by Chris Herlinger
Oscar season is a time to take stock: how well were religious, spiritual, or moral experiences and themes presented in a year of films?
If anything is notable about a year in which there was not a religious blockbuster to command public debate, it is that so many general-interest films represented well-traversed, even well-worn genres, says Brent Plate, who teaches religion and the visual arts at Texas Christian University and who is writing a book on religion and film.
KINGDOM OF HEAVEN gave audiences their dose of grand historical narrative and clash of religions, while THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA and the latest Harry Potter and STAR WARS films put a fresh spin -- not to mention elaborate and sophisticated special effects -- on retelling old myths. WAR OF THE WORLDS and CONSTANTINE explored apocalyptic visions and reflected contemporary concerns about viruses and their potential to cause dread, fear, panic, and possibly the end of the world.Yet for Plate, none of these films came close to being his favorite of the year. That honor goes to a movie largely overlooked by the Academy Awards: David Cronenberg's A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, the chronicle of an upright family man's confrontation with evil and his past that explores familiar ethical and moral terrain, even if the film itself is not overtly religious.
"It asks questions about our identities, our ability to love, whether we are the same person or can change -- in effect, be born again -- and it gives us ambiguous answers," Plate says, "as a good film so often does."
Similarly, Paul Haggis's CRASH, an examination of Los Angeles race relations and fragmented communities, is not overtly religious, but it is "easily transferable" to questions of interreligious conflicts among Christians, Jews, and Muslims, Plate says. It was also among the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' top 10 films of 2005.In the past, some religion and film experts have expressed concern about the effects of the cinema on the life of faith. Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, who teaches at Wesmont College in California, worries about the ways "the screen can flatten imaginative space" and how that affects religious communities. The cascade of images can limit moral imagination, she says, a particular harm for religious traditions where "hearing the Word" is so central.
Film and religion scholar Eric Mazur, who teaches at Bucknell University, says that the overall trend in movies and religion now seems to be in two directions: films fashioned to appeal either to religious communities (THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA) or religious skeptics (DOGMA), and films that appeal to a generalized interest in religion or spirituality, without staking out a specific religious position.Of course, some films can have wide attraction and cross between these groupings. This year, THE DA VINCI CODE may appeal more to religious skeptics, but its huge success as a best-seller, not to mention its expected megamarketing and the fact that two venerable Hollywood figures are at its helm -- director Ron Howard and actor Tom Hanks -- make it a film that defies easy audience categorization.
Two films that excited audiences at the recent Sundance Film Festival and that are likely to draw committed audiences once they are distributed in the United States are the German-Swiss documentary INTO GREAT SILENCE, a widely praised three-hour film on monastic contemplation (VARIETY called the film a "poetic essay" with a "painterly eye" that, given its subject and length, was "surprisingly exhilarating"), and SON OF MAN, a South African film that depicts Jesus as a black African and champions the plight of the poor in black townships.
"We called this the heavy year," Brew says of the 2005 festival, as films examined a host of social issues -- drug lords in Latin America, housing and economic discrimination in the United States, and terrorism in Russia, as well as the dilemmas posed by economic globalization so graphically chronicled in the Oscar-nominated documentary DARWIN'S NIGHTMARE.
