ScreenFish

where faith and film are intertwined

based on actual events

Hotel Mumbai – Sacrifices for God

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What is a worthy sacrifice to make for one’s gods? Does that sound like a basis for a action thriller? It turns out to be a very important part of Hotel Mumbai, the feature debut of director Anthony Maras. Based on the 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai that created three days of chaos in that city, the film focuses on the assault on the famed Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, which was one of a dozen targets of the attack.

The Taj is a very upscale hotel, where guests are pampered, especially the VIP guests. That could entail drawing a bath to precisely 47° C, or making sure that a guest’s call girls for the evening are waiting in his room by the time he finishes dinner. As Chef Hemant Oberoi (Anupam Kher) reminds his kitchen and wait staff at the start of their shift, “The guest is god.”

(From L to R) Armie Hammer as “David”, Tilda Cobham-Hervey as “Sally” and Nazanin Boniadi as “Zahra” in director’s Anthony Maras’ HOTEL MUMBAI, a Bleecker Street release. Credit: Kerry Monteen / Bleecker Street

The story revolves around groups within the hotel: the staff, including Oberoi and a young Sikh waiter, Arjun (Dev Patel); the hotel guests, including David (Armie Hammer) and Zahra (Nazanin Boniadi) who are there with their infant child and its nanny Sally (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), and Vasili, a Russian millionaire (Jason Isaacs); and the Pakistani gunmen (Amandeep Singh, Suhail Nayyar, and Manoj Mehra). When the attack begins in a train station, the chaos of the city seems far removed from the peacefulness within the Taj. Indeed, many people run to the Taj to seek safety. But soon gunmen are inside the hotel, randomly killing whoever they come across, and eventually going room to room hunting more victims. As the battle engulfs the hotel, David and Zahra are frantic to know Sally and the baby are safe, but how can they go to get them?

The hotel staff do all they can to provide safety to the guests, eventually taking them a back way to a private club, the most secure place in the hotel. Although some of the staff have escaped to return to their own families, many remain because of the mantra “the guest is god.” The killing continues, the staff keeps acting nobly, the parents and Sally do all they can to try to protect and save the child. The tension is well developed as the story progresses.

But we also get time to know these gunmen who are terrorizing the hotel. They are more than one-dimensional monsters that we might expect. They have been radicalized and trained for this mission, but the more we get to know them, the more human they become. They are following the orders of their leader over the phone, but in time, they begin to question the brutality of what they are doing.

We also learn that a key part of their motivation is that their families are to get money. Just as the waiter Arjun is from a poor family and is trying to provide for his wife and children, these gunmen are doing what they feel they must to provide for their families. That similarity grows through the film.

The other important comparison between the staff and the terrorists is that they see what they are doing as acting on behalf of their gods. “The guest is god” takes on a deeper meaning when we see that the staff is willing to sacrifice themselves in order to protect the guests. For Arjun, it becomes very personal when one of the guests is afraid of him because he wears a turban (a part of the Sikh religious practice), he calmly explains its deep importance it holds, but offers to remove it because she is his guest. While the staff is serving their guests/gods, the terrorists are being told over and over by their leader (who is in constant contact by phone) of the reward their God has waiting for them.

Dev Patel stars as “Arjun” in director Anthony Maras’ HOTEL MUMBAI, a Bleecker Street release. Credit: Kerry Monteen / Bleecker Street

But if both the hotel staff and the gunmen are acting out of their commitment to their gods—even to the point of giving their lives, does that make them equivalent? Certainly not. But we are called on to understand how they differ and which group is offering up a sacrifice that is worthy of their devotion.

People of faith often speak of the ways we serve our gods. How do we judge that service? Is it how intense we are in our actions? Or is it seen not in ourselves but the way our service brings our gods’ love and compassion to the world we have been sent to serve? It is in this way that we can see the value of those in the film who are serving their gods in different ways.

Photos courtesy of Bleecker Street

 

The Post – Releasing the Truth

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“In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government.” (Justice Hugo Black, The New York Times v. The United States)

Steven Spielberg’s The Post is not really about the Pentagon Papers, the leaked secret documents that showed that the American government had lied to the people through four administrations from Truman to Johnson. The publication of those documents in 1971 brought the freedom of the press into the nation’s consciousness. The Post is really about the courage that is sometimes needed to serve the public good and to make sure the government is serving the people.

The film is set at The Washington Post, a paper that aspired to national importance, but hadn’t quite achieved it. When the New York Times published the first stories about the Pentagon Papers, Post editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) sets his staff to work trying to find a way to get a copy. Soon, one of them tracks down Daniel Ellsberg, the former analyst who leaked the documents. After the Nixon Administration was granted an injunction against the Times to stop publication, Bradlee and his team begin to create their own stories. But it falls on publisher Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep) to make the decision—one that could lead to charges of contempt of court and treason.

Bradlee, in this film, is a stereotypical hard-nosed journalist. He is in search of the truth and believes that the truth needs to be known. We get the sense that he and his reporters would easily be willing to face prosecution over the truth and free press. But it is Graham who is the focus for the difficult decision. Katherine Graham became publisher after the suicide of her husband. The paper had been in her family for decades, but she hadn’t really been involved in it. She was a wife, mother, and social hostess in Washington. She is just beginning to establish herself as a business woman (and really not accepted by some on her board). This decision could have devastating consequences for the company—possibly destroying the paper her father and husband had cared so much about. As deadlines loom, legal issues arise, her various advisors give many opinions, her past friendships with people like the Kennedy’s Johnsons, and Robert McNamara weigh on her. But she must finally choose the road the paper will take.

Spielberg is not new to making historical films. (Previous films include The Empire of the Sun, Munich, Schindler’s List and Bridge of Spies). One of the hallmarks of such films is that they are less about the historical events than they are about the personal stories we are seeing. That is true of The Post. The relationship between Bradlee and Graham is one of respect. They each have different priorities. But they each take their responsibilities—to the paper, reporters, and the nation—seriously. As they face the challenge represented in the Pentagon Papers, they push one another, eventually finding ways to help each to reach their bests.

It’s hard to think of a time when a film that highlights the First Amendment is not timely, but it certainly seems especially so with this film. The adversary relationship between the press and government seems to have grown ever more forceful of late. When tweets take the place of serious discussion, the people are not well served. When an administration dismisses negative stories as “fake news”, the people are not served. When governments seek to hide important information, the people are not served. As journalism continues to evolve (and often devolve) in the information age, we need to be able to depend on a free press to (as Justice Black said) “remain forever free to censure the Government.”

Photos Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

Anthropoid – The Romance and Reality of Heroism

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Heroism. Patriotism. Futility. Is it possible to celebrate the two virtues and still recognize that sometimes the end result may seem a bit tarnished? Anthropoid tells the story (based on actual events) of Czech patriots in World War II who act courageously, yet in the end, as the death tolls grow on both sides, we are left to consider the terrible cost of war—not just the numbers, but the individuals that make up those statistics.

In 1938, the European leaders gave Czechoslovakia to German to try to establish “peace in our time.” Soon Germany had established major factories for armaments and imposed harsh conditions on the country. When resistance began, SS General Reinhard Heydrich (the third ranking official in Nazi Germany and one of the architects of the Final Solution) came to oversee the country and earned the sobriquet “The Butcher of Prague”. In 1941, the Czech government-in-exile sent a group of parachutists to Prague on a mission to assassinate Heydrich. The mission had the code name Operation Anthropoid. The film follows the story of two of those agents, Josef Gabčík (Cillian Murphy) and Jan Kubiš (Jamie Dornan), as they work with locals to set up the assassination.

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Josef and Jan have little intel about the city or their contacts there. The Nazi war machine has been very effective in eliminating the local resistance movement. Those freedom fighters who remain are very leery of Jan and Josef, and especially of their mission. Josef and Jan, in order to fit in to the city, connect with two women of the resistance, Lenka and Marie. There is some love story here, but it is minor. But as a part of those relationships, the film gets to consider some of the various perspectives that one finds in war. As Lenka talks with Josef as they walk around the city, she compares her attitude about the war (pragmatic and grounded in the reality of the situation) with Marie’s (a more romantic view of war).

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The film strives to show both of these views in the portrayal of those involved in Operation Anthropoid. On the one hand, this is a film that relishes the bravery and sacrifice that Josef, Jan, and the others display. (This is the romanticized view.) They all know that any slip could mean death and the failure of the mission. Yet, even though they may have second thoughts, they are devoted to setting their nation free from the scourge that Heydrich oversees. They, like soldiers in any war, are willing to die for their country. But at the same time, the realities and consequences are very plain. When Josef and Jan first tell the locals what their mission is, it is pointed out that if they succeed, the Germans will kill thousands in retaliation. Josef is a bit too easy in saying that any patriotic Czech should be willing to die for this. Indeed, after the attempt, whole towns are killed or sent to death camps. We are left to consider if the plotters bear responsibility for the death of so many innocent people.

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In time, the assassination team is holed up in a local cathedral as hundreds of German soldiers lay siege. The carnage of the shootout in the cathedral is almost worthy of Quentin Tarantino, but less graphic. The plotters nobly go out in a blaze of glory. But we also know that the German soldiers are also doing what they think is their duty to country. The body count that grows through the battle and knowing the doom that is the obvious outcome leaves us feeling a bit gloomy. In no way does this diminish the valor of the Czech fighters, but it does remind us (as Ecclesiastes so often does) of the vanity, meaninglessness, or hollowness of even the great virtues we often espouse.

In tone, the film reminds me of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan in that it tells the story of heroic actions, but leave us saddened by the terrible costs that those actions carry. The film also reminded me a poem I read long ago in school, “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen. That poem, from World War I, calls the romance of dying for country and “old lie”. The way the reality of war and the romantic view of heroism often both compliment and conflict plays out well in Anthropoid.

Photos courtesy of Bleecker Street