Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Errol Morris has lately used his unique documentary techniques to cover some pretty heavy material in fascinating ways: his last film was about the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, and before that, he interviewed Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.   He’s also focused his camera on the death penalty in two films, one about an innocent man on death row, and another about the life of an executioner.  But “Tabloid” is a reminder that Morris isn’t always serious-minded; one of his best films, “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control,” covers several men with interesting/bizarre job, one is a lion tamer, another is a robot scientist.  Like that film, “Tabloid” takes a faux-serious look at people we can’t quite take seriously.

This is the true story, truly told of Joyce McKinney and the Manacled Mormon.  McKinney spends a great deal of time on the screen, explaining her side of the story; unfortunately, the Manacled Mormon refused to be interviewed.  Morris does interview a number of other people associated with the case, and they provide a fascinating counterpoint to Joyce McKinney’s perspective.

From the beginning, it seems like there could be no one more normal than this woman McKinney, with her southern accent, blunt mannerisms and way of confiding in the camera like it’s an old friend.  She tells a story about a young man who fell in love with her, and she with him.  His name was Kirk Anderson. They made grand plans to be married and have lots of kids.  Only problem: he was “enslaved” to the Mormon church.  They whisked him away from her, forbade him to talk to her, and sent him off to Britain on a mission.

So McKinney goes after him, as any red-blooded American woman who’s experienced true love would.  This is where it really starts to get weird; she hires some very interesting, and rather seedy, characters to go with her.  They kidnap him — according to McKinney, he was so brainwashed by the church he barely knew who he was — and take him to a cabin in a small England town, where McKinney proceeds to deprogram him– by having sex with him.

Anderson escaped during a trip to town (McKinney, of course, says he was never imprisoned, and went to buy a paper and never returned) and the thing blew up into a court case that was a tabloid writer’s dream come true.  McKinney, sure that she had done the right, loving thing and determined to expose that vast, criminal brainwashing conspiracy that was the Mormon church – told her story with confidence, humor and wit to the court, and the reporters.  She became a celebrity, hung out with rock stars, and received truckloads of fan mail.  Then she disguised herself as a deaf/mute nun and fled the country.

Morris never really tries to determine the actual truth of what happened in this case, and it’s just as well, because, really does it matter?  The entertainment value here is how bizarre the whole thing is, and it’s only made more so by the conflicting stories told by McKinney vs. the reporters, investigators, friends and accomplices involved.  The whole thing is wild and loopy and fun, regardless of who’s telling the truth.  (There’s a great epilogue, too, about a cloned chihuahua, that has nothing to do with the Manacled Mormon case.)

I won’t pass judgment on Joyce McKinney.  I don’t know if she’s telling the truth, or being smeared by the tabloids.  Probably some of both. I don’t particularly care, either.   Hearing the story was good, bizarre, loopy fun.  If that’s what you’re looking for in a movie, this is your ticket.  If you’re looking for the truth about this strange case, you might need to go elsewhere.  I hear she’s writing a book.  Maybe you could look there.

—

Rent or buy “Tabloid” at Amazon.com and I receive a commission!

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

“Another Earth” uses a science fiction premise to explore, instead of other worlds, the inner unexplored territory.  A lot of the best science fiction does this, and this film is bound to draw comparisons to “Solaris” and “Moon.”

As the film opens, Brit Marling is a talented high school graduate with a bright future in front of her.  After a graduation party, she gets the behind the wheel when she probably shouldn’t, but hey, high school kids on their way to MIT think they’re invincible.  And they might be, but they forget about the damage they can do to others who aren’t.  Marling runs a light and hits a family in a station wagon, killing the mother and child and leaving the father in a coma.  In her defense, she ran the light because she was staring into the night sky and the mirror-image Earth that had just appeared in the sky.

The science here is a bit beyond me, and beyond the scope of the film; it doesn’t bother to explain much, but we gather that the other Earth truly is a mirror-image; every person here has a doppleganger there.  Perhaps it has appeared from a parallel universe; perhaps it is still in that universe, and somehow a window has opened between it and ours.

Marling goes to prison for what she’s done, and emerges a much sadder, less ambitious young woman.  She gets a job as a janitor at her old high school.  But she can’t stop thinking of the surviving father (William Mapother) of the family she killed.  So she approaches his house, apparently to apologize, but then chickens out and pretends like she’s from a maid service, sent to clean his house.

Now this is where “Another Earth” walks on thin ice.  Of course a relationship develops between the two, and even as I write this, it sounds like “While You Were Sleeping” syndrome — the awful, groan-worthy movie convention where one character keeps meaning to tell the truth to another, but never does until the moment of crisis, at which point everything falls apart and has to be put back together again in time for the happy ending — but “Earth” manages not to fall into the frozen lake of cheesiness and sentimentality it skates across.  Yes, the above plot line is followed, to a T, but somehow, it manages to feel believable and not contrived.  Marling keeps cleaning his house, and sees it as a way to make his life a tiny bit better, and that doing so might be a better way to do penance than an apology.  The romance between the two of them never stops seeming unlikely, but at least it’s handled with a certain amount of poetry and restraint.  They are both lonely, hurting people.

And don’t forget the science fiction angle: apparently, everything on the two planets was exactly the same, until that moment Earth 2 appeared in the sky, when the causelines split.  And since that moment was just before Marling killed Mapother’s family, it means that, up there, something different could’ve happened.  This, really, is the entire function of the sci-fi; to provide a way to meditate on what might’ve been, had one or two small details been slightly different, to give the characters, and the audience vicariously, the opportunity to wonder – what if?

It also offers Marling something real to offer Mapother, when the truth finally comes out.  There’s a starry-eyed billionaire planning a trip to the other Earth, and he launches an essay contest, the winner of which gets to go with him.  Of course Marling wins, but she gives her trip to Mapother.  This seems to be both hopeful and terribly problematic; if his family is alive up there, then so is his doppleganger; they already have him, so to speak, and there will be no place for him, not for long.  Which means he will see his family again, but also, that he will have lose them again.  Is that worth it?

The movie never explores this; it’s my own wanderings.  ”Another Earth” is the kind of movie that invites your mind to wander over its possibilities, to contemplate the questions its characters are contemplating.  That might be its greatest strength — it poses interesting questions in a dramatically thoughtful way, and invites a level of engagement from its viewer that few movies can match.

—

Rent or buy “Another Earth” at Amazon.com and I receive a commission!

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

“In Time” is a reasonably entertaining movie, based on an original idea, that could have been handled a lot better.  Or, I don’t know, maybe it couldn’t.  Some ideas seem original and able to bear up for a while, but when you really start exploring them, you find they’re played out before you expected.  Maybe that’s the case here.

It’s the near future, and science has achieved immortality through genetic modification.  To deal with the inevitable problems of overpopulation this will cause, everyone carries a digital timer in their arm that starts counting down as soon as they turn 25.  When it hits all zeroes, you die, instantly, suddenly.  Maybe there’s a small explosive implanted near the heart that goes off; that’s the kind of detail “In Time” doesn’t divulge.

Time is money, quite literally.  Gainful employment puts time on your clock; coffee and cigarettes, as well as rent and bus fare, takes it off.  Justin Timberlake and his mom, Olivia Wilde (did I mention that nobody ages past 25?) live day to day, always minutes away from their death.  On the other side of town, Amanda Seyfried and her family have centuries.  But then one day, a rich man goes down to the slums and gives all his time to Timberlake, right before jumping off a bridge (it’s a real drag to live forever.) “Don’t waste my time,” he tells Timberlake, but he never explains what wasting his time would look like, or what Timberlake’s supposed to do with the time.

And “In Time” never really figures that out, either.  Timberlake gambles it away, and then gets it back, and then gets Cillian Murphy, a sort of cop called a timekeeper, on his tail in an attempt to restore order.  Timberlake sort of kidnaps Seyfried, and they turn into Bonnie and Clyde, or maybe a futuristic Robin Hood, stealing time from the rich and giving it to the poor.

That just doesn’t feel like enough.  Perhaps because the whole thing is launched by a rich man, or perhaps because the film keeps dropping hints about the rich upper class that runs things, I kept expecting “In Time” to go to the source, dive into the origin story (how did the world get this way?) and challenge the system.  It never does.  I wanted Timberlake and Seyfriend to find a way to break the arm-timers and return everyone’s mortality to the hands of fate and/or circumstance.  Instead, they just keep robbing banks, reshuffling a deck obviously stacked by and for the rich. This is what keeps this movie from reaching the level of films like “Minority Report” or “The Matrix.”  It’s decently entertaining, though.

(One thing I liked, and couldn’t find a place to work into the review: Cillian Murphy and his fellow cops drive what appear to be modified versions of a late ’70′s model Ford Mustang — big, burly muscle cars, painted primer black.  Why don’t all cops drive cars like these?   There might be less crime if they did.  Though perhaps more instances of stolen cop cars.)

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

I saw the trailer for “50/50″ and thought, “Really? A comedy about cancer? ”   I mean, isn’t that the standard way to say something not funny at all, to say it’s “as funny as cancer?”   Is it even possible to make cancer funny?  And are the makers of this film brave/stupid enough to try?

Well, not really.  Turns out that trailer was pretty deceptive; “50/50″ isn’t half as funny as it makes it look.  That’s not altogether a bad thing.  (Actually, I’m not sure it’s a bad thing at all.)  Instead of a goofy stoner comedy — the kind of thing you’d expect Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon Leavitt–this film is heartfelt, warm, and emotional.  Yeah, it’s a tearjerker.  You’ll be crying before you finish it.  You will.

So just enter the theater with that expectation.  Sometimes a good cry is exactly what you need, and, aside from certain moments in certain Pixar films, a good cry at the movies has been hard to come by lately.

Joseph Gordon-Leavitt is a young, somewhat anal-retentive NPR documentarian who contracts a weird kind of cancer in his back that will probably kill him.   Seth Rogen is his best friend, which stretches believability a bit; he’s sloppy and goofy and mostly interested in getting laid.  He also works at NPR, mysteriously.   This is all based on a true story penned by Will Reiser, and from what I hear, Rogen and Reiser are close, so Rogen’s actually playing himself in the film.  Which is wierd, because I generally feel like Rogen is almost always playing himself in his films; if in real life he is actually something other than a slacker/stoner who alternates between talking too much and hiding how smart he actually is lest his slacker/stoner friends thinks he’s a nerd, I’ll be terribly shocked.  I might have a heart attack.  I guess as long as he’s not actually that guy he playes in “Observe in Report,” it’s all okay.

Gordon-Leavitt also has a terrible girlfriend, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, who is pretty to look at but can’t act much, and a therapist/love interest in Anna Kendrick, who isn’t all that pretty to look at (no matter how low-cut her dresses) but can invest a frown/grimace with worlds of emotion.  Angelica Huston is his worried/over-protective mom; all of these supporting people struggle to figure out how to support their cancer-ridden friend, who struggles to accept their support.

It’s all pretty heartfelt, and director Jonathan Levine does a more than decent job of balancing the moments of humor with the pathos and sentimentality.  It all builds to a real tearjerker of a scene, and I’m not going to tell you whether it ends well or sadly.   You’ll have to see for yourself.

—-

Buy or rent “50/50″ at Amazon.com and I receive a commission!

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

I used to really like Kristen Wiig.  Her brief scene in “Ghost Town” (“I died?”  ”Little bit.”) was the best part of that movie.  And she was pretty fun in “Knocked Up” and “Adventureland,” too.  But lately…not so much.  She was super annoying in “Paul,” though that may have been the way the character was written more than her performance.  Still, you can pass on a script.  And now, having watched the film she wrote, I’m officially off the Kristen Wiig bandwagon.

Everyone knows that being selected the Maid of Honor is a horrible job, and there ought to be a lot of comedy in exploring the dark side of that.  And there is, I guess; the problem is “Bridesmaids” goes almost exclusively for the comedy of the awkward, painful, embarassing moment.   And I’m just not that into it.  After a while, (pretty quick, actually) those moments just feel more painful and embarassing than funny.

General setup: Kristen Wiig is her best friend Maya Rudolph’s maid of honor.  Rudolph is marrying a super-rich guy whose sister would like to be Rudolph’s new best friend.  She can seriously out MoH Wiig, who is broke and hopeless.  They all get food poisoning at the bridesmaid’s luncheon.  They can’t get in to the super-exclusive dress shop.  She wants to go to the lake for the bachelorette party, but everyone else wants to go to Vegas, and she blows that, too.  Etc. etc.  About halfway through the film, it seems like Wiig (the writer) is just imagining everything that could possibly go wrong in Wiig (the character)’s life, and making it happen.  She loses her dumb job.  She gets kicked out of her crappy apartment.  She pisses off the cop she’s been flirting with.  You name it it goes bad.

The whole thing just gets old, long before it gets good.  And it doesn’t even get that good.  The wedding, as coordinated by the rich sister-in-law, is surprisingly tacky (it looks like they’re getting married in–literally, IN — the fountain outside the Bellagio) and when the two of them make up, it just feels weak.  Seriously, I think I would’ve preferred a hokey ending where the sister-in-law turns out to be devious and secretly engineering all the bad stuff that happens to Wiig (that’s where I thought it was going.)  That would’ve been bad, but it would’ve been something.  Instead, we don’t get much.   Just a catalog of painful moments.   Next time, I’ll pass.

Watch “Bridesmaids” at Amazon Instant Video

[Rating: 3/5]

It’s hard to say what “Moneyball” is about, really. It’s easy to say it’s about baseball, and Billy Beane, and the 2002 Oakland Athletics, but that’s not getting at it.  It’s tempting to say — and I’ve seen people say– that it’s about trusting new-fangled statistical analysis over old-fashioned scouts’ conventional wisdom and instincts, but that’s really missing the point.  A movie about replacing people with computers ought to be cold and heartless.  In that movie, Billy Beane is like the guy who invented SkyNet in the “Terminator” franchise; he may not know what’s he doing, but he’s bringing about the apocalypse with his ignorance. Instead, at the heart of “Moneyball” is a man with guts, intelligence and instincts.  He’s good at what he does, but he’s tired of hitting the glass ceiling of small market baseball teams.  He can develop talented ballplayers, but the minute they have a choice, they jump ship for the big markets and the big money.  So he turns to unconventional sources in an attempt to look at the game from a different angle.

After losing the ALCS in five games to the big-budget Yankees, and then losing 3 of his best players in the offseason to big-budget teams, Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt, who is in almost every frame of this film) decides it’s time to do something different.  He’s tired of developing young talent into stars and then watching them bolt for the bigger markets and bigger contracts as soon as they get good.  He’s tired of replacing stars with prospects.  So he looks to Jonah Hill.  (OK, this is odd and irrelevant, but I’ve got to get it off my chest.  Jonah Hill plays a character named Peter Brand in the film.  But it’s clearly, obviously based on Paul DePodesta.  Why did they change the name?  Beane’s name is the same, as is Art Howe’s, Johnny Damon’s, Scott Hatteberg’s, David Justice’s and many others.  Some of those guys — namely Howe and Damon — come off looking less than great.  DePodesta looks like a nerdy genius who can do no wrong.  So why is he called Peter Brand?)

Hill and Pitt develop a system of rating players based primarily on their ability to get on base.  This generates a list of underrated, easily affordable players, and they proceed to go get those players, much to the costernation of their owner, fans, and especially managers (the aforementioned Howe, played stoically by Philip Seymour Hoffman) who is completely baffled and angered by this new strategy and refuses to play the new guys.  But a rough start to the season turns itself around via a 20 game winning streak – unheard of in baseball, or any sport, really – and an unexpected return to the playoffs.

This is a very warm, human film; it’s about one man’s instincts and daring versus a big, entrenched system of conventional wisdom and established scouting ideas.  In a way, it has a lot in common with “The Social Network;” they’re both about intrepid, controversial innovators, albeit in very different fields.  Aaron Sorkin wrote both movies; maybe they feel alike because of his hand, or maybe he’s just drawn to this type of project.

But “Moneyball” is frustratingly uneven. Snappy, entertaining sequences bearing Sorkin’s trademark gift for dialogue are broken up by slow, sodden bits about Beane’s past failures, doubts, and personal life (the girl who plays his daughter is cute enough, but she doesn’t belong in this movie.) And then it picks back up again, then slows to a skid.  Really, it plays a bit like a 162 game baseball season, full of streaks and slumps.  Ted Williams famously said that the trick to good hitting was to keep the valleys from becoming canyons, and “Moneyball” mostly manages that.  But Ted Williams it ain’t.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

For about 90 of its 100 minutes, “Drive” is an almost perfect artsy action flick.  Ryan Gosling plays a man with no name who is a stunt driver/mechanic during the day and, occasionally, a getaway driver at night.  He is forever calm and calculating; he never says a thing unless it’s absolutely necessary.  You get the feeling – and “Drive” is all about feeling – that he is such an excellent driver because he understands exactly how an automobile works, and there is no room for ambiguity or error.  The flip side of this is that he doesn’t do so well with messy situations involving real people and relationships.  He’s a lot sexier, but actually, Gosling’s character here isn’t that different from the one he plays in “Lars and the Real Girl.” Down the hall lives Carey Mulligan and her young son.  They need saving. Gosling takes them on a magical ride to a secret place, and they are bonded.  Things have the potential to get complicated when Mulligan’s husband gets out of prison, but when he gets in trouble with the friends he made in prison, it looks like Mulligan and son need saving again, so really, it’s not all that complicated.

Sometimes “Drive” feels like “Taxi Driver;” they’re both films about men who feel in control when behind the wheel, and seldom anywhere else.  They’re also both about men looking for someone to save; in a world that doesn’t really operate like a fairy tale.   The difference is that “Drive” is sympathetic to its character where “Taxi Driver” isn’t; Nicholas Winding Refn really seems to want the world to be more fairy-tale like, and he sees the heroic in his protagonist’s noble quest, not just the psychotic.

But just when you feel completely drawn in to the not-completely-real world Gosling lives in, it all comes abruptly to a halt.  Gosling saves the girl from the villain (played chillingly straight by legendary comedian Albert Brooks, but, according to said villain, it’s at the cost of his own life.  This is where, in fantasy and most movies, the hero outsmarts the villain and defeats him in an epic battle sequence.  Instead, “Drive” pulls the rug out from under us just when it had us convinced it was a flying carpet; the blood gets shed in about half a second, and then the film is over.

I liked this film.  I liked its style and sensibility, the performances were great, and it established an admirable tone that it held for a long time.  But I found the ending terribly unsatsifying.  It was all over far too quick.  I hate to say it, but I wanted the drama,the big ending, the final car chase.  I wanted Brooks to be killed with that fancy knife he kept in that fancy case.  ”Drive” was a rare case where I enjoyed almost every minute of the film, but walked away from it feeling unsatisfied.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Here is a nice film for those who enjoy the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” books.  I honestly, sincerely do not mean that as a back-handed insult.  Sometimes something warm and comforting and a little bit inspiring is just what the doctor ordered.   Most movies about faith are either challenging and profound (like “Of Gods and Men”) or alienating to those within the faith, or just utterly ridiculous and embarassing.  ”Soul Surfer” successfully navigates the waters between those currents (are you laughing or groaning at that metaphor?) to provide a decently entertaining, mildly inspiring, warm, friendly family movie. Based on the true story of Bethany Hamilton, a young and promising professional surfer who lost her arm to a shark attack but came back and continued surfing at a high level.  As a film, it is remarkable mostly for what it doesn’t get wrong.  It doesn’t overglamorize the shark attack.  It actually seems to know what a contemporary church service looks and feels like, and doesn’t treat people of faith like unbalanced nuts. And it manages to tell its story without getting all preachy and awkward, or maudlin and sentimental.

A lot of the water/surfing scenes are really beautiful and wonderfully filmed.  A lot of the acting is kind of plastic and shallow.  There aren’t many wrinkles in the story; it’s basically girl-is-happy/girl-has-trouble/girl-overcomes trouble with help of friends and family.  It has its ups and downs: There’s an evil surfer girl competitor who maybe isn’t so evil after all, and a missions trip where truly destitute, desperate and scarred people help the protagonist along on her own path of character development.  But the family dynamics seem real and spontaneous, and the touch-and-go scene when Hamilton is rushed to the hospital is perfectly timed to be tense but not too intense.

And maybe that’s the genius of “Soul Surfer.”  It’s chicken soup;  a bit bland, but never repulsive, never spicy, never hard to handle.   Sometimes that’s exactly the right thing.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

“In A Better World” won both the Golden Globe and Academy awards for best foreign film last year, so it certainly has its fans.   But to me, it feels like a film trying far too hard to say Important Things about Important Issues.   While watching it, I was reminded of my freshman year Creative Writing class: all of us trying so hard to say Something, none of us yet aware of what it was we had to say.  My sympathies go out to Creative Writing teachers everywhere. Mikael Persbrandt plays a Swede living in Denmark but working as a doctor somewhere in Africa.  That’s a lot of displacement.  He’s also estranged from his wife because he cheated on her. His son gets bullied at school until he meets newcomer William Johnk Nielsen, who beats the bully with a tire pump and then threatens him with a knife.  In Africa, Persbrandt has to deal with grownup bulles: he is constantly sewing up people injured by the local warlord and his gang.  He wants to teach his son that violence is not the right way to solve problems, but his son finally has a friend, who solves his problems with violence.

The boys decide to build a bomb. The warlord comes to the doctor in need of medical aid.  Quandaries abound, but none of them feel organic to the story or the characters; none of them feel like they’ve arisen from the circumstances organically.   At every point “In a Better World” feels like its writers started with what they thought would be a compelling situation, then wrote their way backwards into a story to justify that situation.  This is the wrong way to go about things.

Movies that accomplish what “In A Better World” strives so hard to accomplish do so by starting with well-realized characters, and then following them until something interesting happens to them.  If your characters are good, something interesting will inevitably happen to them.   Instead, in this film, the characters feel contorted into their situations, or they just don’t feel real at all.  They are tortured plot devices, insignificant instruments in the service of a greater moral; an Important Thing to Say.  That’s a fatal flaw, and one all aspiring writers must take to heart: it doesn’t matter how profound or powerful your thesis is, if you take shortcuts in your storytelling to get to that point, it won’t come across the way you want it to.  ”In A Better World” feels preachy and fake.

[Rating:4/5]

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. –Flannery O’Connor

As “Secret Sunshine” opens, recently widowed Jeon Do-ywon and her 8-year-old son are in the process of moving from the city to her late husband’s hometown of Mingyang, in an attempt to start a new life in a happier place.  She is a woman of guts and composure, determined to put tragedy behind her, find the silver lining in everything, and provide a good life for her son.  But it all goes wrong.

Director  Lee Chang-dong elegantly captures the feeling of being a new person, and especially a new person with a past, in a small town.  Do-ywon’s neighbors are alternately politely friendly and slightly suspicious.  They’re not hostile or cliqueish, they’re just reluctant to open their arms to her until they know her a little better.  The exception is Song Kan-h0, a lonely mechanic whose devotion to Do-ywon is at first kind of creepy, and then comical, and then endearing.  He clearly would like to be romantically involved with her, but his approach is to follow her around like a puppy dog, ignore her rebuffals, and wait patiently for her to give him a chance.

Tragedy strikes Do-ywon, and her sunny resolve crumbles.  Lost in her grief and anguish, she sees a streetside banner for a church service: “healing for the wounded soul.”  She wanders into the church service, where she does seem to find solace, and converts to Christianity.   Despite cinematic convention (in which all conversions are fake) and even some critics’ reading of this film (which may be more fuled by said convention that actual observation of the film,)  I don’t think it is the director’s intention to mislead us here; I think the conversion is meant to be real, and truly transforming.  Do-ywon really does find solace and a degree of peace in her new church community, and does come to believe in God and let the Bible form her life.

Indeed, her devotion surprises her community around her, all of whom seem committed more to simple piety  than to truly engaging the scriptures and obeying the teachings of Jesus in all their risk, scandal, and impropriety.   Do-ywon decides, after some time, that she needs to forgive the man who has brought so much grief and pain to her life. (This is the decision that convinces me that her conversion was real and her faith is genuine; nobody seeking comfort in a stable community, simple answers and a sunny worldview would ever go this far with Jesus’ instruction to love your enemies.)  But when she visits him in prison, she discovers that he, too, has come to faith.  The idea that God would forgive this man before she was able to, or that the peace and comfort she has found might also be available to him,  is more than she can bear; she passes out in the parking lot after the visit.

Do-ywon spends the rest of the movie in a rapid descent into madness.  She does not stop believing in God; one could speculate that she has experienced too much for that to be a possibility.  But she cannot abide the kind of God that she has come to believe in; one who both causes evil, terrible things to happen (she is told repeatedly by her empty-minded, pious friends that “everything happens for a reason”) and also forgives and pardons and even extends love to the people who do evil, terrible things.   She makes several attempts to hurt God, because she believes she has been hurt by him.  (Again, unlike most of the critics I’ve read, I don’t think she’s trying to tear down a false religious system; she’s trying to strike a blow against the Supreme Being himself.)

“Secret Sunshine” is a powerful, dark, intense film, and it reminded me a great deal of the stories and novels of Flannery O’Connor.  O’Connor understood the scandalous nature of God’s grace better, perhaps, than any other writer or artist in her generation; indeed, better than most theologians.   The movie does not end well — you either fall on the cornerstone or the cornerstone falls on you — but I choose to believe it’s not the end of the story for this character, either.

This has been a remarkable summer for movies that choose to explore the depths of Christianity rather than exploit or mock it.   “Secret Sunshine” ranks right up there, for me, with “Of Gods and Men” and “Tree of Life” for movies that challenge me to think, to pray, and to consider what it means to be a Christian.  This questions feels deeply relevant to me, as a believer; I hope it feels equally relevant to non-believers; one should at least be able to see, from this trio of movies, that there is more to Christianity than what you’ll find in “Fireproof” or on Christian radio & TV these days.  I am deeply grateful that a movie like “Secret Sunshine” exists, and I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in exploring the depths of the Christian faith.