The Movie Files

I’ve just finished reading a Master’s thesis entitled “Forrest Gump: Theological Text in a Postmodern Context.” The author, Chris Wells, suggests that “Like ancient Greece’s theatre and medieval Christianity’s cathedrals, movies now are our culture’s primary source of storied meaning.” The cinema is the one place in our culture where the masses gather to experience stories that attempt to make sense (and sometimes make fun) of our lives and our world.

Given the importance of movies in our culture, we do well to apply the apostle Paul’s advice to contemporary movies: “test everything [and] hold fast to what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Now we all know that goodness, like beauty, is said to be “in the eye of the beholder.” Yet the appeal of a truly “good” film will break that rule and appeal to a wide range of discerning viewers.

Sometimes movies that win special awards are well worth our time and attention. Award winners are often artistically excellent and entertaining. They stay in one’s memory and provoke thought and even action. As J. Robert Parks says of Michael Winterbottom’s multiple-award winning film about the desperation of refugees, In This World, “the movie achieves three of the highest goals art can accomplish – to portray the lives of real people, to tell stories we otherwise wouldn’t hear, and to move us to thoughtful prayer and action on behalf of those less fortunate than we are.”

Now that the Academy Awards and the Genies are behind us, do those awards indicate a film’s “goodness” or worthiness? Do they meet Robert Parks’s three criteria? In some cases, yes. At the top of my list of time-tested “good” movies is Babette’s Feast, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1987. It tells a story in which a community of bitter and backbiting believers learn to eat together (communion?) and to discover the powerful possibility of forgiveness. That was 1987 and it’s still my favourite.

What about last year’s winners? Although the Oscar-sweeping Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is too violent for some, it presents a powerful vision of the way the struggle against evil is both intensely personal and profoundly cosmic in scope. My recommendations from 2003 are also Oscar winners: Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (Best Original Screenplay) and Denys Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions (Best Foreign Language Film, and now Genie award winner). The first is American, the second Canadian. The first is in English (with some Japanese), the second in French with English subtitles.

Both are about being “lost” and longing to be found, to be loved, and to know that a hopeful life might just be possible. Both explore the beauty and transforming hopefulness of loving relationships, even in a broken and longing world. That world is not always pretty, nor does it always make sense. Yet there is always the longing, and the hope. And because both movies are about loss and longing for community, these are movies to watch with a group of friends.

Although some of the content of these movies may disturb or offend, it is possible to engage in a constructive conversation with a work of art, and even be profoundly moved by it, without condoning everything it portrays.

Gordon Matties, Associate Professor of Biblical Studies & Theology, Canadian Mennonite University. Movie Theology website.