Faith, pain, Magnolia and Christians
Why the most important movie of the decade has to be faced head on
GERRY BOWLER
Special to CW Life
There has been some talk in these pages of late about movies, that dominant art form of the 20th century, and whether a journal of the ilk of Christianweek should be discussing their contents with our readers.
On reading this most recent exchange I was reminded of the time two years ago when I was speaking at a Christian college about the importance of people of our faith learning about the culture around us. I encountered some resistance to this notion from a few of the students. One of them said to me, “Why should I fill my head with all the garbage that’s on television? I don’t need to know that stuff. I’ve got Jesus.”
My answer to him was that, of course, neither he nor I needed to learn about contemporary media in order to be saved. However, if we wanted to help our neighbours, the more we knew about what they thought and the ideas that shaped them, the more effective we could be. How can we redeem the culture if we don’t know what it consists of? And so I urged him and his fellow students, just as I have urged anyone who might be reading my words in CW, to be interested in and to discuss the worldview that shapes people in our communities.
Profane and disturbing
It is for precisely this reason that I have been lately urging students at that same Christian college and in my university classes to see a very profane and disturbing film called Magnolia, a movie I consider the most important since Citizen Kane and one that everyone involved in religious ministry of any sort should see.
It is perhaps the most foul-mouthed movie I’ve ever seen–many in the audience walked out within a few minutes every time I saw Magnolia–but it is a movie that exposes the hurting soul of North America like nothing else I have ever witnessed.
Magnolia is a three-hour film that chronicles the lives of a dozen or so residents of Los Angeles over the course of a single afternoon and evening. It weaves back and forth between their stories and connects them with a brilliantly-conceived sound track and a series of coincidences that may not be so coincidental.
Several of these characters are dying. Most are wounded by atrocities committed on them by members of their own family; most are in palpable agony, searching for forgiveness but unable to feel they deserve it, or needing to forgive but unwilling to let go of their grievances because they have nothing else to replace them with.
Into these lives come two ministers of grace–a melancholy Christian policeman and a compassionate male nurse–and a spectacular act of God. By the end of this three-hour ride there has been some healing, some dying and sad hints of more pain to come.
Most important movie
I believe Magnolia is an important movie for Christians for two reasons. First, it will enable them to see what life is like without God or the church. This film is the equivalent of Matthew Arnold’s poem, “Dover Beach,” written in the 19th century when skepticism and science seemed to have conquered faith. Arnold imagined he was left in a world with “neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.”
This film is a call to those with faith to love their own children better and to love their neighbours as well.
The second, and perhaps more important, reason to see Magnolia is because its own director doesn’t have a clue about the movie he really made–and that tells us something enormously vital about culture in the year 2000.
The writer and director of the film is a brilliant young man named P. T. Anderson. He knows he has made a great film (it won both the Toronto and Berlin festivals though it was less popular with Oscar voters), but in interviews it is clear that he thinks it’s just about coincidences and strange weather and being nice to your kids. Until one of his actors, Henry Gibson, gave him a Bible he had no idea that the spectacle that ends the movie was in the Scriptures at all–and only then did he add hints and references to a certain passage in the book of Exodus.
Anderson, for all his skill as a film-maker, does not know that he was making a movie about the absence of grace. Grace is not a word in Hollywood’s vocabulary or in the vocabulary of much of popular culture. But it is the word that Christians were put in this world to give flesh to.
If this is true, how then must we live? It seems plain that Christian separatism that masks itself as holiness is an insufficient balm to this hurting planet. If the limit of our cinematic knowledge is “Davey and Goliath” we are cutting ourselves off from important data about our environment and how we can speak truth to it.
Seeing a movie like Magnolia is certainly not for everyone, but a free discussion of its importance in a Christian magazine must be permitted and welcomed as a step to fulfilling the Great Command.
Gerry Bowler is a Winnipeg writer and historian. You can read his columns on the Christianweek Website. Contact him by email: gbowler@videon.wave.ca