A Serious Man
Review by John L. Ng
November, 2009
Something is amiss when this strange movie begins with a quote from the medieval rabbi Rashi – receive with simplicity everything that happens to you, and a stranger parable set in an Eastern European Yiddish village about how a righteous person might be a ghost (I think!). Then there are the lyrics by the ’60 band Jefferson Airplane – when the truth is found to be lies / and all the joy within you dies / don't you want somebody to love – that permeate the movie. A Serious Man, produced, directed, written and edited (under a pseudonym) by Joel and Ethan Coen is about a serious man Larry Gopnik (played by Michael Stuhlbarg) who seeks to do right but is wronged.
In the fullness of time, his shalom of prairie existence in suburban Minnesota is vandalized by a gang of random circumstances. Slowly a series of existential inconveniences mutates into ontological miseries. One of his students protests a class grade and tries to bribe and sue him. His tenure committee receives anonymous malicious letters regarding his disqualification. A mail order music company harasses him for non payment. His unemployed and live-in brother slips down physical, mental and moral precipices. The bickering rivalry between his son and daughter irks him with daily distractions. His wife decides to leave him for a pompous older widower.
But unlike the story of the Biblical Job, we get no preface glimpse of why these wrongs happened to Mr. Gopnik. At least in first chapters of the book of Job, we are told that the horrific calamities came upon Job because there was a bet between God and the Adversary in heaven. In his travails, Mr. Gopnik is undeterred – he seeks the counsel of not one but three rabbis. First, his synagogue dumps a naïve junior rabbi on him. The young rabbi in earnest seeks to convince him that reality is a matter of perspective. Things aren’t bad if you frame it with imagination.
Then Mr. Gopnik sits before a second rabbi, respectable but pretentious. He tells a story of how Jewish dentist encountered a kind of epiphany in the mouth of a Gentile patient. The dentist searched for meaning in futile agony. At last he went back to his mundane life of weekly golf with friends and daily meals with spouse. At wits end, Mr. Gopnik finally begs for the wisdom of an aged rabbi. But the eminent rabbi’s contemplative life is too busy to have time for him. Once again, his existential questions are left to himself, unanswered.
The movie is ubiquitously Jewish. Some of its cultural and religious references fly over this Gentile’s head. Yet the notion of God’s and life’s incomprehensibility strokes the ruffled perplexity in us all when we witness what seems to be senseless and random evil. More than a few times, Mr. Gopnik laments: I’ve tried to be a serious man. I’ve tried to do right. The incongruity of his desire for right and what ends up as unexplained wrong is troublesome in any thinking person of faith. But there are no answers, even to a person of faith.
The movie is also opaquely funny. A truism from the old Catskills vaudeville days may explain the movie’s humor. Many great comedians are Jewish because the Jewish people suffered so much in history. Mr. Gopnik laments again: Why does He (Hashem, Hebrew for ‘the name’ referring to God) fill us with questions if he doesn’t answer. Here I turn to the third book after Job in my bible. Maybe Ecclesiastes’s counsel is the wisest practice – at day’s end, there is one thing left to do: eat, drink and find happiness wherever we are and what ever we are doing.
November, 2009
Something is amiss when this strange movie begins with a quote from the medieval rabbi Rashi – receive with simplicity everything that happens to you, and a stranger parable set in an Eastern European Yiddish village about how a righteous person might be a ghost (I think!). Then there are the lyrics by the ’60 band Jefferson Airplane – when the truth is found to be lies / and all the joy within you dies / don't you want somebody to love – that permeate the movie. A Serious Man, produced, directed, written and edited (under a pseudonym) by Joel and Ethan Coen is about a serious man Larry Gopnik (played by Michael Stuhlbarg) who seeks to do right but is wronged.
In the fullness of time, his shalom of prairie existence in suburban Minnesota is vandalized by a gang of random circumstances. Slowly a series of existential inconveniences mutates into ontological miseries. One of his students protests a class grade and tries to bribe and sue him. His tenure committee receives anonymous malicious letters regarding his disqualification. A mail order music company harasses him for non payment. His unemployed and live-in brother slips down physical, mental and moral precipices. The bickering rivalry between his son and daughter irks him with daily distractions. His wife decides to leave him for a pompous older widower.
But unlike the story of the Biblical Job, we get no preface glimpse of why these wrongs happened to Mr. Gopnik. At least in first chapters of the book of Job, we are told that the horrific calamities came upon Job because there was a bet between God and the Adversary in heaven. In his travails, Mr. Gopnik is undeterred – he seeks the counsel of not one but three rabbis. First, his synagogue dumps a naïve junior rabbi on him. The young rabbi in earnest seeks to convince him that reality is a matter of perspective. Things aren’t bad if you frame it with imagination.
Then Mr. Gopnik sits before a second rabbi, respectable but pretentious. He tells a story of how Jewish dentist encountered a kind of epiphany in the mouth of a Gentile patient. The dentist searched for meaning in futile agony. At last he went back to his mundane life of weekly golf with friends and daily meals with spouse. At wits end, Mr. Gopnik finally begs for the wisdom of an aged rabbi. But the eminent rabbi’s contemplative life is too busy to have time for him. Once again, his existential questions are left to himself, unanswered.
The movie is ubiquitously Jewish. Some of its cultural and religious references fly over this Gentile’s head. Yet the notion of God’s and life’s incomprehensibility strokes the ruffled perplexity in us all when we witness what seems to be senseless and random evil. More than a few times, Mr. Gopnik laments: I’ve tried to be a serious man. I’ve tried to do right. The incongruity of his desire for right and what ends up as unexplained wrong is troublesome in any thinking person of faith. But there are no answers, even to a person of faith.
The movie is also opaquely funny. A truism from the old Catskills vaudeville days may explain the movie’s humor. Many great comedians are Jewish because the Jewish people suffered so much in history. Mr. Gopnik laments again: Why does He (Hashem, Hebrew for ‘the name’ referring to God) fill us with questions if he doesn’t answer. Here I turn to the third book after Job in my bible. Maybe Ecclesiastes’s counsel is the wisest practice – at day’s end, there is one thing left to do: eat, drink and find happiness wherever we are and what ever we are doing.
The Informant
Review by John L. Ng
October, 2009
The title itself is strangely funny – what’s with the exclamation point and what does it mean! Mark Whitacre, played by Matt Damon with demotic delight, lives and works in the land of Lincoln – the movie is set in Decatur, Illinois. We are reminded of where we are by a Lincoln bust in almost every early scene. Maybe it is Lincoln’s iconic image of wholesome honesty that we should be thinking about. At first, everything about Whitacre seems to have a mid-west wholesomeness, and yet not. His boyish overweight physique, ill-fitted suits and colorful neckties, bad toupee, dorky mustache and bumbling babbles are as promiscuously tasteless as his house cluttered with eclectic collectables. Something is off about him. But we are not quite sure what just yet.
The Informant! by director Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s 11, 12, 13 movies) is based on a book of the same title, without the exclamation and published in 2000, by former New York Times writer Kurt Eichenwald. The book is an expose of the corruption and downfall of ADM, an agribusiness giant that produced corn and other food additives. The movie begins with Whitacre dribbling philosophically to his son about the virtue of corn. Indeed, corn has made him a wealthy man. He is a biochemist and the youngest divisional head at ADM. He soon becomes a whistle blower to the FBI when his company is about to be outed for a price-fixing scheme.
Sometimes clueless, the FBI agents are at once sincere, gullible and inept. Unbeknown to them and the agency, Whitacre’s hands are as stained with the grime of greed as the other executives in his company. Soon, we realize that he is a congenital liar. As his mendacity piles on high and deep, Whitacre irreversibly descends in a detour of depraved disconnects. While his voice-over concerns with where to buy fancy neckties and how to pronounce porche, Whitacre’s life unravels into a self destructive and self deceived fray. His delusional existence is so pathetic that Soderbergh cynically makes fun of it.
The movie is a fun study of human pathology. But our pathos is not funny; it is lugubriously serious. That is why the church calls the seven deadly sins deadly. We laugh at Whitacre for his apparent banal and bumbling greed. Corporate corruption is so common and pervasive in America that we are tricked again and again into believing that it is mundane. White collar crimes, with its expensive neckties (another strangely funny thing in the movie – an overt obsession with neckties), do not ruffle our sense of jurisprudence like other societal crimes, like rape and murder. Everybody does it and nobody is the victim. Or rather, the victims are faceless.
The movie is fun to watch and I feel guilty for it. No conscientious God-fearing person would find any form of human pathology funny. But calmly, like Whitacre, I can deceive myself into self justification. As I type away on my laptop for this review, I can write that my enjoyment is a fitting testimony of how banally evil human pathology can be. In light of recent corporate corruption (the likes of Enron, Madoff Investment Securities, AIG, Lehman Brothers) in greed and other deadly sins that contributed to our global economic downturn, can we do anything but laugh. While the seven deadly sins are being perpetrated by and around us, we grin as if we are watching a fun movie. If human pathology is funny, then the joke is on us when we gaze into a mirror and realize that the victims, and perpetrators, are not faceless after all.
October, 2009
The title itself is strangely funny – what’s with the exclamation point and what does it mean! Mark Whitacre, played by Matt Damon with demotic delight, lives and works in the land of Lincoln – the movie is set in Decatur, Illinois. We are reminded of where we are by a Lincoln bust in almost every early scene. Maybe it is Lincoln’s iconic image of wholesome honesty that we should be thinking about. At first, everything about Whitacre seems to have a mid-west wholesomeness, and yet not. His boyish overweight physique, ill-fitted suits and colorful neckties, bad toupee, dorky mustache and bumbling babbles are as promiscuously tasteless as his house cluttered with eclectic collectables. Something is off about him. But we are not quite sure what just yet.
The Informant! by director Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s 11, 12, 13 movies) is based on a book of the same title, without the exclamation and published in 2000, by former New York Times writer Kurt Eichenwald. The book is an expose of the corruption and downfall of ADM, an agribusiness giant that produced corn and other food additives. The movie begins with Whitacre dribbling philosophically to his son about the virtue of corn. Indeed, corn has made him a wealthy man. He is a biochemist and the youngest divisional head at ADM. He soon becomes a whistle blower to the FBI when his company is about to be outed for a price-fixing scheme.
Sometimes clueless, the FBI agents are at once sincere, gullible and inept. Unbeknown to them and the agency, Whitacre’s hands are as stained with the grime of greed as the other executives in his company. Soon, we realize that he is a congenital liar. As his mendacity piles on high and deep, Whitacre irreversibly descends in a detour of depraved disconnects. While his voice-over concerns with where to buy fancy neckties and how to pronounce porche, Whitacre’s life unravels into a self destructive and self deceived fray. His delusional existence is so pathetic that Soderbergh cynically makes fun of it.
The movie is a fun study of human pathology. But our pathos is not funny; it is lugubriously serious. That is why the church calls the seven deadly sins deadly. We laugh at Whitacre for his apparent banal and bumbling greed. Corporate corruption is so common and pervasive in America that we are tricked again and again into believing that it is mundane. White collar crimes, with its expensive neckties (another strangely funny thing in the movie – an overt obsession with neckties), do not ruffle our sense of jurisprudence like other societal crimes, like rape and murder. Everybody does it and nobody is the victim. Or rather, the victims are faceless.
The movie is fun to watch and I feel guilty for it. No conscientious God-fearing person would find any form of human pathology funny. But calmly, like Whitacre, I can deceive myself into self justification. As I type away on my laptop for this review, I can write that my enjoyment is a fitting testimony of how banally evil human pathology can be. In light of recent corporate corruption (the likes of Enron, Madoff Investment Securities, AIG, Lehman Brothers) in greed and other deadly sins that contributed to our global economic downturn, can we do anything but laugh. While the seven deadly sins are being perpetrated by and around us, we grin as if we are watching a fun movie. If human pathology is funny, then the joke is on us when we gaze into a mirror and realize that the victims, and perpetrators, are not faceless after all.
Julie & Julia
Review by John L. Ng
August, 2009
Julie & Julia is a delightful movie that touches us with our inherent human needs met. Hanna Arendt in “The Human Condition” writes about what it means to be human: to labor for food and shelter, to work in meaningful and creative expressions, and to act toward significant relationships that share our lives’ endeavors. The movie, directed by Nora Ephron, writer turned director, celebrates those meanings with the bliss of conventional marriages, the joy of cooking and eating, and the fulfillment of life’s calling.
The narration, centered around Julia Child’s tome “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” threads two parallel stories. One is Julie Powell (Amy Adams) a would-be writer who lives in Queens with her husband. In a bland job, she spends a year cooking Ms. Child’s 500 plus recipes and blogs about the experience. These blogs later become “Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.” The other story, based loosely on Julia Child’s memoir “My Life in France” is about Julia (Meryl Streep) and Paul Child living in Europe in the 1940’s. Also unfulfilled, Julia laments, “I need something to do.” So she enrolls in Le Cordon Bleu and masters the art of French cooking.
Both women cannot do what they endeavor without empowering husbands. It is their spousal support that provides their pursuit of life’s calling. Although the two marriages are separated by half a century of changes in cultural values and social morals, both affirm conventional
marriage that demands mutual acceptance and volitional allowance between flawed spouses in equally imperfect relationships. Among other aspects, what makes a flawed marriage so joyous is sex as the consummation of emotional intimacy. The shameless and wholesome display of their sexual desire and fulfillment is refreshing. Against pop culture, good sex does not have to be perfect techniques with attractive people. It reminds us that sex is not primarily a physical
act. Julia, getting dressed with her sister, beholds their middle aged and less than perfect bodies in a mirror, demurs, “pretty good, but not great.” The two couples, even with blemished bodies, make sex in marriage fun because it fulfills their longing for the other as intended.
Julie & Julia also celebrates the fulfillment and hard work of finding one’s life calling. Julie struggles with high self-doubt and low self-esteem when with college friends, who flaunt their apparent successes imperiously and imperviously. Julia, the wife of a mid-level diplomat, suffers middle class drift. But the women find significance and meaning when they discover the joy of cooking. They triumph in their discovered vocation with goaded purpose and work regiments.
Finally, Julie & Julia celebrates the joy of cooking and the communal meal. The movie also shamelessly displays culinary lust. When asked what she likes to do, Julia replies, “Eat!” “And you are so good at it,” comes the retort. At every excuse and opportunity, the women cook for their husbands and eat with friends. Every close up of Julia has her talking and laughing with a mouthful of food. No one eats ever alone. Indeed, all four are very good at enjoying good food with good friends. To labor, work, and act (Arendt) is not easy. At the end of the day, where more is said than done, there is nothing better than to eat, drink, and be happy (Ecclesiastes 2.24). How else can we live up to what it means to be human in our created purpose?
August, 2009
Julie & Julia is a delightful movie that touches us with our inherent human needs met. Hanna Arendt in “The Human Condition” writes about what it means to be human: to labor for food and shelter, to work in meaningful and creative expressions, and to act toward significant relationships that share our lives’ endeavors. The movie, directed by Nora Ephron, writer turned director, celebrates those meanings with the bliss of conventional marriages, the joy of cooking and eating, and the fulfillment of life’s calling.
The narration, centered around Julia Child’s tome “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” threads two parallel stories. One is Julie Powell (Amy Adams) a would-be writer who lives in Queens with her husband. In a bland job, she spends a year cooking Ms. Child’s 500 plus recipes and blogs about the experience. These blogs later become “Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.” The other story, based loosely on Julia Child’s memoir “My Life in France” is about Julia (Meryl Streep) and Paul Child living in Europe in the 1940’s. Also unfulfilled, Julia laments, “I need something to do.” So she enrolls in Le Cordon Bleu and masters the art of French cooking.
Both women cannot do what they endeavor without empowering husbands. It is their spousal support that provides their pursuit of life’s calling. Although the two marriages are separated by half a century of changes in cultural values and social morals, both affirm conventional
marriage that demands mutual acceptance and volitional allowance between flawed spouses in equally imperfect relationships. Among other aspects, what makes a flawed marriage so joyous is sex as the consummation of emotional intimacy. The shameless and wholesome display of their sexual desire and fulfillment is refreshing. Against pop culture, good sex does not have to be perfect techniques with attractive people. It reminds us that sex is not primarily a physical
act. Julia, getting dressed with her sister, beholds their middle aged and less than perfect bodies in a mirror, demurs, “pretty good, but not great.” The two couples, even with blemished bodies, make sex in marriage fun because it fulfills their longing for the other as intended.
Julie & Julia also celebrates the fulfillment and hard work of finding one’s life calling. Julie struggles with high self-doubt and low self-esteem when with college friends, who flaunt their apparent successes imperiously and imperviously. Julia, the wife of a mid-level diplomat, suffers middle class drift. But the women find significance and meaning when they discover the joy of cooking. They triumph in their discovered vocation with goaded purpose and work regiments.
Finally, Julie & Julia celebrates the joy of cooking and the communal meal. The movie also shamelessly displays culinary lust. When asked what she likes to do, Julia replies, “Eat!” “And you are so good at it,” comes the retort. At every excuse and opportunity, the women cook for their husbands and eat with friends. Every close up of Julia has her talking and laughing with a mouthful of food. No one eats ever alone. Indeed, all four are very good at enjoying good food with good friends. To labor, work, and act (Arendt) is not easy. At the end of the day, where more is said than done, there is nothing better than to eat, drink, and be happy (Ecclesiastes 2.24). How else can we live up to what it means to be human in our created purpose?
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Review by John L. Ng
June, 2009
My married sister-in-law and her woman friends gasped in weird, but understandable, pleasure when Brad Pitt, draped in a leather jacket on a motorcycle, roared across the screen in a scene from “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” In that moment, Pitt’s character is at his human perfection of cute stuff and very good looks. But the movie is not a study of the actor’s gorgeousness. It is a whimsical contemplation of human immortality. What does it mean to grow old and suffer losses and death? Loosely based on a F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, it is a fantasy about a man who is born a senescent 80-year-old infant - tiny and infirmed, then matures in reverse cycle into infancy at the end of his life. Benjamin’s curious reverse aging only accentuates the ‘unnatural’ painstaking process of growing old. It is common among all humanity. We all die and yet we find it so difficult to accept gracefully.
Benjamin’s story (his journal notes) is read to Daisy (Cate Blanchett), old, wrinkled and dying, by her daughter in a hospital room. His fable spans a good part of the 20th century, book ended by the two world wars. At a revival meeting, Benjamin struggles out of his wheelchair and walks. He frequents brothels. He goes to sea, fights in World War II and gets seduced by a British spy’s wife. Daisy’s life intersects with Benjamin as a young girl and later as a bohemian dancer. He is growing ‘young’ while she is growing old. But for one magical, lingering moment their lives intersect as the lovers share their prime in body, soul, and mind. But being human that they are, the moment does not last. The seamless passing of time is a melancholic process of the pangs and pains of their fleeting love.
How these two lovers age is at once hauntingly disturbing and confidently affirming. It is a study of the impermanence of their years together and the imminence of their mortality. To mature as a human person, whether at the beginning or the end of our lives, Benjamin and Daisy have to suffer necessary losses. In every good their experience is foreshadowed by the disappointment of its eventual loss. As a baby, Benjamin is abandoned by his appalled father. Later Benjamin has to leave Queenie, the nursing home attendant who has nurtured him and whom he loves. He gives up his innocence when seduced and abandoned. Daisy’s aging is full of graces but in time she becomes a wasted old woman, breathlessly waiting to die in a hospital.
When Moses penned these words in Psalm 90, he was well acquainted with the ceaseless and ruthless process of aging. Speaking to the eternal God, the aged liberator reflected:
For a thousand years in your sight / are but as yesterday when it is past . . . .
You sweep them away as with a flood / they are like a dream /
like grass that is renewed in the morning / . . . in the evening it fades and withers.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
So teach us to number our day / that we may get a heart of wisdom
My sister in-law and I are glad to have seen the movie. Its almost three-hour length may be a bit long. Like all human living, it was not how long but how well it was spent.
June, 2009
My married sister-in-law and her woman friends gasped in weird, but understandable, pleasure when Brad Pitt, draped in a leather jacket on a motorcycle, roared across the screen in a scene from “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” In that moment, Pitt’s character is at his human perfection of cute stuff and very good looks. But the movie is not a study of the actor’s gorgeousness. It is a whimsical contemplation of human immortality. What does it mean to grow old and suffer losses and death? Loosely based on a F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, it is a fantasy about a man who is born a senescent 80-year-old infant - tiny and infirmed, then matures in reverse cycle into infancy at the end of his life. Benjamin’s curious reverse aging only accentuates the ‘unnatural’ painstaking process of growing old. It is common among all humanity. We all die and yet we find it so difficult to accept gracefully.
Benjamin’s story (his journal notes) is read to Daisy (Cate Blanchett), old, wrinkled and dying, by her daughter in a hospital room. His fable spans a good part of the 20th century, book ended by the two world wars. At a revival meeting, Benjamin struggles out of his wheelchair and walks. He frequents brothels. He goes to sea, fights in World War II and gets seduced by a British spy’s wife. Daisy’s life intersects with Benjamin as a young girl and later as a bohemian dancer. He is growing ‘young’ while she is growing old. But for one magical, lingering moment their lives intersect as the lovers share their prime in body, soul, and mind. But being human that they are, the moment does not last. The seamless passing of time is a melancholic process of the pangs and pains of their fleeting love.
How these two lovers age is at once hauntingly disturbing and confidently affirming. It is a study of the impermanence of their years together and the imminence of their mortality. To mature as a human person, whether at the beginning or the end of our lives, Benjamin and Daisy have to suffer necessary losses. In every good their experience is foreshadowed by the disappointment of its eventual loss. As a baby, Benjamin is abandoned by his appalled father. Later Benjamin has to leave Queenie, the nursing home attendant who has nurtured him and whom he loves. He gives up his innocence when seduced and abandoned. Daisy’s aging is full of graces but in time she becomes a wasted old woman, breathlessly waiting to die in a hospital.
When Moses penned these words in Psalm 90, he was well acquainted with the ceaseless and ruthless process of aging. Speaking to the eternal God, the aged liberator reflected:
For a thousand years in your sight / are but as yesterday when it is past . . . .
You sweep them away as with a flood / they are like a dream /
like grass that is renewed in the morning / . . . in the evening it fades and withers.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
So teach us to number our day / that we may get a heart of wisdom
My sister in-law and I are glad to have seen the movie. Its almost three-hour length may be a bit long. Like all human living, it was not how long but how well it was spent.
Rachel Getting Married
Review by John L. Ng
April, 2009
At the rehearsal dinner, the bride’s grandmother blurts out, "This is what heaven will be like." She is referring to the collective diversities of people in that room. A subtext of Rachel Getting Married is an unbridled rhapsody of ethnic diversity with no overt racial prejudice or social unease. Rachel is engaged to an African-American; the groom’s good friend is Asian; the bride’s father has a Latino companion; the wedding has an Asian Indian theme. Even the music is a mosaic of rock, folk, new age, jazz and r and b. As heterogeneous as this extended household, each member shares the same human conditions. The movie is also a rhapsody of woundedness of being human. Rachel’s sister (played by Anne Hathaway), Kym, on leave from drug rehab, gets home in time for her sister’s wedding.
Those who know this stuff warn that if you are out of rehab, the last place you go is home with family. Coming home converges Kym’s self-loathing, regrets, anguish and longing. Like all woundedness, the hurts go deep and lasts long. It is also a narcissism that makes her sad and solipsistic. And yet, where else would one go but home when hurt and in need. The director, Jonathan Demme (famed for The Silence of The Lambs and Philadelphia ) calls Rachel Getting Married a ‘home movie.’
Kym comes home to a loving but inept father. Perhaps he is too loving to a fault. He is hapless in reaching out to both daughters who compete sarcastically and resentfully for his affection. Rachel (Rosemarie Dewitt), in her quiet equanimity, is just as needy and wounded. Sibling resentment roars out angrily at every opportunity. The bitterness lingers with no resolution. No matter how much Kym and Rachel scream, no one can undo their painful memories. Their father copes by desperately excusing their personal responsibility for the wrong done. Their aloof divorced mother copes by running away from every unpleasantness. Kym’s dark and deep eyes help us see how humanly inept we all are when trying to expose our inside to others. Worst still, her despairing eyes show how impossible it is to see into another’s inside.
At an AA meeting, Kym is glad that others can find solace in divine forgiveness but laments that she can’t believe in a God who is willing to forgive her. Forgiveness is not an easy thing. The deeper the wound, the more difficult forgiveness becomes, to give or to receive. And yet forgiveness has the only power to change our past and heal our present. Another glaring subtext in Rachel Getting Married is the struggle with forgiveness. Feuding scenes of conflict and resentment come and go as narratives without resolution.
How then can anyone cope? After Kym crashes her car in desperation for more attention, she comes home. Rachel opens her door and accepts her. She bathes Kym in quiet serenity and washes the grime from her body. At the wedding, Kym, stands near Rachel in cleansing thoughts. She finds solace. The bruising from the crash is still visible on her face but the grime is gone. On her way back to rehab the next day, she looks through the closed window and sees her father inside. She cries for him in a whisper, “daddy,” but he does not hear her. She accepts it, gets in her car and moves on.
April, 2009
At the rehearsal dinner, the bride’s grandmother blurts out, "This is what heaven will be like." She is referring to the collective diversities of people in that room. A subtext of Rachel Getting Married is an unbridled rhapsody of ethnic diversity with no overt racial prejudice or social unease. Rachel is engaged to an African-American; the groom’s good friend is Asian; the bride’s father has a Latino companion; the wedding has an Asian Indian theme. Even the music is a mosaic of rock, folk, new age, jazz and r and b. As heterogeneous as this extended household, each member shares the same human conditions. The movie is also a rhapsody of woundedness of being human. Rachel’s sister (played by Anne Hathaway), Kym, on leave from drug rehab, gets home in time for her sister’s wedding.
Those who know this stuff warn that if you are out of rehab, the last place you go is home with family. Coming home converges Kym’s self-loathing, regrets, anguish and longing. Like all woundedness, the hurts go deep and lasts long. It is also a narcissism that makes her sad and solipsistic. And yet, where else would one go but home when hurt and in need. The director, Jonathan Demme (famed for The Silence of The Lambs and Philadelphia ) calls Rachel Getting Married a ‘home movie.’
Kym comes home to a loving but inept father. Perhaps he is too loving to a fault. He is hapless in reaching out to both daughters who compete sarcastically and resentfully for his affection. Rachel (Rosemarie Dewitt), in her quiet equanimity, is just as needy and wounded. Sibling resentment roars out angrily at every opportunity. The bitterness lingers with no resolution. No matter how much Kym and Rachel scream, no one can undo their painful memories. Their father copes by desperately excusing their personal responsibility for the wrong done. Their aloof divorced mother copes by running away from every unpleasantness. Kym’s dark and deep eyes help us see how humanly inept we all are when trying to expose our inside to others. Worst still, her despairing eyes show how impossible it is to see into another’s inside.
At an AA meeting, Kym is glad that others can find solace in divine forgiveness but laments that she can’t believe in a God who is willing to forgive her. Forgiveness is not an easy thing. The deeper the wound, the more difficult forgiveness becomes, to give or to receive. And yet forgiveness has the only power to change our past and heal our present. Another glaring subtext in Rachel Getting Married is the struggle with forgiveness. Feuding scenes of conflict and resentment come and go as narratives without resolution.
How then can anyone cope? After Kym crashes her car in desperation for more attention, she comes home. Rachel opens her door and accepts her. She bathes Kym in quiet serenity and washes the grime from her body. At the wedding, Kym, stands near Rachel in cleansing thoughts. She finds solace. The bruising from the crash is still visible on her face but the grime is gone. On her way back to rehab the next day, she looks through the closed window and sees her father inside. She cries for him in a whisper, “daddy,” but he does not hear her. She accepts it, gets in her car and moves on.
The Reader
Review by John L. Ng
January, 2009
Toward the end of The Reader, a Holocaust survivor cautioned about making choices: As you see fit. Every day we choose our choices as we see fit. Some decisions are big and life changing; some are mundane and ordinary. How we come to them is a personal journey that is at once complex and confusing. Based on the German author Bernhard Schlink’s slender novel by the same title, The Reader opens with Michael Berg (David Kross), a teenager, falling ill on his way home. Inexplicably from the rain, Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), a stranger more than twice his age, decides to rescue him. That chance encounter leads to a discreet and torrid sexual liaison. Each time they meet in her dingy apartment, before they make love, Hanna compels Michael to read to her. Innocently, and with gleam, he reads to her from Homer, Chekhov, Tolstoy, D. H. Lawrence, Hemingway. Just as inexplicably, Hanna suddenly disappears, leaving Michael in despairing wonder. The next time he sees her, Michael, now a law student, is watching the proceedings of some women who are on trial for Nazi war crimes. He recognizes Hanna’s voice and body among them as she defends her moral choices made as a prison guard. Rather than exposing her felt shamed illiteracy, Hanna chooses to go to prison. At one point Michael’s professor concludes that what people feel or think isn’t as significant as what they do because actions, and reactions, have great and grave consequences.
The movie flashes back and forth between Michael as a youth and as an adult (played by Ralph Fiennes). It is a study of individuals making choices as they see fit. Their moral perception does not explain all and certainly does not excuse its peripheral blur, and yet their decisions are irreversibly consequential. What makes a choice morally acceptable or unacceptable. Hanna is willing to help a stranger on a rainy day but watches impassively as innocent victims die in a church fire. While engaging sexually with a teenager, Hanna viscerally decides that D. H. Lawrence’s sexually graphic prose is vulgar. Hanna is ashamed of her illiteracy but not her random choosing of prisoners to their death. Knowing that his decision can save Hanna from imprisonment, Michael decides not to influence her verdict. One fellow student, referring to the war criminals, utters “put a gun in my hand and shoot them all.” When asked what she has gained in prison for her war crimes, Hanna coolly vaunts, “I have learned to read.” When given a chance to acclimate Hanna after her prison release, Michael reluctantly complies but fails.
Every scene in The Reader is beautifully shot. Hanna’s otherwise dingy bedroom is bathed in soft and inviting warm light. The court room is bright and airy, projecting a sense of calm and well being. Even a brief interior scene of Auschwitz is pleasantly ascetic. The adult Michael’s apartment is opened, cool and sleek. And of course, Winslet’s Hanna and Kross’s Michael are sensually gorgeous. But Finnes’s visual sadness betrays a darkness in the movie. Another Hanna, the German-Jewish philosopher Arendt, pronounces that the Nazi crimes against humanity are a banality of evil. Indeed, when ordinary people in daily circumstances make choices as they see fit (see the last verse of Book of Judges in the Older Testament), the consequences of these choices seem dangerously banal. That is the dark deception of private morals.
January, 2009
Toward the end of The Reader, a Holocaust survivor cautioned about making choices: As you see fit. Every day we choose our choices as we see fit. Some decisions are big and life changing; some are mundane and ordinary. How we come to them is a personal journey that is at once complex and confusing. Based on the German author Bernhard Schlink’s slender novel by the same title, The Reader opens with Michael Berg (David Kross), a teenager, falling ill on his way home. Inexplicably from the rain, Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), a stranger more than twice his age, decides to rescue him. That chance encounter leads to a discreet and torrid sexual liaison. Each time they meet in her dingy apartment, before they make love, Hanna compels Michael to read to her. Innocently, and with gleam, he reads to her from Homer, Chekhov, Tolstoy, D. H. Lawrence, Hemingway. Just as inexplicably, Hanna suddenly disappears, leaving Michael in despairing wonder. The next time he sees her, Michael, now a law student, is watching the proceedings of some women who are on trial for Nazi war crimes. He recognizes Hanna’s voice and body among them as she defends her moral choices made as a prison guard. Rather than exposing her felt shamed illiteracy, Hanna chooses to go to prison. At one point Michael’s professor concludes that what people feel or think isn’t as significant as what they do because actions, and reactions, have great and grave consequences.
The movie flashes back and forth between Michael as a youth and as an adult (played by Ralph Fiennes). It is a study of individuals making choices as they see fit. Their moral perception does not explain all and certainly does not excuse its peripheral blur, and yet their decisions are irreversibly consequential. What makes a choice morally acceptable or unacceptable. Hanna is willing to help a stranger on a rainy day but watches impassively as innocent victims die in a church fire. While engaging sexually with a teenager, Hanna viscerally decides that D. H. Lawrence’s sexually graphic prose is vulgar. Hanna is ashamed of her illiteracy but not her random choosing of prisoners to their death. Knowing that his decision can save Hanna from imprisonment, Michael decides not to influence her verdict. One fellow student, referring to the war criminals, utters “put a gun in my hand and shoot them all.” When asked what she has gained in prison for her war crimes, Hanna coolly vaunts, “I have learned to read.” When given a chance to acclimate Hanna after her prison release, Michael reluctantly complies but fails.
Every scene in The Reader is beautifully shot. Hanna’s otherwise dingy bedroom is bathed in soft and inviting warm light. The court room is bright and airy, projecting a sense of calm and well being. Even a brief interior scene of Auschwitz is pleasantly ascetic. The adult Michael’s apartment is opened, cool and sleek. And of course, Winslet’s Hanna and Kross’s Michael are sensually gorgeous. But Finnes’s visual sadness betrays a darkness in the movie. Another Hanna, the German-Jewish philosopher Arendt, pronounces that the Nazi crimes against humanity are a banality of evil. Indeed, when ordinary people in daily circumstances make choices as they see fit (see the last verse of Book of Judges in the Older Testament), the consequences of these choices seem dangerously banal. That is the dark deception of private morals.