ScreenFish

where faith and film are intertwined

father/son relationship

Falling – Loving the Unrepentant

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Viggo Mortensen’s directorial debut, Falling, is a story of an unrepentant prodigal father and the son who strives to be forgiving and loving. It is the story of the dynamics of a lifelong struggle to maintain a relationship that includes a very fragile loving bond.

John Peterson (Mortensen) lives in California with his husband Eric (Terry Chen) and their daughter Monica (Gabby Velis). When he brings his aging father Willis (Lance Henriksen) who is suffering from dementia out to find a place for him to live closer to his family, Willis is not at all cooperative. He does not want to change anything in his life. In the process old memories are roused that show us the pain, suffering, and struggle of a lifetime of this father-son relationship.

The first thing we note is that Willis is constantly rude, crass, homophobic, demanding, and totally self-centered. While we may think his lack of filters is the result of aging and dementia, we quickly discover that he was like this as a young man (played by Sverrir Gudnason). We watch as Willis (both young and old) abuses nearly everyone close to him—including his children and two wives. We may well wonder why John is so intent on trying to help this reprobate who spews anger and odium constantly. But of course, Willis is, despite everything, his father.

While so much of the film shows Willis to be thoroughly reprehensible, there are memories that show some of the ways John has connected to him. The most powerful is when Willis took Jack duck hunting when he was about four. In a bit of astounding luck, Jack shoots a duck. That duck becomes a great trophy for Jack. Both Jack and his father have pride in what happened and they share this memory for a lifetime.

The struggle that John faces is how to fulfill his understanding of filial love when Willis seems so intent on being unlovable. Yet we see that there were times in Willis’s past where people did love him—and he seemed to love them. The problem boils down to how do we judge a life? Is it be the worst people have done or the best they have accomplished? Willis is certainly an extreme case of a flawed person. The flaws seem to far outweigh any virtue he may harbor deep within.

This is a story of the challenge of living with grace. For John the challenge is to bring grace into this relationship he wishes was more loving, more accepting, more fulfilling. But Willis has a challenge as well—perhaps even harder. He must live as the recipient of grace—of one being loved without having really earned that love.

Falling is available in select theaters and on VOD.

That Good Night – To Rage or Not To Rage

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“Are you sorry you woke up?”

What makes it worth living for another day, or two, or a few months? In Eric Styles’s film That Good Night, based on a play by N.J. Crisp, that becomes the real question, not just to be or not to be. Ralph (the late John Herd in his final film) is an aging famous screenwriter. He knows his death is coming soon, but keeps that information from his younger wife Anna (Sofia Helin). As he gets his affairs in order, he demands his estranged son come to visit “before Sunday”.  He also makes an appointment with The Society to send a representative. Ralph’s goal is to have a reconciliation with his son, and to avoid being a burden to his wife in his final days.

When his son Michael (Max Brown) arrives with his girlfriend Cassie (Erin Richards), Ralph is amazingly rude, eventually pushing Michael and Cassie to leave with nothing resolved. Ralph has never had a real relationship with Michael. We learn that Ralph wanted Michael’s mother to abort him. Ralph never saw the child until he was five years old, and rarely after that. Even as an adult, and himself a successful screenwriter, Michael has conflicted feelings towards his father.

After Michael’s departure, while Ralph is at home alone, The Visitor (Charles Dance), dressed in white, arrives from The Society. He and Ralph talk, in a pseudo-hypothetical fashion about euthanasia. Ralph is ready to end it all. The Visitor suggests waiting and counseling. But Ralph insists. The Visitor provides a shot that Ralph things will bring death. When that is not the case, Ralph has a second chance at making things right in his life. He discovers that there may be things yet to come that are worth the suffering that his final months will bring.

You might note that the title is a phrase from a famous poem by Dylan Thomas, which deals with facing death. That poem comes up twice in the film. The first is during Ralph’s first conversation with The Visitor. At that time Ralph says that Thomas, who was less that forty when he died, didn’t have an understanding of the real nature of impending death. The idea of “raging against the dying of the light” is a young man’s idea. The entire poem is read in voice over at the end of the film, now with a different emotional context.

The relationship between Ralph, Anna, Michael and Cassie provide the narrative and emotional structure of the film. The conversations that Ralph has with The Visitor are the intellectual content of the film. Those conversations, ostensibly about euthanasia, are much more centered on life than death. Even when talking about life after death, The Visitor notes that he knows that he doesn’t know. What matters is not the beyond, but the now. We sense that The Visitor is not just a local representative of a euthanasia group. He speaks of being interested in ending the suffering that people go through, but he is also very cognizant of the suffering of everyone involved in Ralph’s life. The Visitor tries to encourage Ralph to see the things that could be worthwhile, even in his final months. His return visits always give Ralph a vision of what could still lie ahead.

A key pair of scenes that occur simultaneously, are of Anna attending Mass in town while Ralph and The Visitor discuss Ralph’s desire to die. Just as Anna receives the Body during the Eucharist, The Visitor gives Ralph the injection Ralph thinks is his death. It turns out that, like the eucharist, the injection becomes both a symbol of death, and an entry into new life. It provides, in a sense, resurrection for Ralph. Resurrection is always about new possibilities.

That Good Night is available on VOD.

Photos courtesy of Trinity Creative Partnership and GSP Studios.

Saturday at AFI Fest 2017

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The first full day for the festival took me on a trip around the world. That’s one of the values of film festivals, we get to see other lands and cultures without the expense and time of travel. (Not that I wouldn’t love being able to go to so many places.) We also get to see through different eyes. Four of the films for today were from women directors. Some have lived in more than one culture and so can compare and contrast. To see such films encourages us to see our own world and culture as others might.

From Spain comes Summer 1993 (New Auteurs section). Director Carla Simón tells a story based on her own childhood. After her mother’s AIDS-related death, young Frida moves into the Catalan countryside to live with her uncle and his family. She is surrounded by loving family members, but she has not yet come to grips with the enormity of the change in her life and discovered how to deal with the grief she holds inside. The beautiful, sunny countryside creates a contrast for the pain that Frida has. Summer 1993 is Spain’s official entry for Best Foreign Language Film.

Joachim Trier’s Thelma (World Cinema) is a nicely creepy film coming out of Norway. Thelma has grown up in a religious family, but has now set off to university, where she finds new ideas and experiences life in new ways. She is strangely attracted to another student, Anja. But when she starts having unexplained seizures strange things begin to happen. There are secrets from her past that come to bear on her life and a chance for her to find happiness. Thelma is Norway’s official entry for Best Foreign Language Film. It is slated to open in theaters on November 24.

Wajib (World Cinema) is a father/son story from director Annemarie Jacir. Shadi, an architect living in Rome, returns to Israel, to help his father Abu Shad hand-deliver wedding invitation for Shadi’s sister’s wedding. As the two men drive around Nazareth and visit friends and relatives, their differences create tensions. For Shadi, a Palestinian living an affluent life abroad, there is a culture clash in returning. The relationship between the two is very complex, at once loving and fractious. Has Shadi abandoned his family and people (as his mother did many years ago)? Has Abu Shadi compromised his principles to advance his career? As a father and a son, I found this a very universal reality of the difficulty in understanding a generational difference, yet being bonded by a lifetime of love. Wajib is the official Palestinian entry for Best Foreign Language Film.

In Iram Haq’s What Will People Say? (New Auteurs) a 1.5 generation Pakistani immigrant lives a dual life: the perfect Pakistani daughter at home, but a normal Norwegian teenager among her friends. But when Misha’s father discovers her with her boyfriend in her room late one night, everything changes. The story is a clash of important values. For the West, where Nisha has grown up, freedom is perhaps the highest value. But for her family, both in their new country and back in Pakistan, honor is paramount. It may seem that her parents are only concerned with how they are perceived, but at the same time it seems they are acting out of love for their daughter, trying to provide her with a life that fits their worldview. Of course, I watched this through western eyes, so some of the responses by her family seem extreme, but at the same time I could empathize with their desire to raise their daughter in what they considered a proper life. Mark this down as one of my favorites of the festival.

I traveled to South Africa with Jenna Bass’s High Fantasy (New Auteurs). Four friends (three women, one white, one colored, two black) go to an isolated farm for a camping trip. But when they wake up in the morning, they have somehow swapped bodies. This is more than Freaky Friday. As they struggle to understand what happened, they must also struggle with the difficulty of what it means to live in a “rainbow nation”. The racial and sexual differences are not something that can be covered up by just “walking a mile in another’s shoes”. The resentments of generations of apartheid and oppression are too deep. South Africa continues to be a country that struggles with racism—as does the U.S. This film is not about finding easy answers for how we live together in racist societies, but rather it raises some questions that need to be addressed if we are ever going to find ways to move forward.

 

The Work – Getting Inside on the Inside

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Raw emotion is the driving force in the documentary The Work. In California’s Folsom State Prison, some of the inmates take part in group therapy to try to rehabilitate themselves. Twice a year, people from outside the prison come to take part in a four-day intensive group therapy experience. Each person from the outside teams up with two convicts who have been through this experience. Those convicts serve as guides in the process. This film follows three outsiders and shows us a small bit of what took place in their group and the way those in the group, both outsiders and convicts, were able to strip away some of the ways their emotional defenses and rip one another out of comfort zones so they could confront their pains, fears, and sorrows.

By its very nature, this film is highly voyeuristic in that we are observing very intimate moments in people’s lives. These men bare their souls in ways they probably never expected to have happen. The cathartic events that take place are often very physical and often somewhat violent. Yet through it all, those involved inspire trust in each other. Among the emotional issues that come out in these sessions are unresolved grief, betrayal, absent fathers, the difficulty of separation from everyone you love, and the temptation to give up on life.

One of the values of the film is that it introduces us to convicts as human beings, flawed as we all are, but also as caring people who are willing to share themselves to help others. These are not low-level prisoners. They are gang members and killers. Many are serving very long sentences. Some may never walk out of prison. They are white, African-American, Hispanic, and Native American. We come to genuinely like and care for these men. We realize that there is more to them than the worst things they have ever done.

The filmmakers had to establish a great deal of trust with the participants in these sessions. The cameras are not some far off observer, they are right on the edges of the group. And when the sessions are in progress, these cameras capture not only the emotional explosions, but also the ways that the men facilitate the possibility of healing.

The part I think is missing from the film is some sort of background on the three outsiders we follow through this process to understand why they would choose to undergo this kind of process. It would also be interesting to hear from them some time later, what effect doing this has for their life after they are back in the real world.

Photos courtesy of The Orchard

Goodbye Christopher Robin: Identity Theft

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Blue: “Your childhood. . .” Billy: “. . .Was wonderful. Growing up was hard.”

In a time when people were famous just for being famous, a young boy’s father writes a book with him as a character. Soon, the whole world wants to know and meet the “real” Christopher Robin. Goodbye Christopher Robin is the story of the writing of the Winnie-the-Pooh books and how the success of those books impacted the young son of the author, A. A. Milne.

When Alan Milne (Domhnall Gleeson) returns from World War I, he has become cynical and disillusioned. He silently suffers from what we would now term PTSD. An established playwright, he is unhappy with his life. As he says, “I’ve had enough of making people laugh. I want to make them see.” He moves with his wife Daphne (Margot Robbie) and young son Christopher (who they always call Billy Moon) (Will Tilston) to the country so he can concentrate on writing his book against war. Daphne sees this as a dead end. (“Writing a book against war is like writing a book against Wednesday.”) She returns to London until Alan gets something done. But she leaves the child there in the charge of a nanny, Nou (Kelly MacDonald).

Milne is something of the stereotypical cold, distant father. When Nou must leave for a few days, the father and son are thrown together with very little connection. As Milne steps aside from his writing to be with Billy (Christopher), he discovers a child with a vivid imagination and an innocent, joyful outlook. That becomes the basis for the Pooh books. The books were amazingly successful, bringing the family fame and wealth.

But that success has a price. Soon Billy is deluged with fan mail. Everyone wants to know the real life Christopher Robin. His days are filled with interviews and photo-ops. But is the boy everyone thinks they know from the books the same as the boy in the flesh? As his parents relish the attention, Billy is losing his childhood. Worse, he is losing his sense of self. He wishes that he could go somewhere (if there is any such place in the world) that did not know about Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin. The real Christopher Robin had been eclipsed by the fictional one.

When his father is telling him about the book, Billy asks why he is calling the character Christopher Robin. His father says that it is because that is his real name, but not who he really is. As a result Billy constantly deals with the onus of having to be Christopher Robin to the rest of the world.

That confusion of an existential identity plays out in his relationship with his father and with the world around him. At a publicity event, when Christopher is asked a question, he begins by saying “Blue said… [pause] A. A. Milne… [pause] Daddy…” That is essentially his hierarchy of the relationship he has with his father. Blue is his playmate, A. A. Milne is the writer he lives with. It is only after those two that he sees the man as Daddy. The relationship would be a struggle for them into adulthood.

To know who one is is a fundamental need. We probably all must deal with competing selves: how we see ourselves, how others see us, prejudices, expectations. For young Christopher Robin that struggle defined his life. And for all the fame and adoration, he suffered greatly.

Photos courtesy Twentieth Century Fox Films

Last Days in the Desert – Struggling Fathers and Sons

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“He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts’ and the angels ministered to him.” (Mark 1:13, NRSV)

“To prepare for his mission, the holy man went into the desert to fast and pray, and to seek guidance.” -opening title card in Last Days in the Desert

Last Days in the Desert is not the biblical story alluded to above, but it is set within that story. Jesus (Ewan McGregor) is wandering through the desert feeling out of touch with God. Satan (also played by Ewan McGregor) is trying to take advantage of that alienation. Satan tries to convince Jesus that God is self-centered and capricious. Jesus is uncertain of himself and of God.

It should be noted that “Jesus” and “Satan” are not actually named (although the Satan character does refer to Jesus as Yeshua, the Hebrew version of the name). Rather Jesus is usually just referred to as the holy man, while the Satanic character is left completely nameless. I use the name Satan for him in this review because I view him as similar to the role of Satan in the story of Job—a part of the heavenly court, but perhaps the most cynical of God’s servants.

Along the way Jesus comes across the tent and half-built house of a desert dwelling family. The mother (Ayelet Zurer) is an invalid. The father (Ciarán Hinds) and son (Tye Sheridan) are at odds because the son wants to see the world. The father believes their life in the desert is the best way to live. As is often the case, the two generations don’t know how to speak to each other and understand each other’s dreams and desires. Satan offers Jesus a deal: if Jesus can resolve the situation to everyone’s satisfaction that he will leave Jesus alone. Jesus spends time with them, helping them build the house that is to be the son’s inheritance and incentive to stay.

Some will have issues with the way Jesus is portrayed in the film because he is filled with doubts. He worries about knowing what to do to help people. Most importantly he worries over where God is. This leads to some interesting conversations between Jesus and Satan. Satan seems to have no doubts about God, but is very cynical about God’s nature. Many of the things he tells Jesus often create anxiety for Jesus, but they also seem in some way to strengthen his resolve to do what God has in mind for him. It is an interesting choice to have Jesus and Satan done by the same actor. It creates a sense of an internal dialogue as Jesus struggles with his human and divine natures to come to terms with his mission.

While that may be bothersome to some, the Gospels (at least the Synoptics) are not always clear about Jesus’ self-awareness and his understanding of himself as divine. Writer/director Rodrigo Garcia focuses on Jesus’ human side. He says in production notes, “I cannot know what the divine side feels like, so I decided to treat Jesus, his predicaments, and his problems the same way I would treat a regular person. Also, this story takes place before Jesus begins his public ministry. There is a sense that this time in the desert serves in some way as an internship for what he will be doing when he emerges from this forty days.

Because of Jesus’ doubts concerning God, the father/son issues of the desert family become an inroad to consider the relationship of Father and Son. There is a lot of talking about fathers and sons and that relationship. Just as the son in the film is trying to come to terms with his father’s hopes and plans for him, Jesus is also trying to come to terms with God’s plan for him. The boy wants to go his own way and live his own life. Is that an option for Jesus to consider? Of course, there is a great deal of difference between the relationships of the father and son and the Father and the Son. Whereas one is exacerbated by the constant proximity of the father and son, the problem Jesus faces in his relationship with God is the seeming absence of God in the wilderness of Jesus’ life. In both the father/son and Father/Son relationships the difficulty of having faith in the interpersonal bonds is a constant struggle.

The film has a slight affinity to Martin Scorsese’s (and Nikos Kazantzakis’s) The Last Temptation of Christ. That was also a story that was not so much biblical as set within the biblical narrative. It was also a story in which Jesus’ doubts play as big of a role as his faith and that focused on the human aspect of Jesus during his ministry. I have to admit that I am personally more comfortable with the human aspects of Jesus. Like Garcia, I cannot understand what it would mean to be divine, so I relate to Jesus much more as a man, even though I do not deny his divinity. So this film, like The Last Temptation of Christ, is more to my liking than the overly reverent treatments of Jesus’ life that are often produced.

Photos credit: Gilles Mingasson / Broad Green Pictures