OSCAR WATCH: RELIGION AND THE MOVIES
by Chris Herlinger

The movie season about to culminate in the annual Academy Awards ceremony has been, according to one ethicist, "a pan-cultural" opportunity for film viewers "to enter moral worlds."

"From an ethics professor's standpoint," says Shaun Casey, who teaches at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, "it was an all-star lineup." All five films nominated for best picture -- ATONEMENT, JUNO, MICHAEL CLAYTON, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, and THERE WILL BE BLOOD -- explicitly explore ethical dilemmas and themes. "In each of these films there was a central moral struggle," says Casey.

Several of the films were searing examinations of evil, violence, and power, and the toll all three can take on their victims. In NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and THERE WILL BE BLOOD, characters "struggled with great systematic evil and violence," says Casey.

There was "an exacting focus, wrenching and necessary, on human suffering, either random or inflicted by people themselves," according to Roy Anker, who teaches English at Calvin College and who described this year's films in an email interview as "chilling and ominous, especially as they seem to conjure up a sort of metaphysical evil fully capable of swallowing people and humankind whole." He called them "eerie and haunting on a psycho-visceral level of soul, meaning how we apprehend the world in our depths."

As such, the films of 2007 continue a recent trend of meditating on what Anker sees as "the mystery of suffering and human predatoriness, or iniquity, as the Bible calls it." For his part, Casey says he was most struck by director Tony Gilroy's MICHAEL CLAYTON, in which the morally ambiguous anti-hero, a lawyer-fixer played by George Clooney, struggles with a series of ethical and moral dilemmas posed by both personal problems and the needs of his corporate law firm to settle a class-action lawsuit that could reap millions of dollars.

One of the signature lines of the film - "I am Shiva, the god of death" - comes from the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred Hindu text, and is spoken by a morally stricken attorney representing the agrichemical conglomerate being sued for poisoning hundreds of farmers. He comes to identify his role with the god of destruction, the destroyer of worlds in a tale of the personal devastation that can result when one profits from dirty, even murderous, business operations.

Religion and violence intersect in THERE WILL BE BLOOD, writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson's powerful examination of the underside of the American Dream and a damning look at God and money. The film, based on Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel OIL!, is an unsparing portrayal of Daniel Plainview, a malevolent oil tycoon whose avarice is perhaps only equaled by his contempt for organized religion, and Eli Sunday, a rogue evangelist.

Robert Johnston, professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary in California and the author of "Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue," believes THERE WILL BE BLOOD is less about religion and capitalism than it is a parable about greed and pride, and he suggested in an email message that the film's real context is the Iraq war. The director, he said, "has found an indirect way to help many of us in the United States come to terms with what we feel is an evil we have perpetrated based on our greed for oil. And as Anderson tellingly shows, the church has been of little help in this situation, wanting only to add to its numbers."

THERE WILL BE BLOOD and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN both made the best movie list of Greg Garrett, an English professor at Baylor University, a lay Episcopal preacher, and the author of "The Gospel According to Hollywood," though he takes issues with the nihilism he felt informed both movies. In particular, he says NO COUNTRY, a West Texas crime saga about a drug deal gone wrong, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen and based on a Cormac McCarthy novel, portrays a kind of "transcendent evil." Evil, rather than good, "is the true power."

"God is not among this cast of characters," according to Jeffrey Overstreet's review of NO COUNTRY for the evangelical magazine Christianity Today. "Love, hope, and Almighty God -- they seem to be missing in action," he wrote.

In contrast, Garrett says the critically acclaimed BOURNE ULTIMATUM, the final blockbuster in a trilogy of films about CIA assassin Jason Bourne, was an entertaining yet thought-provoking film and an allegory about original sin in which "no one is separated from redemption. Humans have the capacity to choose good over evil."

Far removed from the evil and violence was director Sarah Polley's AWAY FROM HER, a poignant and widely praised drama about Alzheimer's disease based on a story by writer Alice Munro and starring Oscar-nominated Julie Christie. Anker found it a beautifully rendered depiction of love and grace. "For all of its aching sadness," he observed, the film displays "a deep awe and gratitude for human connectedness and how very splendid that is. It was and is possible, and it is for this that we are made."

Although best-picture nominee JUNO might not please some for its nonjudgmental view of teen-age pregnancy, Anker thought the film, about the decision of a young unwed teenager to have a baby and put the child up for adoption, was "more remarkable for its tone than story, conveying a kind of winsome, celebrative exaltation of the goodness of the simplest parts of human life, from friends and music to babies." He praised its implicit "dismissal of the glib trivialization of life's value by both the religious right and the sanctimonious left."

Despite its expletives and sassy heroine, JUNO also won the approval of the Office for Film and Broadcasting of the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference. In its list of the 10 best films of 2007, the bishops called it "a smart, funny, and ultimately moving comedy-drama with an equally strong pro-life message....the narrative has just the right moral wrap-up."

Also near the top of the favorite film lists of several who follow religion, spirituality, and the movies was LARS AND THE REAL GIRL, a small-scale, quirky, and overlooked film that is the antithesis of most of this year's dark and deadly best picture nominees. Writing in the February 18 issue of the Christian Century, James M. Wall said LARS headed his list of best movies because of the grace that screenwriter Nancy Oliver and director Craig Gillespie displayed in rendering a "sensitive portrait" of Lars Lindstrom, a "young man so gripped by shyness that the only companion he dares relate to is a life-size silicon doll."

What Wall and others found particularly winning was the acceptance Lars finds among his small-town Lutheran congregation. LARS AND THE REAL GIRL "reminds us that the Larses in our lives ask only to be accepted and understood. See this film and be thankful for congregations that know how to accept others," Wall wrote.

Johnston agreed and described LARS as a "movie that shows the church at its best, accepting people where they are and loving them into wholeness."

"Exuding from the film is the quiet song of the goodness of ordinary life," added Anker. "It is, in short, a kind of litany of praise for the sweetness of being alive in simple companionship and in those simple, ordinary places in which God inheres and is made known. This is a wonderful film in religious apprehension."

Christianity Today also named LARS to its list of "The 10 Most Redeeming Films of 2007," calling it "one of the sweetest, most sensitive movies of the year" and "a powerful look at the body of Christ in action."

For its very top film, the Catholic bishops selected AMAZING GRACE, the dramatization of the life of 18th-century abolitionist William Wilberforce, who inspired the legislation in the British Parliament that eventually eliminated Great Britain's slave trade. "With its solid performances, accessible script, and handsome production design, the film recalls some of the best historical dramas from Hollywood's golden age and is all the more admirable for its unabashed portrait of a passionate man of God," the bishops said.

Other films making the bishops' list included BEYOND THE GATES (a "gripping dramatization about the 1994 siege of a Rwandan secondary school at the height of the genocide"), THE KITE RUNNER (an adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel and a "fascinating portrait of pre- and post-Taliban Afghanistan with fine human values, strong affirmation of friendship and family, and [a] redemptive ending"), and THE NAMESAKE (a "beautifully acted over-the-years saga about Indian newlyweds who emigrate to New York to start their life, and the joys and vicissitudes which follow, including the son who grows away from them").

Jeannette Reedy Solano, who teaches comparative religion at California State University at Fullerton, as well as a religion and film seminar called "Discovering the Divine in the Dark," also singled out THE NAMESAKE, adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, as "a lyrical, expansive narrative that raises important issues for any scholar of religion and immigration. While religion is not highlighted, Hindu values and customs are a forceful and pervading presence in the film. All the tensions that first and second generation immigrants face as they renegotiate mores and customs in the U.S. are played out." Intergenerational religious and cultural conflict and the growing presence of immigrant faiths in the American religious landscape are "a new sub-genre" of American movie-making, Solano suggested in an email interview.

The bishops also highlighted INTO GREAT SILENCE, the documentary first released in 2006 but only widely released in the United States in 2007. The film, about life in a Carthusian monastery nestled in the French Alps, was praised for "combining alternately a painterly formality and a verite intimacy" and for skillfully capturing "the textures and rhythms of [the monks'] highly structured existence."

Three of the five films nominated this year for best documentary feature -- NO END IN SIGHT, OPERATION HOMECOMING: WRITING THE WARTIME EXPERIENCE, and TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE -- examined the implications of American military involvement abroad, with TAXI shedding light on the ethical and moral dilemmas posed by the use of torture by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There were movies in 2007 about wiretapping and harsh interrogation techniques (RENDITION), military strategy in Afghanistan (LIONS FOR LAMBS), and a wife and mother who died during her military service in Iraq (GRACE IS GONE), but given the surfeit of war themes in the documentaries, why was current U.S.-led war involvement dealt with so sparingly in dramatic feature films? Among major releases, only IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH touched on current events related to Iraq, and even it was not explicitly a "war film." Casey, who has taught courses on ethics, war, and film, believes "there is just so much fatigue with Iraq in general that no one wanted to gamble tens of millions of dollars on a theme that the culture may be fed up with."

But war, specifically the events of the early years of British involvement in World War II, does inform the narrative of ATONEMENT, a film version of British writer Ian McEwen's 2001 novel about the unforeseen consequences of a capricious act and the human desire to set things right.

For Johnston, the film raises several questions for viewers, including, "What can we do when we can't right the wrongs we have committed, when our choices have caused irreparable harm, and no penance will make up for it?"

In a fleeting detail during one crucial scene in ATONEMENT, amidst the carnage on the beach at Dunkirk, a choir of soldiers sings the hymn "Dear Lord and Father of mankind forgive our foolish ways," a hint, some have suggested, at the desire for forgiveness in the midst of overwhelming death and despair.

But the lack of notable war films should not be a sign that the aching tragedy of military conflict is somehow being ignored in Hollywood. Just as Johnston believes THERE WILL BE BLOOD is something of an allegory about Iraq, he says a number of films from 2007, examined collectively, are best seen as narratives that can be "successful in helping us theologically interpret our present involvement in war."

In a year of tough, demanding, sometimes violent films that did not shy away from depicting the horrors and consequences of evil, "these films are stories with intent," Johnston says, "which leave the interpretation open, inviting multiple readings, much like Jesus did with his parables two millennia ago."

Chris Herlinger, a New York-based freelance journalist, last wrote for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly about the New York Jewish Film Festival.