Drama

The Town

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Crime Drama. The story of a bank robber in Charlestown NY who discovers love and tries to get out of the world of crime and violence he has succumbed to. The movie hook is that Charlestown is a small community in New York that has more bank robbers per square mile than anywhere in the US. The idea here is also family generations and the sins of the father. What does it cost to get out? What does it take to change your life? It’s a pretty formulaic story: Boy meets girl. Boy is a criminal so he loses girl. Boy tries to get out of crime in order to get girl.

The moral values in this film are confused. While Ben Affleck’s character Doug shows a moral soft spot – he doesn’t kill people, he keeps his insane step-brother in line, and he falls in love with the desire to get out, he protects his innocent girlfriend from violence – he ultimately does not do the right thing: accept justice and help the FBI. In this case, the FBI lead, Agent Frawley, is the pretty boy from Mad Men and while he is not the typical diabolical evil Lawman so often portrayed in these kind of movies, he is played without any depth. There is one moment meant to make this FBI guy ultimately cruel: When he brings Doug in and tells him that if he doesn’t help the FBI there will be a time when he will want to, and it will be too late and Lawley will tell him, with relish, to “go F— yourself.” Needless to say, when Doug gets away, he leaves a note for agent Lawley, telling him to “Go F— yourself,” thus winning the moral duel. Doug thinks that helping to turn in other criminals and their higher ups for their crimes is “ratting,” so instead he tries to run away with his new love. Only problem is the bad guys won’t let him. So he does this one last robbery.

The moral premise of the film is entirely unsatisfying storytelling because the audience is encouraged to root for a criminal to get away crimes and then not paying for his crimes. Doug never gives himself up to the law, never accepts his moral responsibility and never pays for his crimes. He thinks that feeling sorry, “getting out” and starting over, without paying for his crimes, is enough. One of the last lines of the film is Doug saying, “Even when you try to change, there are still consequences for the things you’ve done in life.” True enough, yet a cop-out, because this humanistic morality of a criminal feeling sorry and losing love seems to be all the payment required by these storytellers.

Doug does lose his chance at love because he runs away to Florida and apparently can’t have her. He gives her the bank robbery money to help out with a boy’s club. As if doing good with stolen money is redemption rather than returning it to the victims he violated. He tells a clerk while robbing the bank to not worry cause it’s “not her money.” No, it’s just thousands of other innocent people’s hard earned money. These are all manipulative tactics of trying to avoid the guilt from his actions, but they are not justice. Guilt would have been satisfied, justice appeased, had Doug accepted the penalty for his crime, helped the FBI to attain justice and accepted the rejection from evil criminals for doing so, or at least died fighting against his old life. So there certainly are morally satisfying conclusions that would have redeemed Doug. The filmmakers just didn’t choose them.

Creation

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The dramatic story of the origin of Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of the Species. The narrative that the filmmakers construct is that Darwin reluctantly embraced his theory because it went against the cherished Christian faith of his wife, Emma, whom he loved deeply. It depicts him as suffering physical illness because he considered the implications of this theory to be the “death of God,” and hope for the afterlife. It portrays him as eventually “giving in” to the idea of evolution through natural selection because it was the truth, and he had to follow the truth wherever it led him, even if away from his beloved Emma. So the thematic battle is between truth and love. Emma tells Charles, “We both know you are at war with God. It is a battle you cannot win.” But he does in this story. And at the end we hear him say, “If I am right, it changes everything. If all these things are lies: courage, honor, love. It would break your mother’s heart.” So evolution in this story is a totalizing methodology that transcends science and speaks to other disciplines, reducing ethics and morality and the supernatural to illusions, or worse, delusions.

It also shows Darwin’s wrestling with the notion of a loving God who allows a “wasteful process with so many deaths for so few to live.” It shows his deep love for his daughter Annie, who died young. Annie becomes Darwin’s existential dilemma of the “loving God paradox.” The pastor of the church preaches for Darwin’s ears, “Our miseries are not of a cold uncaring universe, but a wise loving parent.” “The Lord works, in mysterious ways,” to which Darwin responds with anger in telling his now infamous description of the special wasp that lays its eggs in a live caterpillar’s body, as well as the 900 species of parasites that live within our own intestines. There are a few creative sequences where the camera zooms into hyper detail of nature, such as a baby bird that falls from a tree and dies, gets eaten by maggots and other creatures and fertilizes the dirt where the grass grows, all in time lapse to show the “heartless” amoral process of nature. Another poignant moment occurs when Darwin shows his children on a nature walk a fox capturing a rabbit as prey. Although I found it an ironic contradiciton that the filmmaker does not show the actual fox catching and killing the rabbit. This moment, which would have been so powerful in expressing the brutish red in tooth and claw nature of his worldview, the filmmakers could not film, no doubt because of “animal rights” issues. As if there is morality that restrains us from shooting such natural events. “No animals were hurt in the filming of this movie” is really laughable in this context of evolutionary theory.

Notwithstanding theistic evolution, the film seems to make the assertion that evolution’s most important implication is its effect on religion. And religion is not given a good depiction here, well at least the dominant form of religion. Emma Darwin is depicted as sincere, devout and loving. It’s everyone else that is Christian that gets the big hit. To begin with, the movie starts with the title CREATION next to an outstretched fetus hand in the womb. The hand is in the symbolic referential gesture of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, only there is no God’s hand outstretched to give it life. Later in the film, Darwin tells a story about an orangutan in captivity and we see a human with outstretched hand to the ape, also reflecting the motif, but in this sense, about ancestral connection not deity. The opening title asserts that some consider Darwin’s idea to the “The single most important idea in the history of thought.” And why? Contextually it seems because “You killed God” as Thomas Huxley tells Darwin in the film. We hear Darwin refer to a tale of Beagle captain Colonel Fitzroy capturing some indigenous Fuegan natives whom he seeks to convert and civilize them with Christian culture. When Fitzroy brings the “civilized” natives back to their people to try to convert them, it fails, because as Darwin believed in the movie, nature was more powerful than culture, a common narrative in today’s post-Enlightenment world that has hatred for Western civilization founded on Christianity. The local pastor is depicted as making Annie suffer corporal punishment (kneeling on salt) for believing in dinosaurs (a newly discovered mystery at the time), which of course now that we know they were real, makes Christians look like “science deniers.” At the end, Charles takes over the fairy tale book that his wife is reading their kids and instead tells a “natural” story about a sloth in Argentina, thus metaphorically illustrating how his theory replaces narratives of imagination with narratives of “fact.”

But there is some very creative counterbalancing going on in this story as well. For, Emma is shown to be an artist, a piano player, who plays beautiful music as Charles descends into his science of details. I’m not sure the filmmakers are aware of this, but Charles actually did lose his appreciation for classical music which after a time became to him just a series of detailed notes and sounds due to his scientific atomism. His scientific reductionism ruined his ability to appreciate beauty.

Another ironic twist is that the movie does show the fallacious science of the times as well. Charles seeks remedy for his illness in various quack medicines from useless drugs to “hydrotherapy” and body wrapping. So modern medicine at least does not get a full pass and is shown to have its weaknesses. Which is true. For the history of science is itself replete with as many foolish beliefs and practices as any religion.

Yet another ironic twist of interest lies in the comparison of Charles and Emma with their beliefs. The filmmakers show Charles as acting more Christian in his love and Emma more evolutionary despite her faith. Charles loses his own faith in the process, but still loves his wife and family and misses his dear departed Annie. Now when Annie is dying, Charles brings her to a faraway doctor for hydrotherapy. Like Christ leaving the flock to save one sheep, Charles leaves his family of wife and 3 children to save the one child, an altruistic move entirely at odds with his own theory. Meanwhile, Emma turns to go with him, but when she looks upon her brood of three other children she decides to stay, a perfect picture of survival of the fittest, favoring the protection of the healthy and letting the weak go to the ravages of nature – at odds with her Christian faith, and for which she regrets later on. Then, when Charles goes with his daughter, he says his last prayer to a God he is not sure is there, “If it is in your power, to save her, I will believe in you the rest of my days. Take me in her place.” Christian Substitutionary atonement, not unlike Christ’s own vicarious act. The movie also shows through intercutting and montage that Charles vicariously goes through the therapy with his daughter, at least in a spiritual sense. So we see Charles unable to live out the implications of a theory which he believed decimated the notion of love and sacrifice and courage. But we also see his Christian wife unwittingly living out his theory of natural selection.

And now, one of the most powerful thematic twists. At the end, Charles hands her his newly completed manuscript for the Origin and tells her that “Someone needs to take God’s side in all this.” He gives her the decision of what to do with it, to burn it or publish it – all up to her, after reading it. I don’t know if this really happened, but it is the ultimate sacrifice of truth for the sake of love that I can see. Contrary to his “scientific” devotion to truth, Darwin chooses love over truth. But then Emma decides to let him publish it, apparently also out of love for him instead of what she thought was truth. She tells him, “And so you’ve finally made an accomplice of me. May God forgive us both.” So no one is entirely consistent with their beliefs. Theistic evolutionism doesn’t get a voice in this story, as the notion of evolution and God are made to appear dichotomous opposites, as if God cannot achieve his purposes through evolution.

The Lovely Bones

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A murder thriller about the search for a killer in the 1970s, as told through the perspective of his 14 year old murder victim. After Susie Salmon is killed, and time fades with the killer uncaught, Susie’s sister and father hang on to their hope and eventually discover the killer was right on their block. But by the time they realize who he is, the killer escapes and finds a new place to live. The film seeks to bring some kind of justice by having the killer, though uncaught, become the victim of an accident that finds him falling from a great height and being smashed by rocks on the way down – the standard satisfaction for killing villains in movies. Ultimate justice in an impersonal universe.

The story wrestles with the devastating effect on a family that such unresolved pain can create. Marriages often break up over these kind of things, and Susie’s parents almost do. The obsession for justice and solution causes the dad to go somewhat crazy in his search for the killer.

Through much of the movie, Susie is portrayed as being in “the in-between” a world of changing dream-like environments of nature, from flowing wheat fields to mountains and lakes. This is a classic ghost story in that Susie cannot go to “her peace” until her murder is solved or until she and her family “let her go.” It faces the reality that “everybody dies,” but posits a universe without personal deity that seems to operate like an impersonal fate, making the best out of bad experiences. Another moment of impersonal fate bringing some justice is when Susie, who was killed before she could ever fulfill her desire to be kissed a first time by true love, finally gets her chance to do so. She finds a “psychically sensitive” girl who is dating the boy that had a crush on Susie and Susie enters that girl’s body. The boy then sees Susie’s face in the inhabited girl and kisses her with a deep love and tenderness. Susie finds that moment of grace that was stolen from her before she could ever do so. But again, this is the wish fulfillment thinking of a godless universe of impersonal fate that somehow operates in a personal way.

Not once in the entire story about death and the afterlife is a personal God even brought up as a question, let alone an answer. He is completely ignored as if no one even believes in Him, even in the 70s. Because of this, I think this movie will not connect with most people.

All the other victims of the killer, (about 7 other women and girls) meet in the in-between and laugh and dance in their unity of victimhood. And ultimately they all go to some kind of “heaven” of bliss at the end. So according to this film, we live in a godless universe where all people go to an eternal “heaven” (not sure about serial killers though), but there is no apparent hell or eternal punishment for the evil.

Up in the Air

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A tale of cynicism and love in conflict, of reality and escape, isolation and human connection, techonology and humanity. Ryan Bingham works for a company that fires people. He spends 270 days a year on the road, or rather, in the air, flying around to companies firing them. And he is a pro. He’s got his life in a backpack, light and without messy human encumbrances. But when a young new girl at the company, Natalie, inspires a new idea of using computer terminals to fire people remotely, and thereby save hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel expenses and time, Ryan reacts with hostility. Not just because his job is in jeopardy of becoming obsolete, but because, ironically, Ryan still cares about the humans to whom he is bringing bad news. He believes that they need the personal connection to help them “down from the ledge” of depression or despair. So he fights to protect that humanity, while simultaneously remaining a remote person to love, an island of self protection from the dangers of self-disclosure and vulnerability. In short, he is an unbeliever in love – he is a rock, he is an island. Sounds of Simon and Garfunkle ringing in my ears.

As Ryan also speaks at conventions about how to live life in a backpack, we hear his philosophy of life of shedding the weight of traditional life. We can see that it is a rationalization of his own solitude, which he revels in. But herein lies the key to his sympathetic stature with the viewer. Ryan is honest, he doesn’t lie or play games, he keeps it all up front that he doesn’t want marriage, doesn’t want kids, doesn’t want a house to tie him down, doesn’t want the “cultural baggage” of what most people consider “normal life” of “settling down.” In short, he is truthful and honest man, a kind of integrity of openness without secrets or a closet where he hides a dark side. So when he meets Alex, a beautiful woman who has the same traveling lifestyle and same “no commitments” approach, he has an on the road “romance” with her of traveling fornication.

And then Ryan has to bring Natalie along with him to teach her the ropes of personal care in firing people that he is so good at. Young Natalie is a 23 year old who wants to have a career, get married, get a house, yada yada. But when her boyfriend breaks up with her, her world is crushed because she is an incurable romantic who even moved to nowheresville Oklahoma to be near her boyfriend. In other words, she made choices of a traditional belief in love and was betrayed.

The struggle here is between traditional love, which requires vulnerability in order to attain the intimacy of human connection or the modern atomistic alienation of individuals as monads of self interest. The former means you can be betrayed and you will most likely suffer in life but can of course experience that human intimacy which brings shalom (shades of Tennyson, “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all), and the latter means you will never be burdened with the “baggage” of others, you will never be betrayed and saddled with unfair expectations and demands, that you will be “free” to control your own life – and of course live and die alone in this life. Natalie makes the argument that what about the base notion of just having companionship, children there when you die. To which Ryan responds, that is a delusion. Most people put their parents in nursing homes at the end anyway, just as he did and his parents did before him. Everyone dies alone. More shades of Ecclesiastes.

But the problem is that we see Ryan falling in love with Alex.

A particularly poignant moment is when Ryan’s sister’s fiancé is getting cold feet on his wedding day, and Ryan is asked to go in and talk to him. Well, not only does Ryan not have a relationship with his sister (no attachments), here he is supposed to convince someone of something he doesn’t believe in. But he does it. And he does it by admitting all the crap and responsibility that the kid is afraid of, but he ends by getting the kid to realize that all his best memories of life are with somebody, not alone, and that the lonely sad times are when he is alone, so “life’s better with company. Everyone needs a co-pilot.” And it is at this moment that Ryan has shared out of his own lonliness and finally realizes he doesn’t believe in his lie of self-protection and solitude, that he too needs to be known and loved. He walks out of the middle of his next seminar on backpacking life, and runs to the airport (the formula “running to the airport” scene) and flies to Alex’s home, presumably to tell her he wants to spend the rest of his life with her, for her to be his co-pilot. So when he discovers she is married with children and considers their tryst only as a sexual escape from her boring “real life” he is devastated.

But her betrayal is not just of his romantic innocence, because even though she never told him about the family, she also was up front that a sexual tryst was all she wanted. She lured him into love and then cut his heart out with her own heartlessness. The monster has met his match with someone more monstrous than him, and he lost. What’s worse, Natalie, after hearing that someone committed suicide after she fired her, gives up her job and applies for a job that she really prefers. In her interview we discover that as the interviewer says regarding her decision to choose love over her career (in moving to Omaha to “follow a boy”) “I guess everyone does that at one point or another.” And we see her now prioritizing her career over love.

At the end, we are shown “live interviews” of people who found their significance and overcame their job firings by clinging to family over career and money. YET, Ryan ends up back in the air, perpetually alone, without a co-pilot, flying in the clouds above the unaware normal happy families. So, as a story, this hero’s journey seems to contradict the more sentimental notions of family and significance of love in its periphery, which I think creates confusing double talk. The hero’s journey is the one we sympathetically go on and are cheering for, yet just when he is changed in his character arc to accept love, he is burned by it and ends up alone rather than realizing he chose the wrong one. By returning to his old ways, it seems to suggest that he cannot achieve love even if he changes to be a lover. Meanwhile, his sympathetic side kick, Natalie, seems to lose her romantic notions of family and significance and ends up prioritizing career, which is what brought Ryan to the very troubles he suffered. She appears to be turning into him, and losing her hope of love. So, to me this story is ultimately cynical about love, because it shows “extras” pining on about love and significance in family, but the two main characters lose all hope for love and embrace career instead. Perhaps you could call this an “anti-romance” because it takes the typical love story of someone learning that love is more important than career and turns it on its head in the Hero’s own journey, as well as his sidekick’s. It makes the argument in the dialogue for the necessity of human connection and need, but then denies it to the hero and his reflection, Natalie. (A reflection is a character in the story who reflects the same pursuit as the hero but with different choices in order to illustrate antithesis that supports the main thesis or theme of the story).

Perhaps the theme of the movie is best encapsulate in Alex’s words when speaking to Natalie’s betrayal by her boyfriend, a “prick.” Alex says, “We all fall for pricks. Pricks are spontaneous, unpredictable and fun. And we’re all surprised when they turn out to be pricks.” This is reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’s remark:

“And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our [educational] situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that our civilization needs more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests [hearts] and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
— C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

Crazy Heart

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Tender Mercies on steroids. A personal redemption story about a country western singer, Bad Blake, whose seminal influence on country music is all but forgotten, as he struggles to overcome his drunkenness and loser mentality and status. Bad plays in pathetic bars around the southwest, while his good friend, Tommy Sweet, who was mentored and influenced by Bad, is a screaming mainstream success. Tommy wants to help Bad out, by letting him write for him, and even perform a bit, but Bad has that self destructive and prima donna purist attitude about the music that keeps him from being able to do much of anything with Tommy.

When Bad meets the young and beautiful Jean, he falls in love like never before, and seeks to redeem himself through her. The only trouble is, his bad ways return because he is still who he is, a drunken selfish slob. At first, Jean ignores it, but when Bad’s alcoholic addiction endangers her son at a mall, she finally cuts him off.

Bad, then faces his addiction and goes to rehab and considers himself changed. But when he returns to Jean to beg her forgiveness and proclaim he is a new man, she refuses to allow him back in because she knows the reality of this kind of false conversion: Redemption cannot be accomplished through or for another human person, it must be sought for it’s own sake.

And self-redemption is what Bad decides to go after. He accepts the final loss of his one hope at a new life with Jean, and ends up sticking with his new life without her. It’s the opposite of most love stories where the hero or heroine finds redemption in the love of another human being. In standard love stories, the hero or heroine must give up their selfishness and have all hopes lost before they become worthy of the lover, but in this case, that final prize never happens, which makes it a sad melancholic, but more realistic love story of redemption.

The Young Victoria

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A period bio of the early reign of England’s Queen Victoria, played by Emily Blunt. It depicts her attempt to find true love and trust in the midst of an aristocratic world of political intrigue, where everyone has an agenda, and everyone seeks personal and political gain. Victoria discovers Prince Albert from Germany, who over time proves to be the only one who really cares for her well being, which starts with mistrust and testing and ends in an enduring love so often missing in such a world.

An Education

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A feminist coming of age story about a young 16 year old British girl in 1961 England being swept off her feet in a romance with an older man, forcing her to choose between the traditional patriarchal role of marriage and the life of educated independence.

The very first shots of the film show school girls learning posture, dancing, and cooking which immediately set up the traditional notion that even a girl’s schooling is to prepare her for marriage. Jenny wants to go to Oxford to read English. Her parents are traditional in their relationship as well, being depicted as goodly and kind, yet hopelessly anachronistic. So when a dashing young man in his 20s, David, draws Jenny into a world of fun, dancing, restaraunts, art, and travel, she begins to question what the whole purpose of this boring schooling is for anyway.

The examples of “liberated” women are a school marm looking single female English teacher and the principle of the school, another uptight woman who believes education is salvation. They are made to look undesirable and education is made to look undesirable, but only for the moment. Jenny even gives a rather fair assessment from a teen’s perspective of how everyone around her talks of how important it is to be educated, yet everyone in education is boring, boring, boring, so why should she devote herself to a boring independent life instead of really having the fun and enjoyment? Jenny’s father reveals that even his desire for her education is only to make her more appealing to a rich man like David. And David even proposes marriage to Jenny, which she accepts at first, and gives up her education.

But ultimately David is shown to be a deceiver. He makes all his money through questionable, even illegal transactions. He steals, he moves black families into neighborhoods in order to buy old lady’s homes for cheaper when they sell out of racist fear. Oh yeah, and David is also secretly already married to another woman. And this is not the first time he’s done this to other women. He also happens to be Jewish, which makes this movie anti-Semitic in it’s affirmation of “the Wandering Jew” a racist myth from the middle ages of the Jew as satanic tempter, wandering around, making money by exploiting people and tempting them away from salvation. But in this case, salvation is feminist education, making this film anti-semitic feminist theory. Ironic, too, that this anti-Semitic movie would even make a reference to “the Wandering Jew” from the mouth of the father, who is, depicted in this story as ultimately being right.

Jenny is able to get back on track and manages to make it to Oxford, so she is “saved” at the end through education, a myth of the Enlightenment worldview. But it is clear that this movie is about everything not being as it appears. The traditional view of marriage of the man providing and taking care of the woman appears to be romantic at first, but is ultimately destructive seduction. The life of the liberated woman appears to be boring and lonely and uptight, but is ultimately salvation. Every man in the film is either a deceiver or a fool, and every woman who buys into this traditional interpretation is depicted as mindless (David’s partner’s girlfriend who is proud of her shallow ignorance) or a kept woman (Jenny’s mother).

The real education in this film is the education of experience that Jenny has with David, learning that the traditional notions of marriage is a seductive deception that ruins women’s lives by keeping them from independence, and education is salvation.

Invictus

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A true story of Nelson Mandela becoming president of South Africa and his subsequent attempt to bring the country together by focusing on the nation’s rugby team winning the World Cup. The movie begins with Mandela winning the election and being installed. The racial tensions run high as everyone, including his own entourage, expect a “regime change” mentality – fire all the previous administration and replace everyone with your own agents of power. But Mandela surprises them all, by his very first act in office. He calls the previous staff in and tells them that if they want to leave, they can, but if they want to stay and help bring change, then he will keep them. Much to the chagrin of his head of security, Mandela also brings in five big white Afrikaaners to round out his security. Mandela also stops the newly empowered rugby committee from disbanding their “all-but-one-white” team. Why? Because they see that team as a symbol of the oppression of the past. But Mandela sees it as the perfect location for embodying the very future unity the country needs.

And this is the theme of the movie: Overcoming injustice through forgiveness and reconciliation, rather than the multicultural view of overcoming injustice through the will to power and revolutionary regime change. Whereas multiculturalism would preach forced or artificial affirmative action and the vengeance of reverse discrimination against whites, Mandela says, “Forgiveness starts here. A rainbow nation starts here.” If you want to overcome past institutionalized injustice, you cannot replace it with a new injustice of institutionalized vengeance. That is only a cycle of violence. Demonizing previous administrations and punishing them is the injustice of victimology, crying victim in order to justify revenge.

Interestingly, the movie does not address in detail the fact that Mandela was also estranged from his wife because of her belief in violent resistance, but it does show his estrangement from his daughter because of his commitment to a higher cause. His daughter asserts the vengeance and regime change mentality of reparations and affirmative action. But Mandela tells her, “You seek only to assert your own personal feelings. That is selfish. That will not help build our nation.” Mandela so believes in the higher cause of forgiveness and reconciliation that he will even walk away from his family because they sought the ways of multicultural hate and violence.

The title of the movie comes from a poem by William Ernest Henley, “Invictus,” that Mandela quotes a couple times in the film. The last lines are emphasized in this lyric of overcoming the “fell clutch of circumstance” that bloodies the head of the oppressed in life: “I am master of my fate and the captain of my soul.” Mandela concludes, “If I cannot change when circumstances demand it, how can I expect others to?” And so this film is a story about living out grace and forgiveness instead of getting back at your oppressors by oppressing them when you are in power. That “master of my fate” line seems to cast it in a humanistic self-derived power to forgive rather than a religious or faith oriented worldview of divine empowerment.

Me and Orson Welles

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A coming of age story of a young teenager trying to break into acting, who gets a break to be in Orson Welles’ 1937 production of Julius Caesar. This is before War of the Worlds, before his big film masterpiece Citizen Kane, the penultimate moment in Welles’ meteoric career. This appears to be a fictional romance set within an historical event. Zac Efron plays Richard, the young lead, who is 17 or so, still at home with his conventional suburban mother yet yearning for the romance of the theatre. He worms his way into the production by impressing Welles with his wit and confidence, and summarily falls for the troupe’s secretary, Sonja, played by Claire Danes. He ultimately loses his virginity to Sonja and consequently falls head over heels in love with her. He waxes eloquent with expressions of undying love worthy of the bard himself, that is, Shakespeare. But his innocence is lost when he discovers that Sonja sleeps with Welles and will do so with famous movie producer David Selznick, in order to advance her career.

Though Richard is crushed, he begins to re-notice a girl he had previously met, another innocent high school girl with ambitions of getting her poetry published. At the end, Richard meets back up with her and we get the impression that he will pursue this relationship as a sort of consolation prize, or return to innocence.

This film explores the loss of innocence in a head on collision with the cynical reality of the entertainment world of theatre, a world that perceives itself in the words of Welles, as “saving the dignity of man,” yet contrarily lives undignified immoral lives because, again in the words of Welles, “Our business is to create the best art. That’s all that matters.” Since the artist embodies moral truth in their art, they don’t need to actually live morally or truthfully in their personal lives. One is reminded of the cliché self delusion of the actor who thinks they can speak with authority because “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on television,” as if pretending confers any reality upon the individual’s experience.

Welles’ egocentric, self-obsessed, fame obsessed, prurient selfishness becomes the symbolic epitomy of this world that is larger than life, and indeed, a façade for real life. The Welles character is deliberately overplayed like a 1940s histrionic movie character, speaking as if he is always delivering lines. This embodies a “life as imitation of art” that reflects the ultimate fraudulence of that world. But this is all done lovingly by the writer/director, not with animosity for that world, but with a seeming longing for lost innocence amidst his own love of the art.

The Last Station

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Based on the true story of famous Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s last year of life, 1910. This is a “love/hate story” about the traumatic relationship that Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) had with his wife of 48 years, the Countess Sofya, played by Helen Mirren. It’s told through the eyes of a young neophyte Tolstoyan, Valentin, who is hired to be a secretary to Leo. It is a clash of worldviews as Leo seeks to rid himself of private property and deed all the rights of his writing to the public domain, while his wife pleads for him to not do so in order to take care of his family. They are madly in love with each other, yet also hatefully at odds with each other’s politics. And this results in a passionate recklessness of extremes in their reactions to one another.

There is a Tolstoyan commune of people seeking to live without property and in moral purity, something not easily accomplished as Valentin immediately falls for Sasha, a girl who defies the rules and they begin a torrid sex affair. The irony of Tolstoy’s position is brought out as we see his followers refer to him as a kind of Jesus Christ, and yet deviously plot to have him sign away his works to the public domain, “for the people.” Sofya is outwardly portrayed as a desperate clutching paranoid gold digger worried about a conspiracy to manipulate Leo into changing his will, yet she is also displayed as not only being right about the conspiracy, but the only one who has been loyal to Tolstoy, to his happiness, the only one honest about his humanity and faults, and the only one who passionately loves him.

It’s as if this film is showing the clash between socialism and capitalism, a reflection of the current political debates we find ourselves in.

The young secretary enters the commune with pure ideology, which draws the cynical Sasha, but he also comes to see both sides of Leo and Sofya and ends up painfully unwilling to trash Sofya as all the other conspirators do because he sees her depth of true love for Leo. It’s as if the movie is showing us that ideology like socialism, which negates private property and prioritizes the public over the private, ends up destroying the passion and life of individuals in the name of “the cause” while the apparent selfishness of free market capitalism with its priority of private property ends up creating the freedom out of which true love and human individuality is bred. Sofya is not without her selfish and histrionic faults and Leo is not without virtue for his ideals, which is what makes this story an honest portrayal instead of propaganda.

As the conspirators draw Leo away to hiding, in order to let him write his great work which Sofya seems to be impeding, Leo is nevertheless depicted as needing her for his very breath in order to live. It is their passionate love that draws them unstoppably together, but it is their philosophies that draw them apart. As stated in the film, “To love and be loved is the only reality,” and “love is what it is all about.” Leo tells his secretary that the one thing that all religions have in common is love, that it is “love that binds all mankind together.” And in this story, it is love of individuals that transcends ideology of the community.

Evidently, Tolstoy had rejected the Russian Orthodox church (another reflection of socialism is the negation of religion) and his followers are so concerned that Sofya will visit him and bring about a death bed conversion back to the church, that they seek unsuccessfully to keep her from him as he dies. As Leo’s ideologue friend Vladimir tells the naïve secretary, “A deathbed conversion will destroy everything. A simple noble death is what we want.” In other words, the truth and the individual must be sacrificed to the movement or the ideology. At this ending, just before Sofya is brought in by the now more realist Valentin, she tells Vladimir “You want to create an image of YOU, not HIM.” And so it seems this story shows that those who seek to build movements and ideologies over the individual and love will end up manipulating the individual and controlling others.