Paine & Ebert at the Movies
a sermon given by the Rev. Roger Paine
on the Third Sunday in Lent, February 24, 2008
at The First Parish in Lincoln
“The power of film can change lives and communicate truth; it can reveal and redeem.”
– Robert K. Johnston in Reel Spirituality
READINGS:
1. Our first reading is one of the most bizarre stories in the bible. It’s about an exorcism, and it takes place in a small town on the Sea of Galilee. Jesus and his disciples have sailed across the lake, and here’s what happened according to Luke 8:27-39:
When Jesus stepped ashore, he was met by a demon-possessed man from the town. For a long time this man had not worn clothes or lived in a house, but had lived in the tombs. When he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell at his feet, shouting at the top of his voice, "What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, don't torture me!"
Jesus asked him, "What is your name?" "Legion," he replied, because many demons had gone into him. And they begged him repeatedly not to order them to go into the Abyss. A large herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside. The demons begged Jesus to let them go into them, and he gave them permission. When the demons came out of the man, they went into the pigs, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.
When those tending the pigs saw what had happened, they ran off and reported this in the town and countryside, and the people went out to see what had happened. When they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone out, sitting at Jesus' feet, dressed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. Those who had seen it told the people how the demon-possessed man had been cured.
Then all the people in the region asked Jesus to leave them, because they were overcome with fear. So he got into the boat and left. The man from whom the demons had gone out begged to go with him, but Jesus sent him away, saying, "Return home and tell how much God has done for you." So the man went away and told all over town how much Jesus had done for him.
2. Our second reading is from a book called Reel Spirituality by a seminary professor, Robert K. Johnston, whose specialty is the interface between theology and culture.
Seen any good movies lately? The question is a common one. Among adults, 95 percent saw at least one movie last year, while only 47 percent read one book. In Europe, movies and music are the entertainment of choice; in India, sales of movie tickets outpace those in America by over two to one.
[In colleges and universities both here and abroad], movies are commonly used as part of the core curriculum in such disparate fields as philosophy, psychology, sociology, English, and religion.
When Walt Disney created the character Bambi, deer-hunting nose-dived in one year from a $5.7 million business to $1 million. After being featured in [the movie] Sideways, sales of pinot noir increased 44 percent and became the wine of choice. New Zealand tourism is up significantly as a result of The Lord of the Rings.
And we increasingly learn history from film. Good Night, and Good Luck recaptured the McCarthy era. Platoon gave us an understanding of Vietnam. Mississippi Burning shows us the civil rights struggle, and Saving Private Ryan has been a primary shaper of opinion concerning World War II. Several weeks after that film came out, the Los Angeles Times ran an article describing how some younger people were saying they understood for the first time something of the sacrifices that were made. Some twenty-year-olds were even going up to people in their seventies and thanking them for what they had done. The power of film can change lives and communicate truth; it can reveal and redeem. (pp. 31-34)
I love movies.
I have ever since I was eight years old and spent every Saturday afternoon at the movies for 15 cents.
As a teenager, I was very well-behaved, but when I saw James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause,
I went back five times, and I wondered:
would I ever have anything like the je ne sais quoi that he had.
A decade later I fell hopelessly in love with Julie Christie as Lara in Doctor Zhivago –
so did most of the men and a few of the women I knew –
she’s now in her 60's, and if you missed her in the film Away from Her,
as a woman dealing with Alzheimer’s, rent it – it’s beautiful and sad and real.
When I was a divinity student at Yale,
my peers and I were all trying to figure out how to meet the world,
how to deal with whatever might come our way, and we found our answer
in the exuberance and never-say-die spirit of Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek.
I also noticed that Bill Coffin, who was Yale’s chaplain in those days,
would often illustrate his sermons with a scene from a movie
because he knew how much films can shape how we think
and help us see a truth that we might otherwise have missed.
That’s what got me thinking about the movies which are nominated for Best Picture
in tonight’s Academy Awards:
Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, and There Will Be Blood.
I’ve seen them all.
They are about many of life’s most difficult subjects: betrayal, obsession, greed,
teenage pregnancy, man’s inhumanity to man, and how lives can be ruined by one lie.
They are all brilliantly made, and they are all disturbing.
At the end of each film I wondered: what are we meant to take away from this?
Why did the producers and the artists spend all that money, and use all their talent, to tell this story?
I’m going to speak about only three of the five films – the three that affected me most –
No Country for Old Men, Michael Clayton, and Juno –
and while I know some of you have seen them,
I’ll be careful not to say too much, so as not to spoil them for the rest of you.
The odds-on favorite to win the Best Picture Award tonight is No Country for Old Men.
It’s closely based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy.
The ensemble cast has already won the Screen Actors Guild award for Best Performance by a Cast,
and they deserve it – every scene is flawless.
The story is set in West Texas in 1980.
A poor man who lives with his wife in a house trailer is out hunting
and he comes across a drug deal gone bad out in the desert –
there are bodies everywhere, and a satchel with two million dollars in it.
He takes the satchel home.
But there are powerful people who want their money back, and they hire a hit man to get it.
Javier Bardem, the Spanish actor, plays him as a remorselessly evil man.
He has never played anyone like this before – and neither has anyone else.
In his review, Roger Ebert writes that as the story unfolds, the camera regards him
“with wonderment, as if astonished that such a merciless creature could exist.”
He is like “a pursuer in a nightmare,” always moving “at the same measured pace,”
and as you watch this film, you know you are in the heart of darkness,
and you want to leave, but the story staples you to your seat.
There are no heroes in this story, not even the sheriff, who has given his entire adult life
to fighting the bad guys, the crime and the violence, and now he is tired and defeated:
what good has it all done? – there just seems to be more of it every year.
Reflecting on all of it he says, “I feel overmatched.”
This is a film in which life and death turn on the toss of a coin, and the violence never lets up.
Of the five films, it’s the one I most wish I could forget.
But Peter Travers in Rolling Stone says “don’t” –
this story, he says, forces us “to look into an abyss of our own making.”
That word, “abyss,” is also in this morning’s reading from Luke, which is another story about evil.
Jesus arrives at a lakeside town and is met by a naked man who is homeless and clearly insane.
In those days, people who were insane were thought of as possessed by demons.
If you were a demon, you liked being out in the world – you did not want to be sent to the Abyss.
The Abyss was where disobedient demons were locked up – it was like being grounded.
That’s why the demons, speaking with the naked man’s voice, beg Jesus to let them be.
They know he has the power to send them wherever he wants to,
and when they see a herd of pigs feeding on a nearby hillside,
they negotiate what they think will at least be better than the Abyss.
They’ll go occupy the pigs.
When Jesus agrees, the demons leave the man and go into the pigs,
but the pigs go crazy and run down the hill into the lake, where they all drown –
and this is where the story gets really interesting.
The people who watched this all happen go tell the townspeople, who come take a look,
and what they see is a bunch of drowned pigs and their crazy neighbor,
“dressed and in his right mind.”
But instead of feeling good about this, it scares them.
They had gotten used to the way things were, and now Jesus has upset the balance of power.
What else would change?
So they asked him to leave – and he does, instructing the man who was now cured
to go tell everyone what God had done for him –
but you can easily imagine people shaking their heads and turning away from him.
It’s a brilliant story.
Because it puts a finger on what keeps us from becoming a more compassionate society.
Are we, like the people in that town, really most comfortable with the way things are?
If so, then we are, indeed, looking into an abyss of our own making,
whether it’s whether it’s people who are homeless, people without health care, or the war.
Which brings us to the film Michael Clayton.
What if your prestigious and very successful law firm represents a chemical company
which has knowingly sold a toxic weed killer that poisoned the people who used it,
and now a three-billion dollar class-action lawsuit has been brought against the company?
Your client – the company – is paying you millions of dollars to run the defense.
Michael Clayton, played by George Clooney, is not one of the partners, and he never will be.
He is the house fixer – he cleans up the messes, and he’s good at it.
When the lead attorney for the defense stares into the abyss of what the chemical company has done
and decides to blow the whistle – against his own firm’s interests –
Michael Clayton’s job is to fix the mess.
And what happens forces him to wonder what he’s really about.
It’s a story about how money and power can bend us and cause us to look the other way.
But it’s also a story about moments of conscience and decency and personal honor.
The fixer is not shocked by what he sees – he’s seen it all.
But he has finally had enough of it.
Of the five best picture nominees, this is the film with the strongest moral sense of itself,
and I loved it because it says: no matter how flawed you may be,
you can still rise to the occasion and do what’s right.
It just came out on DVD.
If you haven’t seen it, rent it – you’ll be glad you did.
The third film I want to talk about is Juno,
which more people have seen than several of the other films combined,
and it has sparked the most comment –
probably because so many of us can identify with one or more of its characters.
Juno is Roger Ebert’s choice for Best Picture of the Year, and it’s mine, too.
Juno is a sixteen-year-old girl who has sex one time with her boyfriend and gets pregnant.
She is a smart and savvy kid, and some of you have wondered
how a smart and savvy kid would get pregnant in the first place,
but the answer I’ve heard from several women is: accidents happen.
And even smart kids sometimes do dumb things.
Juno decides to carry the baby to term, and so she gathers the courage to tell her parents she’s pregnant.
Her parents, as Roger Ebert notes,
are “older and wiser than most teen parents are ever allowed to be” in the movies,
and when Juno breaks the news, we realize how original this film is going to be.
Her dad asks her who the father is.
She tells him it was her boyfriend, Paulie, and dad ponders this fact for a moment,
then turns to his wife and says, “I didn’t think he had it in him.”
She smiles and says, “You know, of course, it wasn’t his idea.”
All of the dialogue in Juno is quick and witty and it stops just short of going too far.
One of you wrote me to say that Juno’s parents are “fabulous, but unlikely.”
And another of you wrote to ask: what if Juno had decided to end her pregnancy?
How would America feel about this movie in that case?
She does go to an abortion clinic to consider the possibility,
but the clinic and the woman at the reception desk are portrayed so ghoulishly
that she heads for the door with her mind made up.
I’ve been in a number of clinics which offer abortions and I’ve never seen one like the one in Juno.
As Ellen Goodman wrote in a column last month,
in movies over the past year or two, “by some screenwriter consensus,
abortion has become the right to choose that’s never chosen.”
But another of you, a woman, wrote that at least Juno does have a choice –
a choice that a lot of women fought for back in the Seventies,
and so, she wrote, “for those of us who fought for a woman’s right to choose,
this movie should make us feel good.”
There is lots of cool humor in Juno, and there are several very tender scenes,
including another one with her father, in which Juno wants to know
whether a lasting love between two people is ever really possible.
This is a movie that really loves all but one of its characters, and if it’s too idealized or unreal,
maybe that’s an argument in its favor, because it gets us talking,
and in several key scenes, it shows us behavior worth emulating.
Ellen Page as Juno and Julie Christie, as a woman with Alzheimer’s,
gave us two of the most luminous performances of the year – they’re both nominated –
and at age 20 and 66, they both deserve to win.
Before saying “Amen,” I want to return to the weary sheriff in No Country for Old Men.
When he looks at how all the injustice in the world just keeps on coming, he feels “overmatched.”
And he is.
So are the lovers in Atonement, pictured on the cover of your Order of Service.
Every film up for Best Picture has characters in it who are overmatched by what comes their way.
But some are not.
As a minister, I have a bias.
My bias is my belief in our fundamental goodness.
I know that artists often show us hard things about ourselves and the world we live in,
things we would rather not see, especially if it’s an abyss of our own making.
But I don’t want to hide my head in the sand – because the stakes are too high.
I place my hope for a better world in the human spirit – in what I know we are capable of doing.
I do not believe that we are overmatched.
There are transcendent moments in art and in life.
We have it in us to win.
Amen.
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