Our little year-end film festival of faith, doubt, Holocaust, and hope

January 2, 1:09 PMSpiritual Life ExaminerRabbi Ben Kamin

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A crop of genuinely artistic, highly motivating, even spiritually-bending motion pictures sent great crowds to the theaters during the Christmas-New Year’s hiatus.  My wife Audrey and I, eschewing holiday travel in favor of relaxation and reflection in and around home with our children and family, made it our business to view a host of the films which arrived, like welcome prize-seeking birds, all at once.

Slumdog Millionaire took our breath away with its Dickensesque fairy tale of youthful fury and savvy overcoming the quicksand of abject poverty and the quaking caste system of India—though this social equation could take place just as well in Detroit or Amsterdam or Cairo.  We agreed with the Washington Post’s assertion that “this outsize celebration of perseverance and moral triumph contains within it a deeper idea—in this case, the relative nature of what we think we know, and what's worth knowing at all.”  Great music—that reverberated throughout the house all week, whether any of our kids, from 13 to 28, was turning on the switch!

The Reader, with its haunting grayish canvas of postwar and contemporary Germany, and that nation’s complex soul-searching process to adjudicate and bury the hideous reality of the extermination of Europe’s Jews, crystallized the story into the dark interaction between a vulnerable young man and an emotionless woman.  I remember reading Bernhard Schlink's novel long ago; the movie is a gripping realization of sexual obsession (and manipulation) and hard-fought ethical decisions set against the ongoing courtroom struggle of modern Germany to settle the nation’s ghoulish legacy—a labyrinth of jurisprudence and shadowy human nature.

Frost/Nixon made me relive the tawdry, repulsive unraveling of the American presidency that came with Richard M. Nixon in the 1970s.  I was surprised to see so many younger people in the audience and then realized that they generally equate the presidency with duplicity and televised gimmickry.  We agreed with The Onion’s summary that “Frank Langella highlights Nixon's oily charm and guile.”  Oh for a sequel in a few years, President Obama, which celebrates ethical integrity and ethical courage in Washington?

Milk, besides grabbing one’s heart, sight, and conscience, is a quickening movie of brilliant colors, moral outrage, and political disturbance.  Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times nailed the core of the production: “Sean Penn never tries to show Harvey Milk as a hero, and never needs to. He shows him as an ordinary man, kind, funny, flawed, shrewd, idealistic, yearning for a better world.”  This is not ultimately a drama of the gay community; it is an American story casting harsh light all the way from “the Castro” in San Francisco into every street, school, and city hall in this country. 

 
Doubt, aside from the entrancing performance of Meryl Streep as an unwavering Catholic school nun and principal who doubts the morals of her easy-going and warm-blooded rector and superior, was better realized on the stage.  Philip Seymour Hoffman, a charismatic and intensely fluid actor, was nonetheless miscast in the latter role.  We wanted the suspected priest to anguish more visibly with his possible sexual guilt and its ramifications and to dispense with things less handily than with brief chapel homilies more suited to a Hollywood set than a gritty, windy, Queens neighborhood in 1964.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas should be viewed by every youngster in this country over the age of 9—it is just about the only Holocaust movie ever made that will teach a child about good and evil and innocence and what happened without gratuitously relying on the graphic images required for adults. The simplicity of this tale of devastatingly pure friendship between two boys on opposite sides of history’s barbed-wire fence is enough to turn your soul inside and out—a good thing.  We cannot stop thinking about this little, searing narrative of men’s darkest motivations and children’s last stand.

Grateful we are that there are cinematic possibilies for making the soul wince.