens with a professor enthusiastically quoting Nietzsche to his students:

“The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves!”

The idea, a student surmises, is to live life with abandon; to pursue one’s passions, even if it means living dangerously. Except the professor doesn’t live this way, which brings in a second philosophical issue: can people change? In many ways, Linklater’s film—where Professor Gary Johnson poses as a fake hit man for the New Orleans police—is an examination of these two ideas, via a genre mash-up of screwball comedy, edgy rom-com, and film noir. Should we live dangerously and can we change ourselves to get there?

Something else Linklater has come back to regularly in his career: he questions the rules, has his characters press up against the edges of things and see whether there’s any there there. And this draws out a third question: if we answer ‘yes’ to the first two questions, then how can we make it happen? What is the cost?

On this point of questioning the rules, I am reminded of Linklater’s best work: the Before trilogy. In each case, Jesse and Celine question the rules. Can two strangers spend one night in Vienna and build a meaningful and lasting connection? When Jesse and Celine reconnect in the second film, what role does Jesse’s marriage play in the continuation (or not) of their relationship? And in the third film, does their marriage bind them in any way going forward?

In Hit Man, the genre mash-up is one way of testing the rules: by bringing these genres together, which genre rules predominate? Screwball says anything goes. Romance says guy gets girl. Noir says there will be justice. Or maybe the mash-up means there are new rules that need to be discovered? Linklater and his co-writer Powell take the story in strikingly strange directions: In the first act, Powell’s professor leans way into his fake hit man persona, researching his “clients” and becoming the hit man character they “need”—screwball. In act 2, the professor/hit man falls for one of these “clients,” getting himself entangled in a surreptitious and steamy romance with a woman who tried to hire him to kill her husband. Act 3 draws in the noirish elements alongside the screwball and romance, as the two protagonists find the world of rules and justice closing in on them, until it doesn’t.

It’s this last bit that makes the film such a puzzle. Up to the third act, the movie breezes along, light and airy. And the movie at least plays like we should live dangerously and we can change who we are. However, when the bodies start dropping and the protagonists get away scot-free, one cannot help but question what Linklater is up to, question the cost that these characters have to bear to find, in Nietzsche’s words, their “greatest enjoyment.” There are probably more ways to take the conclusion, but I can think of three major options:

Played straight, this is a comedy about people who kill the problem people in their lives, get away with it, and live happily ever after. This is living dangerously to the fullest. There are no absolutes (and therefore, no justice).
A second version is slightly different than the first: this, too, is a comedy. It recognizes some limits and lines, but if there is justice here, it is individually determined.
A third version makes what appears to be a comedy into an abject tragedy: here we take the ending, which unfolds in the future, in a completely ironic way, seeing the protagonists entirely as anti-heroes who have bought into their fantasy world and will play pretend in their community and even with their children for the rest of their lives (or as long as they can).

None of these readings is entirely satisfying—the first because it is basically amoral and a nonsensical way of being in the world; the second because it seeks to define morality only individually, which runs into major problems once you realize you necessarily live in relationship with others; and the third because its tragedy is deeply painful given the now-involvement of children.

Based on what unfolds in the movie, I am inclined to advocate for the third view as the most sensible reading, based on an exchange repeated three times in the film: “How’s the pie?” “All pie is good pie.” The first two times this phrase shows up, it indicates an entrance into a fantasy world, where Johnson is a hit man and the person asking him the question is going to hire him for a job that will never take place. When Linklater brings this back for the final scene, it indicates that Madison and Gary, now married with children, remain ensconced in a fantasy—this time them married with two kids. They are as disconnected from reality as they have ever been, doomed to live as actors and never revealing their true selves. The problem is, outside of that line, nothing in the film really points toward a tragic tone—everything is in a comic register.

Whichever way we take the ending, something about this project feels off. Whether it’s the moral logic, the tone, a combination of both, or something else entirely, I am left seeing Hit Man as a confused, albeit interesting, failure. So, while it is certainly true that “All pie is good pie,” Hit Man tells me that Linklater’s filmmaking instincts, close to pie as they might be, are undercooked here.

Damsels in Distress (2012)

When I first saw Whit Stillman’s DAMSELS IN DISTRESS nearly eleven years ago, I was thrilled with his return to the movies after more than a decade away. His dialogue was as clever as ever, the quirks were dialed up to at least a hearty seven, and the film exuded a thoroughgoing sense of fun. But while I enjoyed the experience, I think I missed just about everything that was profound about Stillman’s effort.

Anselm famously taught “faith seeking understanding.” A corollary to that maxim might be “experience deepens understanding.” In the more than a decade since I had first (and last) seen the film, my life experiences around mental illness and depression have deepened. Struggling alongside loved ones, hearing about the experiences of others, and reading theologically oriented works on this subject, I found myself responding much more deeply to Stillman’s film than I had previously.

While the film tracks the comic efforts of these young women to influence cultural change at their fictional university, one key element of their pursuit is an effort to decrease the suicide rate on their campus. Further, Stillman highlights that each of these young women have some struggles of their own, none more so than Violet. What I find interesting is that many of Stillman’s typical concerns from his earlier work are on display here, but they take on a new significance in light of this particular theme in DAMSELS.

First and foremost, Stillman is devoted to social forms. DAMSELS makes this clear through its heroine’s devotion to proper dress and scent. Violet is devoted to a way of carrying herself in the world which stands beyond her or anyone’s personal preferences. In contrast, Doar Dorm is such an awful place because the young men that live there have not figured out how to live in a society while checking their own impulses. I think it notable the frequency with which the Bible shows up here as well. It is a reminder that there is an order to the world. Violet’s attempts to order campus social life are an implicit recognition of an order that transcends her own.

Second, DAMSELS shows an affinity for history and tradition. Violet criticizes contemporary social life for always seeking people cooler than we are. By the same token, her devotion to dance is rooted in the history of dance crazes, expressing this in response to a professor’s question about influences. Violet knows what is good and has a clear direction for her life because she appreciates the tried and true. She even loves cliches, which, ironically, is so un-cliched of her.

Finally, the film leans into the notion that artmaking, dance, and an appreciation of beauty are fundamental to the well-ordered life. Violet believes in her suicide prevention program amidst the mockery she receives for her “naïve” approach. But what her critics don’t see is that these things she participates in are things she does herself in order to stay sane, to stay encouraged. That she draws others into her habits actually spreads the joy. This is no clearer than when Violet, having separated from her roommates in order to clear her head, shares her discovery of the great smelling motel soap with those present at a diner. After allowing waitresses and customers to each smell the bar of soap, Violet says, “This scent and this soap . . . is what gives me hope!” Violet finds things she loves and throws herself into them. In so doing, she seeks to keep the dark clouds away. To borrow a line from Violet, her personal suicide prevention has been 10 out 10 successful, for herself first, but also for numerous others.

DAMSELS carries a great deal of wisdom relative to the struggles of life. Maintaining some measure of social order that extends beyond ourselves, being rooted in a tradition or way of being in the world, and embracing beautiful sensory experiences like dance and the smell of soap are not simple prescriptions or magic pills for eliminating depression or some other struggle. But these are exactly the kinds of things that draw someone outside themselves, which in turn creates barriers to life’s downs. That DAMSELS is able to do this while remaining both funny and joyful from beginning to end only increases my admiration for Stillman’s achievement here.

Holiday (1938)

Home doesn’t always feel like home. We’ve all been spending more time at home over the past year. For some, this has been a harder than normal stretch marked by conflict, for others an opportunity to rest and spend more time with those they love most. But even if our experience of the pandemic has been free of pain, regular conflict, or death, eleven months into this thing, we all realize that even a comfortable home isn’t the answer to all our problems nor is it the fulfillment of all our desires.

A sense of yearning seems to bind together holiday celebrations of all different kinds. In the United States, many look forward to celebrating Independence Day with fireworks and family or spending Memorial Day honoring those we’ve lost (and wishing they were with us once again). But there’s also the notion holidays look beyond themselves, helping us to imagine a better way of being in the world: Thanksgiving prompts us to bring gratitude to our day-to-day lives, while Martin Luther King, Jr. Day reminds us of the “dream” and the hope of a just and equitable world.

George Cukor’s aptly titled HOLIDAY begins on Christmas Day, settles in on New Year’s Eve, and concludes with a holiday of a different sort. As the film opens, Johnny (Cary Grant) and Julia (Doris Nolan) announce their engagement to friends and family on Christmas morning. However, due to their brief acquaintance, their loved ones hardly receive the news as a gift. Cukor brilliantly sets up the conflict between Johnny and Julia in these first two sequences—Johnny the more “common” of the two, practical, hard-working, but also fun, while Julia’s impulsiveness with Johnny masks a significant traditionalist streak as she lives her life according to the expectations of her wealthy family and naively expects everything to work out for her and Johnny.

Into this relational breach steps Julia’s black sheep of a sister, Linda (Katherine Hepburn), who desperately wants to live an exciting and adventurous life, a striking contrast to her family’s overly structured and “proper” life. Linda spends most of her time at home in the “Playroom,” a cozy, comfortably furnished room where she can play games or music or hold intimate parties with a few of her friends. The room, furnished by Linda’s mother who has long since passed away, carries with it the remembrance of home in a way their museum of a house does not. Many of the film’s core scenes take place in the Playroom and give concrete shape to Linda’s yearning for home.

As the chasm of expectations between Julia and Johnny becomes clearer, their rash decision to get engaged appears worse than ever. On New Year’s Eve, as Julia’s family celebrates the holiday with hundreds of their closest friends, Linda takes refuge in the Playroom with Johnny’s closest friends and eventually Johnny himself. Cukor’s expressive direction in this sequence communicates the core feeling of the film—Hepburn reveals a fragile vulnerability amidst her strength of character, Grant responding and reaching out to her, even sharing a quiet dance together. They see life and vibrancy and home in one another, the opportunity to avoid spending their years waiting to die.

Also fascinating to me is Cukor’s suggestion that the lively, adventurous life devoted to family, friends, fellowship, and fun comes not with through financial windfalls but shared commitment to one another, for embracing another as they are rather than as we might wish them to be. Cukor manages to evoke all of this with a humanistic gentleness in the portrayal of all of the main characters that leaves us with a winning impression of the people on both sides of the divide—they are respectable, even as they choose what might be a less interesting or vibrant life, the safer road.

Ultimately, the film sides with Linda and Johnny, leaving us with the notion that our deep sense of yearning for something better can’t be satiated with money. As Johnny and Linda meet at the film’s conclusion, their ultimate destination is uncertain. But their love for and commitment to one another—their movement outside themselves—has put them on a path to better deal with their displacement in the world and their yearning for a better home than the ones they’ve known thus far. That makes this not just a great pandemic film, but one that will continue to bear fruit even as we get back to whatever normal will be post-COVID.

Ad Astra (2019)

James Gray’s contemplative Ad Astra opens with a shot panning through the darkness. As the sun comes into view, the light refracts in circles across the image, eventually revealing the face of Roy McBride (Pitt) looking out at the glowing orb. McBride is actually on his way to work on the International Space Antenna, a towering structure designed to seek out intelligent life beyond the confines of earth. However, an unexplained power surge forces McBride to abandon his post on the exterior of the antenna. He drops into freefall, tens of thousands of feet above the ground.

The star man falls to earth.

In one way, the entire film unfolds in this opening scene, its themes layered into the action. Gray’s film is wrestling with a simple, albeit profound, question: what does it mean to be human? Roy McBride’s journey is one of discovery, but the discovery is less about experiencing long distance space flight or blasting through the rings of Neptune and more about who he is (and will be). The film’s answer: we are fundamentally emotional and relational beings, not self-sufficient, but made for love.

Gray’s film follows McBride’s fall from the heights of brilliant-but-cold-astronaut, a man whose sole focus is pointed upward, to the stars. The film highlights a fundamental disjunction in Roy—great at work, awful with relationships. He’s always calm—his heart rate never going above 80—but this leaves him distant from common human emotions. When catastrophe strikes at work, he stays focused on the task at hand. But relationally, it means he’s unphased when his wife leaves him. And in the most striking moment, Roy declares that he relies only on himself, something that makes him excellent in a difficult spacewalk, but which would destroy a marriage. Gray further highlights this disjunction by showing Roy making the right decisions in space, yet keeping most of his dialogue internalized—he’s either talking to a computer or to himself.

Over the course of the film, McBride hurtles toward a reality which reveals these relational limitations as a cauldron of emotion that has been simmering just beneath his placid, low-heart-rate surface begins to bubble up. Indeed, Roy’s trajectory in the film is a fall from detached, godlike status in the astronaut community toward something more truly and robustly human (and, frankly, more akin to true deity, but that’s another issue).

The contrast between Roy and other characters also highlights the importance of relationality and love. Clifford McBride’s old friend, Thomas Pruitt, remains dissatisfied (and ill, to boot), because his friendship with Clifford ended with a quarrel. Others express love through religious faith, offering prayers at key moments. These people (primarily the crew on the ship from Mars) also have natural relationships with each other, even if they seem fearful or judgmental of others, or a bit too tied to the rules. Roy seems to float above all of this emotion and relationality. His life is himself. This self-sufficiency is Roy’s defining quality, and the script from Gray and co-writer Ethan Gross interrogate this approach to life at almost every turn.

What inspires Roy’s fall into humanity? In short, reconnecting with his father, Clifford, a man who has been absent from Roy’s life for about three decades. Upon hearing the news that he would need to reach out to his father’s supposedly lost ship, Roy’s immediate reaction is to grapple with pressing regrets. He starts to message an apology to his wife (which he deletes without sending). After further reflection, including watching old video of his father, and a traumatic experience on the way to Mars, Roy admits to vast stores of rage simmering beneath his placid surface. The latent emotion within him continues to bubble up, and after a disorienting and isolating two-and-a-half-month journey from Mars to Neptune, a journey away from the only star and light in our solar system and into the darkness, Roy begins to yearn for others.

When Roy reaches his father, we realize how much Clifford’s journey has changed him. In an early recorded message from Clifford’s journey to Neptune, he told his teenaged son that he could sense God’s presence as they had passed Jupiter. And yet, by the time Roy reaches his father, any faith the man had has been swallowed up in reams of data that have found no signs of intelligent life. At one point, Clifford declares that we are all alone—it’s as if his faith has always been tied to the hope of finding some kind of concrete evidence for the divine. When the numbers didn’t cooperate, his faith faltered.

Roy has also changed, but in a strikingly different way. First, when his father tells him that he never loved him, Roy’s response is, with tears in his eyes, “I know, Dad. I love you anyway.” This is the first time we’ve seen this man make such a declaration to anyone or show any emotion to anyone, which is strange given the long journey he’s been on (most of us would share a hug or phone call with someone before we left). But second, when Clifford notes that the data points to their solitude in the universe, Roy answers with, “We’re all we’ve got.” There’s some ambiguity here, for sure. On the one hand, Roy’s words acknowledge the vital importance of relationships, a major change for him. On the other, the statement could be a declaration of unbelief—a kind of dismissal of the theological that he was likely raised with. However, he could simply be saying that a person doesn’t need scientific, observable and repeatable evidence of intelligent life beyond humanity (e.g. aliens) in order to believe. Maybe Clifford’s faith has actually been tied to the wrong things. Maybe his faith needed to be tied to the people—to the faces—of those in his life.

Once Roy parts from his father for the last time, he reflects on the data his father did collect. Gray offers us images of numerous planets, strange and unknown worlds. And as Roy describes them, he contrasts his father’s despair with these images of beauty, images that inspire “awe and wonder.” Rather than looking for God only in the things we don’t have, Clifford should have seen him all around, including in the face of his own son.

Gray ends the film with Roy eagerly anticipating his return to earth, and offers a voice over of another psych evaluation once he returns. The wording is almost the same as the one that opens the film. However, where in the first Roy made his independence clear, in the last he says exactly the opposite, depending on a close circle of family and friends, while making plans to “live and love.” All the while, Roy sits in a coffee shop, stirring his coffee, and then turns to see his ex-wife coming to meet him. The star-man has fallen into relationship with another human. He sees her face. He is learning what it means to love.

The final word of the film is “submit” as Roy sends the message, where it becomes something of a call to action, for there is no relationship, no love, without a willingness to submit ourselves to another.

A Hidden Life (2019)

“To lower oneself is to rise in the domain of moral gravity. Moral gravity makes us fall toward the heights.” –Simone Weil

Terrence Malick’s breathtaking new film, A Hidden Life, traces the later years of Austrian peasant farmer and devout Catholic, Franz Jägerstätter. In 1943, when the Austrian army called Franz from his village of St. Radegund to serve in the German war effort, Franz refused on the grounds that he could not swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler. This led, eventually, to his imprisonment and execution. Franz’s wife, Fani, also suffered in numerous ways—the loss of her husband and the father of her children, the scorn of most of her neighbors, and the questions and doubts that encroached upon her faith.

One of the most surprising and gratifying moves Malick makes with this “hagiography” is the strong and virtually equal presence of Fani in what has ostensibly been framed by many as Franz’s story. Where a lesser filmmaker may have been tempted to place the focus solely on Franz (who has been beatified by the Roman Catholic Church), Malick understands that one cannot properly understand the nature of Franz’s sacrifice without also seeing the equally significant sacrifice of Fani. The mark she leaves on the film is so strong that I even wondered whether she, rather than Franz, was the hidden life referred to in the film’s title (a striking reference to the conclusion of George Eliot’s magnificent Middlemarch). Of the two, she remains the one most hidden to the rest of the world, but her story of persevering faith in the midst of profound trials stands every bit as tall as Franz’s.*

Given the strong marital relationship at the center of this film, along with the dual paths of suffering that Franz and Fani follow, I am tempted to suggest an alternative title in the spirit of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s masterful The Passion of Joan of Arc: ‘The Passions of Franz and Fani of Radegund.’

An early scene that takes place in the village church portrays a conversation between Franz and an artist restoring some of the building’s artwork. Their conversation turns to the act of painting Christ, a task the artist frankly admits is beyond his capability. He believes he is too comfortable to truly understand (and therefore reflect) anything like the reality of Christ in his art. The whole scene comes across as something of a commentary on the film (and a call out to his next one, reportedly a rendering of the Jesus story?), as Malick portrays two distinct but linked passion narratives, reaching for the truth in the midst of the sacrifice.

This dual suffering of Franz and Fani is where the film cuts most deeply. On the one hand, Franz’s narrative portrays a man who, though he struggles at times, has pointed himself toward righteousness and means to carry that out, no matter the cost. Fani, on the other hand, is much more expressive in her struggle, her words often directly questioning God, even as she quotes Scripture. Her rendering of the simple tasks and events of her life take on a questioning character—simple joys of presence with her daughters or the blessing of a harvest become weighty trials in the wake of Franz’s absence. The film’s honesty about the realities of evil amidst and within the life of faith, that the follower of Jesus should expect suffering to follow, is probably its most poignant contribution.

I began this piece with a citation from Simone Weil. Franz and Fani lower themselves, resisting the temptation to dwell in a compromised safety even if there are some really good, non-Hitler-y reasons to take that road. But in that lowering, they attain a moral (and spiritual) gravity. As they persevere in their profoundly Christian responses to evil, they fall toward the heights.

* That the film includes a dedication to Malick’s wife, Alexandra, only strengthens this impression for me. I would also point out that Malick does here something very similar to what he did in To the Wonder, which we might now call his “other marriage movie.” In that 2012 effort, Malick turns his attention almost exclusively upon the women of the story—a wife and a mistress—leaving the husband/boyfriend character played by Ben Affleck virtually silent by comparison.

The Rider (2018)

Chloe Zhao’s The Rider unfolds as a film filled with tensions: history vs. the present, disability vs. wholeness, human vs. animal, isolation vs. connection. The film follows Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau), a young, twenty-something horse trainer and rodeo rider who has recently suffered a serious head wound. Independent to a fault, Brady has checked himself out of the hospital, hoping sheer will and grit will get him back into the rodeo ring as quickly as possible.

Ms. Zhao highlights the film’s thematic tensions by working with a strong contrastive visual sense. While much of the film is shot in interior close ups, with characters in the frame isolated from one another and the world, Ms. Zhao incorporates a number of exterior wide shots that situate her characters within their respective environments—or just show us the landscape itself. This sense of contrast continues to force us to break out of thinking just about Brady and his interior world. These wide exterior shots serve the purpose of reminding us that Brady’s world isn’t just what is in his head, but what is all around him as well.

That the film follows a young Lakota Sioux man places it in a particular historical and cultural context that is important for the film’s narrative. One of the great tragedies of American expansion was the loss of the prairie for the native Americans. Once the Europeans had settled and marked off the great plains, the natives were left without their livelihood and forced to find new ways of being in the world. This adaptation was profoundly difficult for a whole host of reasons (only some of them internal to the tribes), and it left these tribal communities in a far weaker state than they had been. Brady’s story mirrors this American tragedy, as the young cowboy loses his livelihood and is forced to adjust on the fly, with no resources and very little guidance.

To this point in his life, Brady seems to have situated himself on or in close proximity to a horse. There really has been nothing else for him. However, his injury begins to create obstacles to that vision of himself as a cowboy. His suffering with a form of seizures that force his fist to clench around anything in his hand (including the reins for his horse) only serves to indicate the difficulty Brady will have in letting go of his cowboy life.

Brady is in a precarious position. His injury has brought limitation to him for the first time in his life. He wants desperately to be whole again so he can continue pursuing his purpose. However, wholeness remains an elusive goal. Brady’s situation carries with it a sense of universality, in the sense that we all have our moments of reckoning with our limitations. This is part of what it means to be a finite human in a broken world.

Brady reflects on this brokenness in the context of the animals he loves so dearly. When a horse is injured to the point it cannot do what it was made to do, we put it out of its misery. Not the same with human beings. We are different. Though we might wish for death in our lowest moments, we realize that life continues to beckon, even if what is ahead remains a deep, dark mystery to us.

Into this reckoning of life and purpose, Ms. Zhao incorporates the character of Lane Scott, a rodeo rider and friend of Brady’s who has been gravely injured sometime prior to the film’s opening. Brady says early in the film that he hadn’t visited Lane in quite some time, because he’d been busy on the rodeo circuit. The contrast with the rest of the film is both striking and productive for thinking about the critical way the Brady/Lane scenes inform what’s going on with Brady. Brady’s visits with Lane form the foundation from which Brady will decide whether to turn inward and continue to rely simply on himself, or whether he will reach out for connection with others. Ms. Zhao’s concluding scene brings these themes together in a profound way, lighting the way to a better way of being in the world.

Favorite Films of 2017, Part II

It’s two months into 2018, which means it’s time for me to compile my top films from the previous year. With the Oscars right around the corner, this seems as good a time as any to roll out the list.

I already offered up #10 through #6. On to the top five.

5. While I am quite fond of Jordan Peele’s Get Out, this film’s treatment of race feels even more subversive as its dazzling technique at first masks then reveals its pointed thesis on race in American culture: being white means possessing the ability to take advantage of societal good will, while being black means being associated with crime or lack or sexual promiscuity. Good Time (dir. Safdie) accomplishes its purpose by following 24 hours in the life of two (white) brothers, one of whom is seeking to get the other out of jail. This film moves, its frenetic pace buffeted only by a couple of emotional scenes that bookend the film.

4. In The Lost City of Z (dir. Gray), James Gray manages to provide both a sense of adventure as well as an intensely personal statement about longing for something more than this world offers. This film is about appreciating mystery, about searching elsewhere for what we need here, and about our reach needing to exceed our grasp. But even as we might be carried away by such flights and explorations, Gray roots us in the real world of loss, sacrifice, and failure. Gray’s film lives in the midst of a tension, between “this city” and “the city yet to be discovered.”

3. Phantom Thread (dir. Anderson) finds director P.T. Anderson exploring 1950s London fashion scene, through the experiences of Reynolds Woodcock, a designer of high quality (and even higher-priced) dresses for the elite women of Europe. The lead character prefers his world tightly controlled, and his women more so. When his newest love interest, Alma, moves into the house, a battle of wills commences, as the couple seeks an elusive but glorious reality—artistic achievement in communion with relational satisfaction—which we come to discover carries its own dark underbelly.

2. In Lady Bird (dir. Gerwig), the easy (and, at times, abrupt) movement between comedy and heartbreak mirrors the life of a teenager well, while Gerwig’s script creates a sense of groundedness–both in place (Sacramento, CA), and in its attachment to wisdom as well. The Catholic elements add a sense of depth and transcendence to the proceedings as Lady Bird learns something of what it means to mature personally and to love others–namely, to offer others the gift of attentiveness.

1. The Unknown Girl (dir: Dardennes) follows a young doctor, Jenny, as she plies her trade in a low-income neighborhood. But when a murder happens very near her office, everything changes. By staging the doctor as something of a community priest, the Dardennes are able to access more directly something that has undergirded all their fiction films: the humanity and dignity of all people. Jenny affirms her neighbors by caring for their needs, tending their wounds, and even hearing their confessions. The brilliant final shot provides a downright incarnational vision for humanity that I won’t soon forget.