Film Journal 2023: The Marvels Directed by Nia DaCosta
You’d have to be a legitimate grinch to hate this film. Or for that matter, to want to hate this film as it seems some are predispositioned to do. I get it, superhero fatigue is real. But if you can set that aside, even if for a moment, I think you’ll find a film that is charming, chalk full of fresh energy, a good deal of fun, and utilizes a tight script to keep the tension focused on the interpersonal dynamics and the stakes right in the sweet spot. Throw in a breezy hour and a half run time that forgoes the typical third act Marvel formula, and everything about this preaches worthy successor to Danvers’ splashy introduction.
Let’s not forget too, we aren’t that far removed from Captain Marvel bringing genuine and welcome change to the superhero universe. She gave plenty of young girls and young women someone to emulate and look up to, and this sequel gives time to exploring that relevance too, tying it nicely into the films thematic interests.
The real star of the show, aside from a banger scene with the iconic cat, is the dynamic trio. When it wasn’t going for the heartstrings, I had a grin on my face the whole time. The Director utilizes every moment of their on screen chemistry and antics. Based on my audience, it’s a genuine crowd pleaser.
In N.T. Wright’s new book, Into The Heart of Romans, he locates the fundamental force of Paul’s letter within Paul’s understanding of the Genesis story. As he notes,
“… God called Abraham to undo the sin of Adam.”
How do we understand this sin and solution? “God called Abraham to be fruitful and multiply and look after Gods garden (creation).”
In contrast, “Abraham and Sarah are promised that God will make them fruitful (despite their old age) and give them a land (despite their presently being wandering nomads).”
What informs the gap inbetween the original vocation and Gods covenental purposes for a vocation gone wrong? We see this in the exile from the garden into the wilderness, the very thing that marks the wandering nomad. This becomes a movement back into a renewed garden space. Subsequently, we encounter the parallel story in Genesis 6 that finds the “be fruitful and multiply” command playing off of the progression of Cains murder and Lamechs successive murders, setting in play a pattern of retribution that then fills the earth. When we get to Genesis 6, this is joined with the outcome of the spiritual beings being fruitful and multiplying and filling the earth with evil, resulting in a decreation account and the emergence of Noah as a new Adam set within a covenant- as Wright puts it, “God so loved his world that HE determined to put it right.”
In covenantal terms, “God always intended to work through human beings” according to the Jewish expectation of a promise that “included the whole world” and which “extended to include all the nations.”
“Paul believed… that all these promises had come true in Israel’s Messiah… the very heart of the Gospel. Jesus is thus the rightful kyrios, “lord”, of the whole world… It didn’t need translating into non-Jewish terms to be relevant- uncomfortably relevant of course!- to the world which already had other “lords”, Caesar in particular.”
Reading Journal 2023: Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age Author: Tom Holland
No one does narrative history quite like Tom Holland. The third in his sweeping treatment of ancient and imperial Rome, War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age picks up with the death of Nero and examines the Flavian Emperors up until Hadrian’s death.
One of the great things about Holland is his willngness to explore the gaps between the facts that we know and the world behind the facts without reservation. He is not afraid to submit his wealth of historical awareness and knowledge to a necessary imagination, using the power of story to evoke questions and intrigue as he goes.
And what a story it is, traversing world shaping moments such as the fall of Jerusalem and Pompei. For as familiar as these stories are, its the inner workings of the world these events occupy that remains most intriguing. Its fascinating to consider, as a people looking back on an all too familiar legacy to us today regarding history’s greatest empire, just how uncertain and fearful the people and leaders of Rome actually were in the present. Even more striking to consider that the thing that caused this uncertainty was fear over Rome’s increasing diversity amidst the rise of immigration. Things feel far too real when considering our own present context as Holland navigates the construction of Hadrian’s wall. A striking shift from Rome’s once open borders.
Anyone with an interest in the Jewish revolt and the fall of Jerusalem I think will find plenty to stoke their imagination of this historical conquest. And if anyone has read Dominion, the focus he gives to the subsequent rise of Chrisitanity within the same soil that sees Rome’s eventual fall should not be surprising. I really loved the perspective he brings to these parallel events operating as part of the same story. There is some rich commentary to be found, and perhaps some important convictions and contextualization for constrasting two different portraits of the notion of kingdom. As the title of the book suggests, this age is considered Rome’s zenith, or golden age, but this zenith is shaped by the ever present tension of war and peace, the very things that continue to throw the promise of Empire, or the kingdoms of this world, into question today.
Film Journal 2023: Landscape With Invisible Hand Directed by Cory Finley
A quirky, ambitious sci-fi that works to defy both conventions and expectations. How willing you are to sink yourself into the oddities of this world will likely determine how well this works for you.
It’s also a bit of a slow build. Not in the pacing, but in the time it gives to building its world. This applies equally to the character development. The film’s interest in using its premise- benevolent aliens turned overlords whose introduction of technology has gradually eroded the human economy- to say something about larger social realities. The clear commentary on capitalism, disparity, gender and family dynamics, internet culture, all gets played through the lives of these two teens and their respective families. The way the script draws this out affords them layers, moving the plot in some unexpected directions as we watch the relationship between the two develop.
It all acts as a reminder that we live in a world shaped by these invisible hands. Our awareness and understanding of the persons existing within these systems involves awareness of the systems themselves.
As with anything unconventional, there is a definite level of experimentation, some that works more than others, and the further this goes along the deeper it sinks itself into it’s own imagination. This is, however, where the film is also at its most interesting and inventive, and goes a long ways in establishing this as worthwhile viewing.
Film Journal 2023: The Holdovers Directed by Alexander Payne
Plays like a warm blanket with a hot drink. Cosy, pared back, simple, heartfelt. It’s also smart, or Aasmartly written character study that gives its two central characters, a cynical aging professor and a castoff delinquent student, plenty of room to develop.
One of the potential dangers of a film that leans this heavily into its character drama is that it stands to isolate viewers who won’t necessarily connect to these performances whole sale. If you don’t, there is a decent chance you will find the film a bit underwhelming. If you do though, this thing should work like a charm. The investment of the cast and the filmmakers in winning you over to its holiday themed premise, a clear ambition of the script, is evident either way. For my money, it’s a resounding success. I bought into the chemistry hook line and sinker. I loved the mix of dark humor, emotional concern, and relationship building. The concept of two seemingly polarizing figures coming to discover that they have more in common than they thought never gets old.
It’s the kind of film that I think stakes a firm claim in potentially becoming a future holiday classic down the road.
“If we imagine that ‘law’ simply means a moral code- as many readers of Romans have done- we will miss much of the point.”
N.T. Wright (Into the Heart of Romans)
21 So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; 23 but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.
Romans 7:21-23
In locating the heart of Romans in chapter 8, Wright notes the “therefore”, or the ‘so then’, that opens the chapter as the conclusion of the argument Paul has been making in chapters 1-7. The emphasis of chapter 7 is on the dual nature of the Law, which, as Wright notes, was not a set of moral codes but the first five books of the Torah, the formative story of Gods acting in the world and Gods promise to make the world right.
The question at hand is, how can the Law do two seemingly opposite things: 10 I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death 13 Did that which is good, then, become death to me?
Paul responds definitively; 7 What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! 13 Did that which is good, then, become death to me? By no means!
So how do we then reconcile the end of chapter 7 with the beginning of chapter 8: 7:25b I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin. 8:1 Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus
The answer, seemingly is found in two pointed realities concerning cheaters 7 and 8. First, Sin is depicted as something that has agency. It is able to “seize the opportunity”. It “springs to life”. It “uses what is good”. “It is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me.”
And this agency is depicted as “another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.” Earlier Paul locates this “in the realm of the flesh” where the “passions” are aroused. So its not only a matter of Sin as agency, it is a matter of a fleshly reality, which for the ancients was marked by Death, or finiteness which breeds suffering.
Second, Paul says in chapter 7:6 that; 6 But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit
Later in 7:25a, Paul offers this precursor to the direness of 25:b; 25 Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Therefore, it is Jesus who releases is from the Law, not ourselves, nor any good moral works.
Now notice how how 8:1 repeats the claim of 7:25a, adding the specifics in relationship to the broader argument in chapter 7 regarding the Law; Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, 2 because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death.
God fulfills the “aims” of the Law, the thing it was powerless to do in the realm of the flesh where the agency of Sin holds sway, by “sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering” (vs 3). And in so doing God condemns “sin in the flesh”.
What is the aim of the Law, or as Paul puts it, “the righteous requirement of the law”? It isn’t to follow a moral code perfectly. It isn’t to be sinless in those terms. It isn’t for us, or Jesus on our behalf, to prove faultless in terms of perfect obedience to a set of moral commandments. The righteous requirement was found in the aim of the Law, which was the story of the first five books of the Torah that shaped Paul’s Jewishness, and that aim was the three fold expectation of the defeat of Sin and Death, resurrection, and the establishment of the eternal king on his throne.
In other words, a new reality brought about in our midst “8 Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God. 9 You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit.”
Now read these words in 8:18-21 18 I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19 For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. 20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.
What is the subjection? If we have followed Paul’s argument, we can see that the subjection was the giving of the good Law which promises life, which became the means by which this agency called Sin acts and enslaves according to the flesh and fleshly reality. What is the hope? Liberation of creation from this fleshly reality. 24 For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? 25 But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
Attentive readers can then note the connection between this present fleshly reality and the hope of this liberated reality in Jesus, with the connective piece being our own obligation as a people already occupying space in the spirit, or the spiritual reality. 12 Therefore, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation—but it is not to the flesh, to live according to it. 13 For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.
Why is this an obligation? Because through life in the Spirit we bear witness to the fleshly reality of our hope in the person and work of Jesus. And not just to one another, but to creation itself. Through our living the new liberated reality is experienced even as we experience life in the flesh as slavery to Sin and Death
Welcome to the fallout Welcome to resistance The tension is here The tension is here Between who you are and who you could be Between how it is and how it should be
Switchfoot (Dare You to Move)
The Dream
Years ago I had a dream. A dream to make music. A dream to make a living making music.
A once upon a time kind of dream that danced that line between fairy tale vision and potential reality.
Like all great music dreams should begin, mine begins with the legendary bastion of grunge rock, Pearl Jam, covering their song Daughter for school spirit day. The intermittent drum lessons that colored my childhood, managed as they were with the aid of a rickety, no named brand budget kit, a mere step up from the pots, pans and pails I banged around on under the tutelage of a particular elementary peer and prodigy, had graduated to a swanky new Pearl set leading into my grade 10 year. I was a self made developing musician, a basement drummer surrounded by much better studied and studio quality professionsals, who was given a stage by a group of my peers, a moment that would eventually bleed into years of endless basement jam sessions with a rag tag mix of “riff raff” friends with a shared interest in these basement level passions. Those jam sessions would bleed into what became many years as the primary worship drummer at my church. A bit of a juxtaposition with my metal head days; two worlds colliding and weaving their way through the different iterations of hopeful bands and projects that would follow.
As I was chasing my dream, seeds of a different kind were quietly being planted by the relationships I was building with a small group of 12 year old kids finding their way in our still at the time small and fledgling house church turned established community.
The Beautiful Letdown
I’m in my mid-twenties. I’m looking back at a litter of failed band projects. I was dealing with the sudden departure from my life of a pivotal part of that dream and process; a close friend whom had an opportunity to see his own dream fulfilled. It was, in many ways, a time of crisis. One of those moments that asks of you, just how important is this dream, and what do you do when this dream seems to be veering back towards the realm of fairy tale without the necessary happy ending?
I decided to take one last shot at turning the dream into a reality. A decision that had some inspiration from the outside; while I was in the midst of this pursuit, another group of young musicians from California found themselves in a similar space asking similar questions of themselves. As their story went, an indie record had earned them a spot opening for some established names. What was meant to be their breakout record, an album that would gain the title The Beautiful Letdown, faced one of the greatest obstacles of that time- rejection from the big wigs. And, as they tell that story, not just rejection but rejection a mere 30 seconds into their audition.
The ways into the industry were not the same then as they are today, with most paths following a similar road chasing a cherished spot at one of the big labels. Thus the question for them was the same- just how important is this dream, and what do you do when this dream seems to be veering back towards the realm of fairy tale without the necessary happy ending? They answered the challenge by risking an independent release, choosing to believe in the record rather than allowing the rejection to seal its fate. The Beautiful Letdown would go on to be their breakout album, only on their terms and as their project.
That story would carry with me as I met with another close friend, a guy also named Dave and who also shared the same birthday as me, one of the few to only remaining musical voices in my life at the time, and dreamt up a new possibility. Sitting there in his bedroom, together we set out on this venture to build a project that could get us where we wanted to be on our own terms- making music.
Fast Forward: Years of hard work and struggle brought that dream slowly to life, bringing in a front person, writing a bunch of original songs, putting together a recording and a couple makeshift tours east and west, and eventually bringing in the help of a local band manager as part of an effort to make a real go of it.
I was on the precipice of experiencing what I had spent so long striving for. In fact, for a while I was living it in its earliest stages. Little did I know I was approaching another important intersection. Those seeds that had been planted through my relationship with that handful of students had been growing and aging alongside my dream. And it was on one of the biggest stages of my life that I realized I was, in fact, at a point of crisis- follow the story of the band through to its ultimate conclusion, or leave it behind so that I could be there for these now grown adolescents heading into their graduating years.
It was in this moment, on the bigness of that stage, listening in the background to this hopeful band manager laying out the game plan with our front persons (which included getting the “notes” that I needed to cut my hair and change my image) that I began to reflect on my dream. For as silly as it might sound to some, I would call it a prompting of the spirit. I was compelled to wonder about what fueled my dream from its early moments. Was it a dream to make music? Or was it a dream to play music that invested in the lives of our primary target audience- that younger generation I had been journeying with alongside the creation of this band? When I realized that what got me most excited was the latter, I knew which road I had to take.
So I stepped out of the band. To be honest, there was a real sense that I taken the thing as far as I could. What the band would become seemed to be developing into its own thing, a very different thing than I had once imagined. I felt like I had brought it far enough to prove to myself that I could do it, that I had gotten to where my dream had long imagined I wanted to be. But as life does, this wasn’t without a small bit of irony. Not long after I left the band, they would find themselves sharing the stage with Switchfoot.
20 Years Later: The Beautiful Letdown
Its funny. Perhaps this is what makes art, any art, timeless. Listening to an album at one point in your life can speak something quite different 20 years later. I recently had the privilege of attending The Beautiful Letdown anniversary concert, a tour in which they performed the album front to back. It was a last minute decision, shaped by something of a pilgrimage- I was in the middle of reading the recently released biography on the life of Martin Luther King and simultaneously looking for somewhere to go in the fleeting days of summer before my current job in the school system kicked back into gear. Switchfoot was playing in Birmingham, Alabama. The Birmingham area was where so much of what I was reading in this biography had occurred. Plans for a solo trip took shape, and off I went with that formative album functioning as my soundtrack.
This is your life Are you who you want to be? This is your life Is it everything you dreamed That it would be when the world was younger And you had everything to lose?
Switchfoot (This Is Your Life)
20 years later I find myself asking similar questions about my life, just from a much different vantage point. Driving through the mountains of Tennessee and into the Alabama foothills, I found these songs urging me to look backwards rather than forwards, leading me to assemble the many ups and downs of my journey since leavinng my dream behind into an existential crisis regarding my legacy. I imagined, walking in the footsteps of one of the world’s greatest dreamers, what the story of my life might tell having chosen the path that I did. Was it everything I dreamed. Am I who I want, or wanted to be, now that the world is much older?
I’m not sure I settled on much of an answer. In fact, driving down those Alabama highways, an immenses sense of my many failures loomed large. I did however find along that journey particular moments of clarity.
I remember, following a lengthy day of visiting Montgomery and travelling the well trodden path to Selma, which included visiting the areas literary inspirations, deciding to get off the interstate and travel the backroads back to Birmingham. I was surrounded by forests of tall, thin oak trees, weaving their way through the foothills and upwards back towards the city that marked the entry point to the areas Red Mountain. Intermittent rain storms had quietly worked their way southward, helping to break the humidity. I had the windows rolled down and the sunroof open, letting the coolness of the gentle downpour inform my reflections on the darkness I had encountered that day in the story of Alabama’s, and America’s history.
That’s when these lyrics really hit home;
Life is not what I thought it was Twenty-four hours ago Still I’m singing ‘Spirit, Take me up in arms with You’
I want to see miracles To see the world change Wrestled the angel for more than a name For more than a feeling For more than a cause I’m singing ‘Spirit, take me up in arms with You’ And you’re raising the dead in me
Switchfoot (Twenty Four)
Here is what I can say with a fair degree of certainty- the longer I live the bigger the world gets. And the bigger the world gets, the more the particulars of a story draw it back in. A close listen to The Beautiful Letdown can demonstrate its keen sense for this inevitable relationship between the story of the self and the story of the world it sees. To ask, am I who I want to be, is to ask am I who I want to be in relationship to the world I see and experience. In the song On Fire, the band also imagines that our relationship to the world we see exists within the broader question of Gods relationship to the world..
And you’re on fire When he’s near you You’re on fire When he speaks You’re on fire Burning at these mysteries
Switchfoot (On Fire)
In some real sense, to encounter and see the divine is to see the world through that lens, and subsequently to find our relationship to the world through our relationship to the divine. That’s where we can dare to wonder and imagine, “when everything inside me looks like everything I hate, You are the hope I have for change.” Words that ring out from those places of darkness and defeat, amidst the dreams and the seeds of dreams still unexpressed, locating places of transformation in the mystery.
I’m standing on the edge of me I’m standing at the edge of everything I’ve never been before I’m on fire Burning at these mysteries
Where “Every day we borrow brings us one step closer to the edge of infinity”, leading us to ask “Where’s (our) treasure? where’s (our)hope? This is the ultimate point of clarity that emerges from Dare You To Move, singing “maybe redemption has stories to tell.” Or the words of Meant To Live, which echo with equal parts lament the proclamation, “we want more than this world’s got to offer.” Or to sing the song of The Beautiful Letdown;
It was a beautiful letdown When you found me here I will carry a cross and a song Where I don’t belong I don’t belong
Switchfoot (The Beautiful Letdown)
To see my story through the words of these songs 20 years later was to hear these words speaking to the many points of crisis and failure and joys and successes that mark my journey, and reshaping them against the echoes of a greater dream. I might not be making music, but my life nevertheless continues to sing a song. 20 years ago I would want to tell that young dreamer that the greatest melodies come from marrying that song to the mystery that hold them loosely. That the world you will find through a lived life will demand that mystery in order to sing a new song “between who you are and who you could be. Between how it is and how it should be”.
When the world was younger I had a dream. The older the world gets, the more I realize that the dream is in the living.
The subject of necessary awe is still one of the most fascinating subjects to me when it comes to my dialogue with those who do not hold to belief in God. The basic question is this: if awe was not there, if it was stripped away, proven to be false, not attainable, would we still live the same way? This has always seemed to me to be the question that gets us closest to some sense of transcendent and foundational truth across that divide:
“Most of us find it difficult to recognize the greatness and wonder if things familiar to us.
The biblical man has not forfeited his sense of radical amazement. That “wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder” was stated by Plato and maintained by Aristotle. “For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize.” To this day, wonder is appreciated as semen scientiae, the seed of knowledge, as something conducive to cognition, not indigenous to it..Wonder is the prelude to knowledge; it ceases, once the cause of a phenomenon is explained.
But does the worth of wonder consist merely in its being a stimulant to the acquisition of knowledge? Is wonder the same as curiosity? To the prophets, wonder is a form of thinking; it never ceases. There is no answer in the world to ultimate amazement.
What is so wonderous about the world? What is there in reality that evokes supreme awe in the hearts of men? (In the prophets) it is proclaimed not as a messianic promise but as a present fact. Man may not sense it, but the seraphim announce it.”
Film Journal 2023: A Million Miles Away Directed by Alejandra Márquez Abella
One of the most remarkable things about this space odyssey, based on a true story, is that for as many miles as this travels it never strays far from the thing that really matters- home. There are so many points in this story where the filmmakers could have been tempted towards shifting the focus away from its central character and on to NASA or the expedition itself, in this case one that took a migrant farm worker to the space station. Instead, the film makes intentional choices to constantly redirect the forward movement back on to to the family, on to the humble life this aspiring astronaut has back home. The result is a final quarter that offers one of the most beautifully captured “journey to space” sequences I can recall. There is no nail biting drama. No harrowing moments. It is simply the power of a moment, a moment the film is content to sit and linger with. And for every time it seems like the film is going to lurch forward, the filmmakers draw us back instead.
It might be easy to jump to the conclusion that this is pure sentimentalism on display, but I would argue this is simply excellent filmmaking built on an allegiance to capturing a quiet simplicity. For me, looking in from the outside at a distinctly American story, it provided a stark contrast between two commonly associated aspects of the American dream. When I think about what that dream is in the American ethos, I either think about the narrative of progress that it tends to attach itself to, such as NASA, or about the land of opportunity, such as the immigrant farmer to astronaut motif. This is decidedly rooted in the latter. Even then, as someone who tends towards critique of that dream, what I found so refreshing about this take on such an idea is that it never seems to idealize the journey itself. The film serves as a reminder that such a journey is meaningless outside of the story (or stories) that surround it. And, in fact, the film seems to want us as viewers to know that such a life would be meaningful with or without the accomplishment of the dreamer. What the accomplishment provides is the sort of contrast that allows one to set things in perspective.
There is a moment in the film where the main character’s child asks why their father wants to go to space. This question is never actually answered verbally. Instead, the Director lets the journey itself answer the question for us. It’s a poignant way of showing rather than telling, which is precisely what makes the films choice to lean towards the intimacy of life on the ground so effective and inspiring. It’s worth noting here too that none of this would prove successful without some great casting. The chemistry here is as real as it gets.
Film Joutnal 2023: A Haunting in Venice Directed by Kenneth Branagh
Death was only the beginning.
Thus reads the official tagline for the latest entry from Branagh into the famed Hercule Poirot saga, which includes Murder On the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. Each of those films has it’s own distinct style and flavor, much of that stemming from their different settings. Those differences in setting also lend each film a distinct thematic focus, with this latest one being the most philosophically rich of the bunch. There is something about Venice that evokes a necessasy existential process.
The film, in fact, brilliantly plays the setting as a way of exploring the internal tension of its themes. The film begins with a Venice that feels demytholigized, the typical romanticism being traded for a dark and staid portrait of the historic canals and buildings. We are introduced to Poirot as a figure stripped of his sense of purpose and burdened by the hidden ghosts of his past. Early on this formulates as a simple but concise philosophical quandry, one that Poirot, with the help of an old “friend”, plays in both directions of the ontological problem. If God is not real, he surmises, then the spirit does not exist. If the spirit exists, then God is real. Both equations have implications for how we understand the world and how we navigate the world. In the world of Poirot, this has implications for how he solves the mysteries that cross his path, and indeed why he feels compelled to solve these mysteries. Built into this is the question of mystery itself. Do we understand this world to be purely material in nature, a mystery to be solved by way of parsing out the objective facts that shape its reality? Or does parsing out the facts effectively invite us into the mystery. One stark, and powerful observation that the film carries forward is that Poirot’s existential crisis doesn’t exist in a bubble. The mysteries he solves are attached to the real, flesh and blood crisis of the persons who are asking for his help. What hangs in the balance is not simply the fate of the dead, but the struggles of the living.
There is another blink and you’ll miss it observation that I felt was powerful. It comes in a confessional moment, one in which Poirot’s materialist worldview is being threatened. Forced to consider different possibilities, we see him betray his own ontological challenge by admitting that his real struggle is reconciling a world shaped by encounters with the struggles and death that inform his own experiences as a detective. More problematic for him is reonconiling the existence of a god, and therefore a spirit, with the harsh nature of this reality. His resistance to having the rationalized and reasoned parameters of his carefully structured and protected worldview penetrated and broken apart is actually anchored in the problem of evil. To state this another way, his journey wonders about whether a world without God is preferable to a world with God. In some ways a purely materialistic reality makes it easier to confront the fact that darkness exists. Where it is less adept is affording us good reason to confront it, especially where it requires something of us.
I loved the mystery element in Murder on the Orient Express. I loved the thrill of the visuals in Death on a Nile. In A Haunting in Venice I loved the character driven story. It plays in many ways as a good, old fashioned ghost story packaged as a classic who-dunnit. Perfect for heading into the halloween season. What gives it relevance is its ability to ask big questions and explore those questions in the particularities of its characters. As I mentioned earlier, the film brilliantly uses its setting as a way to contrast the tension of the existential process. There is a point in the story where Branagh then moves us from the darkness into the light, allowing us an opportunity to see the world a little differently, to recover the romanticism and idealism that marks those same historical buildings and canals, and perhaps the fabric of our own lives, and indeed the reality of the world at large.
What carries into this visual contrast is the exploration of its questions, forcing us as viewers to give up some of that ability to control the darkness. What remains are hints of the necessary mystery, perhaps then inviting us to also relinquish the need to control the darkness as well.
The Stories of my Life 