Doug Geivett
February 25, 2008
The 80th Academy Awards last night kept fewer people poised at the edge of their seats. Viewer “attendance” was at a historic low. One friend of mine watched the Oscars until the final hour, supposed to be the most suspenseful, to flip over to a channel showing the movie I, Robot (2004). He says he recorded the last hour of the Awards for future viewing, but I wonder if he’ll get around to it.
Maybe people are losing interest in what the Academy thinks about the movies. I know many people who like movies who didn’t see any of the films nominated for best picture this year. In radio interviews during the past week I was frequently asked why the Academy selects films that haven’t been seen or liked by very many regular folk. That’s a good question. The short answer is that members of the Academy see things in film that regular viewers don’t see and aren’t looking for. This answer raises the more imposing question, What do members of the Academy see that the rest of us don’t see in films, and why do they care so much about things most people don’t get? There isn’t a short answer to that question.
Part of the answer may have to do with the religious sensibilities of many regular viewers. After seeing a particular film, I’m often asked, “So, is it a good movie?” I think people ask this question for two reasons. They want to know if they will be entertained by the movie; and, they want to know if they will be offended by anything in the movie. These days, there’s always a good chance a movie will fail in one or both respects, especially for people of faith.
On the eve of Awards night, religion news reporter, Kim Lawton, reflected on a growing “disconnect between Hollywood and religion”:
At the Academy Awards on Sunday, the nominees for best picture portray some complex moral situations: A pregnant teenager figuring out what to do; a lawyer in an ethical crisis; a Western saga overwhelmed by evil; a romance doomed by lies; a clash between an oil man and a greedy evangelist.
But except for the unsavory clergyman in There Will Be Blood and perhaps the title Atonement, there’s little explicit treatment of religion. 1
There are problems with this analysis.
First, engagement with issues of faith by filmmakers cannot be measured in terms of the “explicit treatment of religion.” Issues of faith transcend explicitly religious phenomena, like church attendance, preaching, men of the cloth, crucifixion, or the parting of the Red Sea.
A dramatic film called Last Word, featuring Wynona Ryder, Wes Bentley, and Ray Romano, was screened at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. The film is not in any meaningful sense a treatment of religion. But there is a crucial scene where a suicidal person is challenged by an apparently secular acquaintance to consider whether he’s ready for death if he doesn’t know that there is no heaven to prepare for. This is a poignant moment in the film, and at its center is a question with unequivocal religious significance.
Second, it’s not clear what explicit treatment of religion is supposed to look like. Consider Lawton’s statement. The depiction of an “unsavory clergyman” in There Will Be Blood counts as explicit treatment of religion. But why? The character, Eli Sunday, is important to the storyline of the film, and so is his self-interested exploitation of religion. But does this film provide a commentary on the man’s religion? This might seem like a trick question. After all, as we come to find out (and maybe we have suspected all along), Eli Sunday really isn’t a religious man. He’s a narcissistic opportunist with a peculiar set of talents for getting what he wants. In this, he’s not much different than the thoroughly secular oilman, Daniel Plainview.
Eli Sunday has the appearance of being religious. But appearance here doesn’t match reality. Maybe that’s supposed to be a general statement about religion, or the kind of religion Eli represents or purports to represent. But it’s not clear that this is a deliberate message of the film. So does There Will Be Blood include a treatment of religion? It’s a legitimate question.
Third, Lawton suggests that if the film Atonement is “religious,” it is only in the sense that its title is borrowed from Jewish or Christian theology. But there is a deep question to consider here: What is the point of assigning this name to this film?
Atonement is an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel bearing the same name. To say that the film is called Atonement because that’s the name of the novel isn’t very helpful. What was McEwan thinking when he selected this title? There’s a pretty strong clue at book’s end, where a defining puzzle is set to words:
. . . how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. No atonement for God, or novelists . . .
Maybe there’s a deeper issue of religious significance here after all. Even if you see the film without reading the novel, you will surely recognize the complexity of the plot and the challenge it must have been to render it on the big screen. This complexity is some evidence that the choice of title is not void of religious import. After considerable reflection about the film, I concluded that the novelist in the film, Briony Tallis, might well have fabricated the entire story, it being her authorial prerogative to do so. And there would be much irony in the suggestion that this act had atoning significance for the creator.
Fourth, complex moral situations have a tendency to link up with religious themes. Films that seek to plumb the depths of moral experience without reference to religion may inadvertently reinforce the widespread suspicion that religion provides the only meaningful support for the moral life.
Much could be said in exploration of these four considerations. But another point relates more directly to Lawton’s claim that the five films nominated for best picture all portray complex moral issues. These issues have to do with teenage pregnancy, ethics and lawyering, unmitigated evil, interpersonal conflict rooted in deception, and greed.
Though these issues are portrayed in these five films, I think it's a reach to suggest that all five films portray the moral complexity of these issues. I agree that Atonement and Juno do. Michael Clayton, maybe; but it's a stretch. (Michael Clayton is more of an entertainment film than a message film.) But No Country for Old Men, and There Will Be Blood?
Definitely not No Country for Old Men, and probably not There Will Be Blood.
There's nothing morally complex going on in No Country for Old Men, unless it's reflected in the disillusioned law-enforcement character played by Tommy Lee Jones. But my sense is that Tommy Lee's character is incidental to the story, and totally incidental to the apparent success of the film. This is a movie that tried to package a message, but was so clumsily determined that the package got sent without the message. The Texas Ranger isn't a complex enough character to give the film any existential heft. Llewelyn, the Josh Brolin character, is more interesting than a stick figure. But the ethical import of his behavior isn't explored. The real action of the film effectively diverts attention away from its morally instructive potential. That potential is sublimated by a desire to pump up viewer adrenalin with a film whose genre is more horror than Western.
The satisfaction people find in a film like No Country for Old Men is morally curious—if not morally complex. It was widely rumored that it would win the Oscar for best picture. So there was plenty of support for it. But who are the people who considered it all round more sophisticated than the other four? What is their argument that this film is most deserving of the honor? What criteria explain this preference? No Country for Old Men may have deserved a nomination for best picture, but of the five, I think it was least worthy.
There Will Be Blood has more moral impact than No Country for Old Men. Actually, it has quite a lot of moral impact. That doesn't mean it portrays complex moral issues, or that it treats moral issues with proper sensitivity to their complexity. But at least a case can be made. Compare Daniel Plainview with that bloodthirsty Chiguhr of notorious hair. It can be argued that Daniel wants to be a good person, and that even when he does something to injure others, he at least acts in the interests of what he believes is good on some level (a level intelligible to a narcissist). But Chiguhr is a killing machine. There are few signs of moral awareness or moral concern in his demeanor. And this is intentional. It's pretty hard to wring moral complexity out of the behavior of a psychopath. Daniel Plainview is unpleasant, but people are drawn to him; he has charm. Not so Chiguhr. We are given a real chance to believe that Plainview can be redeemed, though in the end he isn't. The question isn't even raised in the case of Chigurh.
So I’m at a loss to see what complex moral situation is portrayed in No Country for Old Men.
Michael Clayton was my choice for best picture, and not because it's particularly deep, ethically, religiously, or otherwise. I favor mystery and suspense, of a relatively traditional kind. This movie had that. The moral components of the narrative are back story. They don't drive the film in a singular way. Contrast that with Atonement, where a young girl's fallible observations, combined with confused moral sensibilities, ruin the lives of her older sister and the man they both care about most. Atonement doesn't exist as a film without the moral complexity at its core. Michael Clayton didn't need an arresting moral issue to be the engaging film that it is, because it wasn't designed to engage on that level in the way that Atonement was.
Yes, there is a morally conflicted attorney, two of them, in fact. And yes, there is a subtext of corporate exploitation of the naive and helpless in Michael Clayton. But these issues simply provide context for a good whodunit. Given that George Clooney plays the lead character, it's rather surprising that the film isn't more politically and ethically sermonic than it is. Michael Clayton isn't off-the-charts great. But in its genre, it's very good. And how often does a straightforward suspense film get an Oscar? Does it really matter that it doesn’t connect with issues of faith or treat religion explicitly? Maybe a film should win an Oscar for somehow managing to entertain without doing (or trying to do) any of that.