Lyra's World at the Movies

No movie can fully capture the depth and complexity and magic of a good book. The Lord of the Rings trilogy perhaps came closest, but, good as the film versions were, they emphasized endless battle scenes at the expense of some of the more subtle messages of Tolkien's books. To me, a fundamental theme of the written LOTR trilogy was the theme of loss, the sense that when one fights a war, even the winner loses much that he had fought to save. Return of the King tried to convey this sense of loss in its final, much-ridiculed half hour, at the Grey Havens, but by that time it was perhaps too late.

Back in May, I wrote with anticipation of the long-awaited filming of the first book of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, The Golden Compass (published originally in Britain as Northern Lights). I concluded my post with the words: "Assuming the film bears any resemblance at all to the book, I say "two thumbs up" even before I see it! Don't miss it!"

The movie was released a week ago. The reviews have been mixed, and the first week's gross receipts, perhaps as a result, disappointing. Many have felt that the movie was less subtle, less complex, less intellectually satisfying, than the book. Well, duh! That's always the case. The movie presents in two hours a book that takes much longer to read, and that has room for far more complexity and development. Philosophical and theological ideas that develop slowly in the reader's awareness, absorbed from the plot itself, in a two hour movie must be presented either in narrative voice overs (parallel universes exist, a pompous voice exclaims at the outset, where humans have souls that look like animals!), or in unlikely lectures by characters, inserted in the midst of the plot. (If you hate such plot-slowing lectures, never read The DaVinci Code, where the author was unable to tell his story without such artifices even in a lengthy written novel.)

In the time available, I feel that the movie actually did a more than adequate job of presenting all the major events, characters, and plot developments of the book. This is a movie, like The Fellowship of the Ring, that will make far more sense and be more appealing to persons already familiar with the books. The movie moves quickly. The viewer has little time to mull over plot and character development before the next crisis, the next character, the next twist of plot, arrives on the scene. You can't turn back five pages to recall who had which daemon. But the film does a more than adequate job of laying the foundation -- and creating an appetite -- for the next of the series, The Subtle Knife.

Visually, the movie could hardly be better. In LOTR, we marveled at the integration of the computerized Gollum into the filming of the live characters. In The Golden Compass, an enormous number of animal daemons, witches, armored bears, and mechanical insects fight, talk, and maneuver along side the live action cast. It's all done so seamlessly that we hardly appreciate the technical skills involved.

And the daemons! As we gradually learn in the book, and as the voice-over informs us bluntly at the beginning of the movie, every human in Lyra's world has his or her appropriate daemon, an animal companion representing an embodiment of the human's soul. In the many mob scenes, all the humans have to be shown with their daemons -- whether these are large impressive animals for complex characters -- snow leopards, golden monkeys, wolves -- or small simple daemons for simple folks -- birds, small dogs. The filming is handled beautifully, and we quickly grow accustomed to Lord Asriel stalking into the room, his leopard at his side, or, more movingly, Lyra's loving daemon, still capable of changing into a bird or a cat when appropriate, but usually presented as an ermine with an expressive face. (The Texas pilot's daemon, a female rabbit with a sarcastic Texan drawl, is hysterically funny.)

Death in such a world is dramatic. In the book, when a human was killed his daemon quickly faded away. In the movie, his daemon explodes in a flash of light. Battle scenes are thus spectacular!

Finally, a serious concern even before the movie was made was how the director, Chris Weitz, would handle the religious question. In the book, Lyra's world was ruled by a version of the Catholic Church that had, in her world, adopted some aspects of Calvinism during the Reformation and had moved its headquarters to Geneva. The Church, in the book, is a malevolent force. Its leaders' objective is to maintain control over the people, and to protect them from "sin," which in the author's vision is the same as protecting them from true adulthood. In the first book's most devastating scene, only somewhat less affecting in the movie, the Church conducts experiments in an Arctic laboratory, experiments it hopes will find a way to eliminate sin by surgically cutting the bond between children and their daemons before the kids reach puberty. The vision of the little boy -- now effectively soulless -- crying all alone in the frozen North for his lost daemon is unforgettable.

New Line Cinema could not see any advantage to releasing a movie for young people that attacks -- even in an alien world -- an institution that resembles in any way Christianity in our world.

We knew that Pullman's professed atheism would have to be tamed to some degree in the movie. How much, no one was sure. This month's issue of the Atlantic Monthly contains a lengthy (and very interesting) article by Hanna Rosin arguing that the movie gutted the book, leaving behind a couple of hours of simple entertainment for the mass audience. "The studio opted to kidnap the book's body and leave behind its soul."

I disagree. First of all, the trilogy's "soul" was not a logical attack on religion. It was a fantasy with many themes. It described a malevolent, or at least sadly mistaken, Church. But it also described the Chuch's God as a pathetic, senile old man floating around in space, who in his elder days was dominated by his supposed subordinates. It presented angels -- good, bad, and a couple who were gay. It presented flying witches. It presented talking, armored bears of incredible strength and endurance. It presented pathways between universes.

No one, no child, would take any of this as anything but a ripping good yarn. A fairy tale, a story of "what if?" Insofar as it contained a message, it was a call for every person to grow up, take responsibility, seek out the unknown, be brave, sacrifice the self for the common welfare, and love others. Hardly subversive. Those who see it as an attack on religion should ask themselves why they see a greater relationship between the "Church" in Lyra's world and any religion in our own world than they do between any other of the story's fictional devices and anything we're familiar with. Both those who applaud and those who fear the movie -- as an attack on religion -- should ask themselves that question.

In any event, to answer the Atlantic's critique, I don't see that the movie seriously watered down the philosophical questions of the books, except insofar as necessary to make a short movie and to avoid unnecessary offense to Christians . The movie always refers to the Church as "the Magisterium," and in the only reference to the fictional God of that world calls him "the Authority." Anyone old enough to be interested in the movie, beyond the level of cheering for awesome fights between armored bears, will recognize the religious references. Anyone that old, I would hope, also recognizes a fantasy when he or she sees one.

So my pre-release verdict from last spring holds. "Two thumbs up. Go see it!"

(But you really should read the books first!)

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(12-16-07) -- The movie has drawn an extraordinary amount of comment on the internet, much of it from Christian writers. The majority of Christian commentators appear to feel that the movie, and even more the books, present a threat to children's faith. Others, however, view the movie as a well-produced fantasy, one that is not only entertaining but that presents parents with an opening for serious discussions of religious faith and theology with their children.

The Pullman trilogy is an "ode to the joy of living in a physical world, a hymn to flesh, to exuberance, to the here and now, to free thought, imagination and feeling, to nobility of spirit," according to a review by Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda.

"I happen to think that these positive traits are entirely compatible with organized religion and so I choose to focus on the positive rather than on any anti-religious themes in these books," said Paul Lauritzen, director of the Program in Applied Ethics at Jesuit-run John Carroll University in Cleveland, commenting on Dirda's review. Lauritzen is a contributor to dotCommonweal, a blog run by the Catholic magazine Commonweal.

--© 2007 Catholic News Service/USCCB

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Office for Film and Broadcasting gave the film, which is rated PG-13, a warm review. The film is not blatantly anti-Catholic but a “generalized rejection of authoritarianism,” it said.

While noting the story’s “spirit of rebellion and stark individualism,” the office said Lyra and her allies’ stand for free will in opposition to the coercive force of the Magisterium is “entirely in harmony with Catholic teaching.”

--MSNBC (11-30-07)

Into the Wild

At that stage of my youth, death remained as abstract a concept as non-Euclidean geometry or marriage. I didn't yet appreciate its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who'd entrusted the deceased with their hearts. I was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality. I couldn't resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink. ... In my case -- and, I believe, in the case of Chris McCandless -- that was a very different thing from wanting to die.

--Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

Before he was a writer, Krakauer was a mountain climber. Before writing Into the Wild, his previous books had all been about mountaineering. Like many men and women who climb mountains, he wonders why he does it. He also wonders whether the emotions and self-revelations won by confronting death, supported on a cliffside by fingertips and poorly anchored pitons, or on an ice wall by crampon tips and an ice axe, can ever justify the devastation that his actual death would visit upon his family and friends. Like all adventurers, all radicals, all visionaries, all prophets -- he wonders at the cost to be paid for deviating from the average, the cost not to himself but to those he loves.

In his book, Krakauer devotes a chapter to describing his own experience at the age of 23, attempting a solo first ascent of a peak in Alaska. During that climb, he stared at the face of death. He tells the story not as autobiography, but to explain why Chris McCandless walked into the wild. The only difference between the two, as Krakauer sees it, was that he was lucky and lived, and McCandless was unlucky and died.

Sean Penn's film of Into the Wild, of course, is now showing across the country. The movie is beautiful, exhilarating, funny, and heartbreaking. It faithfully adheres, for the most part, to the conclusions drawn in Krakauer's book about the life of Chris McCandless.

What the film cannot show, however, given the limitations of time and the film medium, is that McCandless's life as portrayed is really Krakauer's painstaking reconstruction of a life from fragmentary clues, from conversations with family members who knew him as a child and with persons who met him only briefly during his wanderings. To some extent, I suspect, the Chris McCandless that emerges is actually a picture of Jon Krakauer, modified to account for the known events of McCandless's life.

I think Krakauer may agree. I think, in fact, that Krakauer suggests as much in his book.

Nevertheless, few people could be as well positioned as a mountaineer to get under the skin of an oddball like Chris McCandless -- Alex Supertramp -- and to intuit the urges and motives that drove him to the post-college life he chose. McCandless was a seer, a prophet, a crazy man -- a person not willing to live an unthinking life amongst the herd, but driven to grasp and feel reality, sensation by sensation, minute by minute. It is the same drive shared by anyone who hikes, camps, climbs, or travels without reservations and guided tours. But he pushed his craziness to the brink of death, and over the brink; the rest of us push it only far enough, perhaps, to embrace discomfort as a road to experience. McCandless insisted on absolute purity in pursuing that dream; the rest of us keep a Visa card in our wallets, just in case.

The book and the movie arouse grief for the shortness of his life, a life that held so much promise, and for the gap his death left in so many other lives -- his parents, his sister, the elderly man who saw him as a grandson, the teenaged girl who dreamed of him as her lover. But it also reminds us how precious is every moment of life, and how wasteful we are of those moments. McCandless, for all his journal writing, for all his reading of Tolstoy and Thoreau and Jack London, sought to experience every blade of grass, every drop of rain, every ray of sunshine. He died at 24, but he experienced more life in those 24 years than many of us will in 90.

At the end of his life, he was ready to return to society, to live to some extent among the humanity that he had never rejected. Happiness must be shared, he notes.

See the movie, by all means. But read Krakauer's book as well.

He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and willful and wild-hearted, alone amidst a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.

--James Joyce

Chalk

Once upon a time, I thought I might become a high school teacher. It's hard to understand how I ever got this remarkable idea, especially when you consider that it occurred to me while I was a high school student myself. Nothing I knew about either my teachers (with a couple of exceptions) or my fellow students should have led me to believe that I would enjoy teaching. I guess I liked history and math, and naively believed that it would therefore be fun to teach those subjects to kids.

Seeing the movie Chalk would have swept away any such illusions. I could have seen myself as Mr. Lowrey, a shy first-year history teacher, standing nervous and tongue-tied before a restless, giggling class.

Lots of movies show high school from the kids' perspectives. Chalk gives us the teachers' side. It follows Mr. Lowrey and three other teachers through a school year at an urban Texas high school. The film, co-written by two former teachers, uses the "mockumentary" format, and does it so realistically that I could easily believe it was a true documentary. The lines and action are spontaneous and unforced. These are not professional actors playing cute high school kids, brimming over with witty one-liners. The girls are usually obese and unattractive; the boys are pimply, in need of shaves, and sullen. Most of all, the students look desperately in need of sleep.

For the teachers, the school year is a wasteland of long days, hostile or indifferent students, conflicts among themselves and with the administration. A broken copier or a "stolen" stapler is enough to push them over the edge.

Nevertheless, each of the four featured teachers makes personal progress during the year, and each develops some rapport with his or her students. We are given to understand that some learning by the kids does occur during the year, although we never see how it happens. This is not a Hollywood movie. None of the teachers even faintly resembles Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society.

I left the movie with enormous respect for the underpaid and overworked teaching profession. Although the movie gave some reason to question the quality of the education that the teachers themselves had received, it is clear that even the less sympathetic of the teachers cared deeply about the students and about their profession.

My short-lived desire to be a teacher was not without idealism, but it was an idealism on behalf of the academic subjects that I thought I wanted to teach. But for the vast majority of real high school teachers, their devotion is to the kids themselves -- somehow, anyhow, begging, enticing and forcing them to learn the very basic information they will need for life after graduation. As Mr. Lowrey remarks, as his year in hell comes to a close, "teaching is hard work." It is also extremely valuable work that deserves far better compensation, and far more respect than it receives from the rest of us.

One half of all new teachers quit the profession within their first three years. This movie shows us why. It was left up in the air whether Mr. Lowrey would sign the contract offered him for his second year.

"Sicko"

And speaking of movies, Sicko is the Michael Moore documentary critique of the American health care system that I've been meaning to see, but still haven't gotten around to. Zachary Freier, a Colorado high school student whose comments to my posts have often enlivened these pages, has posted a partisan -- but unusually well written -- review of the film on his own blog.

Give his review a look. And I'm planning to see the movie.

Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)

The knight playing chess with Death: The Seventh Seal

Photos below, top to bottom: The Virgin Spring; The Magician; Wild Strawberries

Ingmar Bergman died today at age 89. He was one of the greatest movie directors of the past half century. His films, shot in Swedish, were some of the earliest subtitled movies to be widely viewed in the United States. He proved to viewers, to many perhaps for the first time, that movies could be a form of art, not merely a medium of entertainment.

Bergman directed a wide variety of films during his long career. Some were full of warmth and were easily accessible. Fanny and Alexander (1984), an Oscar nominee, was a fond recollection of his Swedish childhood and of the warmth of family life. The Magic Flute (1975), an excellent and highly enjoyable production of the Mozart opera, was sung in Swedish with English subtitles and has been called the best adaptation ever of an opera to the screen.

On the other hand, during the 1960's and 1970's, many of his films were studies of human isolation and inability to communicate, viewed especially from the perspective of women. These films tended toward long periods of silence, with little happening on the screen. Woody Allen imitated (or parodied, depending on the reviewer) these notoriously inaccessible films in a number of his own movies, such as Interiors (1978) and Another Woman (1988). I've tried, but failed, to appreciate them.

It was Bergman's "metaphysical" films from the late 1950's that have always made the greatest impression on me, and probably on most other viewers. These films appear motivated by Bergman's fear of death and search for God, a search that he later abandoned as his career progressed. The photography is shot bleakly in black and white. The settings lie in Sweden, and the movies are illuminated by the characteristic long twilight, or "white nights," of the Swedish summer. The themes are mysterious and haunting.

I'm familiar with four of the films from that period. The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring have medieval settings, mystical tales studying the meaning of life and death. The Magician, set in the 19th century, considers the nature of truth and illusion. Wild Strawberries portrays a doctor, near the end of his years, who looks back on the disappointments and missed opportunities of a lifetime.

The photography, imagery and symbolism in all four are stunning.

Some films have a profound effect, especially on impressionable young viewers. These four films certainly had that effect on me the first time I saw them. Rent one or more when you get the chance, and experience film as directed by a distinguished artist.

"Anyone Can Cook"

I'm not going to write a movie review of Ratatouille. Everyone by now has heard of it. A Pixar creation, and Disney's best release perhaps in decades. You've read the reviews. The first movie I've seen for years, maybe ever, that has received 100 percent favorable reviews from the critics, or at least from the large number that are published on the Rotten Tomatoes website.

But you "foodies" living in Sonoma County -- you guys have to see it. The whole world of food preparation and appreciation is spread before us, like a tasty French pique-nique. The experimenting with combinations of contrasting flavors. The technical skills required of the cooks. The jealousies within the kitchen staff. The tension between chef and waiter. The seeming chaos within the kitchen, contrasted with the quiet perfection of the dining room, on opposite sides of a swinging door.

And -- Doug and Juliana take note -- the tyranny of the Restaurant Critic. The aptly-naned Anton Ego, a formidable food snob (with the voice of Peter O'Toole), who can destroy a chef's career with one well-chosen, sneering word in his newspaper column -- but who proves in the end that he has a heart, as well as a stomach. And finally, the danger that heirs to the name of a famous restaurant and chef will exploit the name to market -- in this case -- junk food.

And underlying all is the film's assertion that even the most despised of outcast groups can bring forth artistic genius -- the sewers and garbage dumps of Paris can send forth a rat with the sensitivity of an aesthete and the soul of a poet. The hero, Remy, indisputably a rodent in a kitchen, rises to become the greatest chef in Paris, with the help of his goofy human friend, Linguini. And he does so, ultimately, without turning his back on a horrifyingly huge pack of his scurrying relatives -- a family of ever-starving scavengers for whom, as his Dad explains, "food is just fuel."

The film works on many levels. And now, before these random thoughts of mine evolve, in fact, into a review, let me just leave you with one thought:     See it!

High School Debate: It shouldn't be rocket science

Seattle is in the midst of the nearly four-week-long Seattle International Film Festival ("SIFF"), the 33rd year of the event that bills itself as the nation's largest film festival. This year, the festival presents 227 feature films, 61 documentaries, and 117 short films, showing in seven theaters around the city.

Last night, I saw "Rocket Science," a dramatic comedy so good that it probably will come back in general release later in the year (it's actually scheduled for "limited release" in August). Centered on high school debate, the film was written and directed by Jeffrey Blitz, the director of the surprise documentary hit about spelling bees, "Spellbound" (2003).

The nerdy hero of the film, played by 16-year-old Canadian actor Reece Daniel Thompson, has a stutter so severe that it renders him virtually speechless. He falls desperately in love with a member of the debate team, a cute but self-centered classmate who offhandedly suggests that he join her on the team. She quickly loses interest in him, when he repeatedly fails to articulate even the first sentence of his presentation in his allotted eight minutes, and ends up after each attempt either locking himself in misery in the janitor's closet, or vomiting in the boys' room. But he remains painfully obsessed with the girl, and with proving himself worthy of her love by succeeding as a debater and going on to the New Jersey state competition.

The audience was thus prepared for a highly unlikely "Rocky"-esque denouement, but it never arrives. Our hero never wins -- or even completes -- a competition, and he never wins the girl. He desperately tries to overcome his speech handicap by sessions with the school's "professional," who admits that speech impediments weren't really his forte, and that it was too bad that the student wasn't hyperactive, a problem that he really knew how to handle.

In a conclusion that was bittersweet for those of us praying for his ultimate triumph, our hero contents himself with smaller victories. He learns to set his presentation to rhyme and to present it, more or less understandably, in a sing-song, based on the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." And he finally succeeds in ordering a pizza, a "P" word that had long been beyond his reach, although "pepperoni" still seems to elude him. His adult self, in a voice over, assures us that these first small steps were only the beginning of the young man's eventual ability to say what he needed to say, by focusing on the content without worrying about how he sounded or without trying to imitate some ideal speaker.

As a child, I never had to contend with a stutter. But my heart overflowed with empathy, nevertheless, because for years I would totally freeze when forced to speak before a group, unless I had detailed notes to follow. (And yet, sitting in class I could debate one-on-one with the teacher for half the class session, to the delighted relief of the rest of the class.) Even in law school moot court, a mandatory part of our first year curriculum, standing and arguing before a three-judge panel caused me to become tongue-tied. A trial attorney was the last thing I thought I'd ever be, or want to be, as a lawyer.

Even now, I'm not a competent extemporaneous speaker, and can occasionally feel myself going into my old teenaged panic mode -- a blank mind, a paralyzed tongue, and a buzzing in my ears -- if called upon to speak formally with no advance warning. But like the young man in "Rocket Science" (speaking isn't rocket science, he notes at the end of the movie, although he's still unable to force the word "science" past his tongue), I eventually learned that when I focus on the importance of what I want to say, and ignore as unimportant the personal impression I think I'm making on my audience while saying it, I can work my way rather smoothly around what is apparently a congenital weakness.

After the film, both the director and the teenaged lead appeared and answered questions from the audience. Blitz said the movie was autobiographical, to some extent. He also had stuttered badly as a boy, and he also had forced himself to suffer horribly as a stutterer by signing up for debate. As "Rocket Science" ends, Blitz permits his teenage alter ego no success in either love or in debate competition, but shows us that the seeds have been planted for him to achieve a better understanding of himself, an understanding that eventually will allow him to overcome or work around his stutter. Blitz wanted to present a realistic picture of an interesting high school boy who does not become a champion, but who achieves real growth as a person. He felt we already had too many "Rocky" films, and that we really didn't need to view another.

He did admit, however, somewhat sheepishly, that in his senior year he and his debate partner won the New Jersey state debate championship.