Living Wittily

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel; When reviewing a film becomes a review of your life....

Yesterday I went to see the Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. The same winning ingredients - sumptuous setting in India, characters who combine being interesting with being vulnerable, and who are played by actors and actresses of consummate skill who are clearly enjoying themselves. Add to that a whole network of love stories which are emerging, or submerging in all the complexities of two human beings trying to understand each other while not fully understanding themselves; and of course the script, moving from condensed milk sweetness to bitter lemon tartness, and with some one liners that are clever, funny and at times movingly profound in their probing of our deep hopes and at times our deeper disappointments. When Richard Gere says he is 64 I am reassured that at least in one tiny fact at least, I am the same as him.

Which means to be 64 and watching a film about the possibilities and opportunities of retirement is to be asking, if not for trouble, at least for food for thought. Growing older has its positives, but if we are not careful we might buy into the cultural confusion about ageing we have all played our part in creating. The range of ageist responses from patronising concessions, culpable indifference, burden bearing resentment, optimism bordering on denial, to what Maggie Smith as the citrus tongued philosopher of the Hotel says, the one utterly unacceptable attitude that negates the real possibilities, the self pity of the old mourning their own mature chronology.

So at 64 the film brings me laughter, joie-de vivre, food for thought, and a heightened awareness of the key line of the whole film, and it is a happy misquotation by the overexcited Hotel Manager, "There is no present like the time." That is such a beautiful rearrangement of words. Time. Now. The present. The gift of time and the gift of the present. Time is a present, presented to us, now.

My own chronology, and chronic denial of its creeping limitations, means I;ve been sidelined from five a side football for a month and probably a month more. A badly strained soleus muscle. The physiotherapist suggesting I now run faster and stop more suddenly than my wee legs can take! But who then advises not to give up, but to train and strengthen the muscles, adjust my play, and go on keeping fit.

But the injury is a reminder that mobility isn’t to be taken for granted. And that the body doesn’t go on forever! Actually, I won't go on forever, another gentle but persistent reminder embedded in the film. Like many who start the third third of life I’m still unsure of many things as working life slows down. Some of that is an overactive sense of accountability. For all of us this can take the form of chronic guilt, or performance anxiety, or status maintenance or ego consciousness, and various other subterfuges of personal insecurity. In other words there is a spiritual dimension to retirement from major responsibility that involves learning to trust the purposes of God, relinquishing a Pelagian Christian work ethic – by that I mean assuming the faithfulness of my discipleship is performance based. 

The current emphases in theological reflection are on embodiment, enacting, performing; but these must be heard as correlates of the grace that enables such embodiment, practice and performance. Salvation by works, that old legalism of the heart, remains a debilitating temptation to those who always want to prove to God they are worth saving, and to others that we are worth having around! What this film does is insist, persistently and consistently insist, there is no present but the time - each day is a gift to be received with thanksgiving, trust and loving care for those who struggle the same road, and wondering how we'll manage the tight corners, steep climbs and sudden landslides.

And yet. And Therefore. God’s call in the Third Third of life comes from the same God who calls, Giver of the same grace which enables, Source of the same love who purposes good, but does so now in the life of someone  who has the same amount of time in a day as anyone else, sufficient energy and health at least for now.

A poem that has come to mean much to me is Edward Thomas's poem for his daughter "And You Helen":

And You, Helen

And you, Helen, what should I give you?
So many things I would give you
Had I an infinite great store
Offered me and I stood before
To Choose. I would give you youth,
All kinds of loveliness and truth,
A clear eye as good as mine,
Lands, waters, flowers, wine,
As many children as your heart
Might wish for, a far better art
Than mine can be, all you have lost
upon travelling waters tossed,
Or given to me. If I could choose
Freely in that great treasure-house
anything from any shelf,
I would give you back yourself,
And power to discriminate
What you want and want it not too late,
Many fair days free from care
And a heart to enjoy both foul and fair,
And myself, too, if I could find
Where it lay hidden and it proved kind.

There it is, a perfect review of the film and three lines that help us welcome life with the attitude there is no present like the time: " I would give you back yourself,/ and power to discriminate / what you want and want it not too late."

Wednesday Nights are Wolf Hall.

The title of this blog is Living Wittily. The phrase comes from Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons. The play is based on the life of Thomas More and explores the moral, psychological and theological morass created by Henry VIII and his ruthless determination to produce a male heir with or without Catherine of Aragon. Of course, it was going to have to be without her, which set Henry on a collision course with the Pope, the Catholic Church, and any close to him whose conscience prohibited approval of the King's dynastic goals.

Disapproval of the policies of a Tudor King may well be dictated by conscience but it was equally an act of political suicide and invited martyrdom. This was brilliantly captured in the most recent episode of Wolf Hall, in which the King's ruthlessness, Thomas Cromwell's manipulative cleverness, and Thomas More's adamantine refusal to violate his conscience. were composed into a concerto movement of tragic slowness, tortuous windings, and an outcome made certain in its fatal climax. The psychological subtleties and virtuoso ethical performances of More were never going to save him in a drama about power in need of substance, about evolving national identity, debts of remembered grievance being called in, and the beginnings of Parliamentary muscle flexing towards a more democratic distribution of power, at least amongst the nobility and between Parliament and King.

The portrayal of More's moral dilemma and spiritual crisis, was a brilliant narrative of a frightened man whose fear of death was only tolerable because the alternative would be the fear of an enraged God should he go against conscience. In Bolt's brilliant paraphrase of human tragedy and moral perplexity, More claimed he sought to serve God in the tangle of his mind. Equally brilliant, was Cromwell's deconstruction of More's own self-image as one who never sought another human being's harm. Although not made more prominent than it needed to be, the use of the rack, burning at the stake, and the whole hellish machinery of religious violence against those who believe differently, is a telling reminder in our own day of the cruelties and violations unleashed when an ideology with the status of a religion secures its dominance by a process of elimination. I welcomed the reference to the deceits behind Tyndale's capture, More's gloating piety, and Cromwell's much less religious distaste for religious persecution as justifiable on theological grounds.In this production More is saint and sinner, with the weight on the saint oblivious of his own deep and cruel sins against others.

Which doesn't mean Thomas Cromwell was himself above coercion of conscience and the use of force to suppress dissent; More's hounding to execution is part of the evidence against him. 

Another enjoyable and important strand in the production is the role of women in the making and breaking of power in a cultural context so structurally masculine. While serial Queens were to be taken and discarded if they failed Henry's obsession with succession, Catherine, and Anne Boleyn, are not portrayed as the wilting, timid, or unintelligent consorts in other productions. They are strong; they understand power; they form alliances and plot against dangers; their fears are real, but so is their courage and integrity. They are an important alternative narrative to the insecure King desperate to establish a dynasty, and the power hungry nobility and advisers whose loyalties are ambiguous, and whose own security has to be bought at the expense of others. 

A TV adaptation will always struggle to persuade those who are fans of the original book, but this one comes as close to the real thing as may be possible. The occasional historical anachronism is easily ignored in a production that varies in pace but is overall a leisurely unfolding, increasing in tension and crisis, and which therefore allows the chief characters to be developed and established in all their emotional complexity and political ambiguity in the mind of the viewer.

Thomas Cromwell is I think convincing, chilling, hard to read, but a man with a long memory for grievance and a passively violent way of settling things his way and in his own interests. Not sure what it says about me but so far I like him! His portrait being painted in this week's episode (by Holbein?) placed him in the classic partial side profile of Renaissance portraiture, and showed that same strong, unreadable face, unflinching in gaze, and coming alive only when he speaks in an understated, considered forcefulness of someone who always, but always, thinks before he speaks.

I can understand why Hilary Mantel is very happy with the adaptation. It will bear repeat broadcasting later.

Maya Angelou, Gregory Peck and the Importance of Literature

“When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.”

Maya Angelou was one of the wise people. Wisdom is an endangered species in the information age. Information, knowledge transfer, unlimited cyber- data accessibility. It has never been easier, or harder, to learn stuff. Easier in the sense of information finding and retrieval; harder in the sense of understanding, assimilating, applying and allowing what is learned to become transformative of who we are. 

Angelou is right. Reading of literature allows us to enter stories not our own, and find ourselves there. A novel is not only a story, it is a world into which we enter, with people we encounter, conversations we overhear and circumstances we experience in the imagination, rehearsing the questions, experimenting with answers, and like pilots in a flight simulator, practice the moves and manoeuvres that might some day save our lives.

Can that same process take place watching a film? Reading an average novel takes 8 hours assuming 40 pages an hour or a 300 page story.  Even a long film is over in 150 minutes. Going by my own experience, and with no claims it has to be so for anyone else, I've found some films to be just as transformative as reading a novel. That said, the experiences are not comparable at the points that matter most. Written stories depend on words being chosen and crafted; context being created and made credible, at least within the imaginative world of writer and reader. But I wonder if novels depend rather more on description and imaginative sympathy in the reader, to enable characters to form and grow and become living agents in the story.

Yes there''s the film script, and the good direction that enables characters in a film to emerge into their identity and seek to win the assent or resistance of the viewer, just as in the novel. But the written story has the great advantage of slowed down reading, re-reading, pausing between chapters for seconds, minutes, hours, even days, during which time the story slowly seeps into the mind and emotional biosphere of the reader.On the other hand, in less than two hours a film can so impress itself on the mind and memory, the conscience and emotions, that seeing it the first time is a memorable and world-view altering experience. I think of Schindler's List, The Mission, Patch Adams, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Kite Runner, The Shawshank Redemption, The Reader, as films chosen at random which at the very least demanded, or at least encouraged, some reconsideration of how I viewed the world, myself or other people.

I suppose the adaptation of a book for the screen is a good way of understanding some of the differences and similarities of these two experiences of story - story read, and story viewed. Reading Pride and Prejudice is an education in manners, motives and mischief, conducted by an  author whose scalpel is precise and whose skill exquisite in opening up the inner machinations of social control and personal exchange; watching the BBC adaptation is an altogether different experience, but done faithfully to the original, it can achieve much the same effect. I recently watched Gregory Peck as the lawyer in To Kill A Mocking Bird; would I have needed to read the book to feel the ethical earthquake rumbling through that whole film? 

In a world now incurably visual, even digital in its story-telling, the written word, literature remains an essential humanising and transformative medium. Having just read Lila by Marilynne Robinson, I am persuaded all over again, the written story remains a means of grace. But then, having watched To Kill a Mocking Bird in all its black and white and grey portrayals of human moral behaviour, I'm equally convinced that film has the same capacity to shake our assumptions and shatter our complacencies.  

The Angel Share - The Amber Liquid of Hope....

Had a moving and hilarious night at the cinema watching The Angel's Share. I've heard about it from others who went, and missed it on general release but caught it on a one off showing in Aberdeen. The reviews describe it as a movie about a young ned with a last chance to make something more of his life. No big names in the film, but lots of acting talent and character portrayal - from the caricature to the stereotype.

Everyone will find their own window into this hard world of social realism at the tough end of the socio-economic spectrum. For me there were several stand out moments in a film that simply drew me into the dramas of several lives, as they slowly became the woven strands of the central drama - how to steal the world's rarest cask of whisky without being caught.

When Robbie holds his new baby son, and calls him Luke, something changes in the way he looks at the world. When he then faces one of the victims of his drugs fuelled violence there are  several minutes of relentless emotional hammering as he hears from his victim, and his victim's mother, the cost and cosequence of his mindless violence. Through tears of bewilderment and guilt he hears the mother demand that he look at her. Look becomes an important word no matter how it is spelled.

The amber liquid made in Scotland from girders is not whisky, but Irn Bru. And the Irn Bru bottles become central to the story as it twists and turns to its conclusion. The contrast between the Community Service Group and those bidding over a million for a cask of whisky is one of Loach's recurring themes of social justice, life chances and young people struggling to remain hopeful aginst all the social forces that do them down.

The combination of humour and pathos, of tenderness and violence, of fluent obscenity and linguistic clarity, of friendship and enmity, and of hopelessness and hopefilled longing,  was just this side of confusing cynicism and sentiment. And the ending is both hopeful and ambiguous, which life tends to be, even for the most resilient.

Theological reflection on such a film probably shouldn't be done the morning after. But one thought nags away - the love of a good woman, the birth of a child, and the stated theme from the start, of one more chance at life - this film explores the transforming power of love, whether the love of Leone for her and Robbie's son Luke, or the raging love of the mother confronting her son's attacker at the meeting for restorative justice. And woven throughout, the goodness of the Community Services Supervisor, who offers home, guidance and an expanding world to this Glasgow prodigal son.

The King's Speech and why I'm going to see it again

I have a friend who is a speech therapist. But though helping others speak is her job, she is much more than a speech coach. She sees her work as a vocation that involves befriending, encouraging and accompanying each of those she deals with. Many speech impediments are physiological and are helped by exercises, behaviour modification and various breathing techniques. Some are caused by trauma, psycholohgical barriers and other emotional difficulties that affect the confidence, spontaneity and social freedom to speak. But whatever the causes, the distress and personal cost of being unable to speak clearly or fluently can be all but unbearable.

Last year we were sharing in a meeting and she told the story of a child who was unable at pre-school stage to identify and make the sound of the five vowels, let alone construct and articulate words, phrases, sentences. Five years on the girl now well into primary education was able to say in class, equilateral triangle! There is something profoundly humane about a life's work helping others speak. Speech is a primary form of social exchange, of relational building, of personal expression. And those who enable and empower others to speak contribute a precious gift to people like that child, and equally provide one of the most valuable services within our education and health services.

Last night we went to see The King's Speech. Plenty of reviews are available about how good this film is. Most of them are not overstating the achievement of Colin Firth in his portrayal of a proud, self-conscious but decent man who is the son of a King, and who stammers.The speech therapist, Lionel Logue, played by Geoffrey Rush is equally convincing. relying on the experience of helping traumatised soldiers returning home and rendered incapable of speech by what they experienced. There are powerful protective walls in our consciousness that hold back what cannot be spoken. Rush brilliantly portrays a compassionate and good man.

I will go and see it again while it's still in the cinema. As a study in friendship across the chasm of social differences; as an essay on the human voice as an instrument of personal identity and social relations; as a demonstration, through close-up camera, of the human face as the window to that place from which our deepest emotions sustain or wound us; and as a portrayal of that longing to be free of what constrains and limits us that is common to every one of us honest enough to face our imperfections and struggles - as all of these and more, I think the film is a masterpiece. There were moments when it wasn't clear whether my tears were of laughter or sadness, and the truth is there are scenes that are comi-tragic and which encapsulate how hilarity and burden intermingle in the life we all have to live.

Gabriel's Oboe - and why only the occasional composition should be called "glorious"

I saw The Mission the year it was released, and still remember my first hearing of the soundtrack, and the glorious Gabriel's Oboe. I was once told by someone who knows a bit about writing that the word "glorious" is too overused, and now a cheapened word. Well, yes it can be. And a lazy word, a flattering exaggeration, a way of investing importance in something relatively mediocre by invoking a vaguely heavenly glow. But Gabriel's Oboe on its first hearing was glorious, and hundreds of subsequent hearings have only confirmed that for The Mission, Morricone composed a musical score that is heartbreakingly congruent with the tragic story of a priest for whom glory only came through martyrdom.

The Mission remains a potent and subversive statement of the perilous connections between church and state, faith and empire, prayer and politics - because mission is itself an ambiguous word. If the Church has a mission, so has the state. The word mission is used of an army incursion, a diplomatic service, a task delegated by a higher authority. And in the film, there is a collision of missions, an encounter between the Gospel and the Empire, a fatal meeting between the priest carrying the gold sunburst Ostensorium surmounted by a cross out of the burning mission church, and the lead musket balls that tear the life from his body. And all of this haunted by the aching melody of Gabriel's Oboe, and a film score redolent with the gift of genius.

The popularity of Gabriel's Oboe made it inevitable someone would want to put words to it. Written by Chiara Ferrau, and first performed by Sarah Brightman, the lyrics (English translation below) convey the aching longing of humanity for a different and better world, a humanity more humane and a world more just, and a wistful yearning for cities warmed by the winds of peace. And the singer confesses this is all in the imagination - but the music is not wistful and resigned - what makes Gabriel's Oboe such an emotionally subversive experience is a melody that weaves together our deepest longings and highest aspirations as human beings, and composes them into imagined possibilities and resilient hopefulness. I suppose that's what is meant by saying the piece is inspired....and glorious.

All the above reflection is because I've just ordered the double CD (will wait for Christmas for the DVD) of Morricone's recent Vienna Concert.  I'm familiar with a number of other Morricone scores. There's an apparent incongruence between some of his music and the films that engendered them. The spaghetti westerns of Clint Eastwood are bleak, violent, enjoyably cynical, and minimally moral, other than the blunt and dubious morality of vengeance in the shape of a poncho wearing gunfighter who gives the really bad people their come-uppance. Yet in for example, "The Good the Bad and the Ugly", some of the soundtrack is haunting, even tender, while other tracks even 40 years on have a menacing edge that bears comparison with the best of contemporary cinema music. The versatility and imagination of Morricone has produced for cinema goers unforgettable music - and for music lovers some of the finest compositions of the last 50 years.  The music of Gabriel's Oboe, and the lyrics translated below, are still for me the pinnacle of cinematic musical interpretation.

In my imagination I see a just world,
Everyone lives in peace and in honesty there.
I dream of souls that are always free,
Like the clouds that fly,
Full of humanity in the depths of the soul.

In my imagination I see a bright world,
Even the night is less dark there.
I dream of souls that are always free,
Like clouds that fly.

In my imagination there exists a warm wind,
That breathes on the cities, like a friend.
I dream of souls that are always free,
Like clouds that fly,
Full of humanity in the depths of the soul.

Hurry up with my CDs!!

Up. Food for thought and freedom to fantasise.

Sheila and I went to see "Up", the new Pixar animated film. It's a feast for the imagination, visually beautiful, woven through with wit and wisdom, and one of the best arguments around for combining in one film food for thought and freedom to fantasise. No need to tell the story. If you don't go see it you wouldn't get it - if you do go and see it you won't forget it. An entire pastoral theology module could be based around some of its themes of life, death, love, friendship, ageing, care of creation, adventure, courage, rejection and welcome, carelessness and responsibility, selfishness and generosity, and all of it wrapped up for each of us in our personal adventure book, with its page, "Stuff I Want to Do." Do yourself a favour - go see it.

Creation, Darwin and the origin of "The Origin of Species"

Last night went to see "Creation", the new movie about the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. It's more a biographical study of Darwin's family life, particularly the relationship with his wife and children following the unexpected death of his daughter. Decided I don't want to write a review that tries to be cleverly critical of the film 's technical aspects - not my thing anayway; or that attempts to explain the psychology of guilt which when it becomes pathological, is a deeply human and inwardly destructive self-rejection that has roots in life circumstance, our closest relationships and our religious commitments or loss thereof; or that points out the historical liberties taken in order to present such a powerful psychological study of a decade in one man's life; or that defends some particular theory of creation as an act of apologetics dutifully undertaken to correct the theological unsubtleties of some less than convincing intellectual positions.

No. No review.

Just the straightforward admission that I enjoyed it, and that in my view this is a good film. It humanises rather than demonises Darwin; it does not caricature the understandbaly defensive postures of Victorian religion confronted by radical shifts in intellectual, cultural and scientific life; it places the writing of a painstakingly written natural history treatise in its historical, emotional and domestic context; and it does all this with the well practised competence of a BBC costume drama, which in reality it is. No review than - other than to say again, I thoroughly enjoyed it, in the way you do when you take time to try to understand what is so about another person's life, and that the struggle to survive isn't only a theory of life's origins - emotionally, intellectually, spiritually and physically it's the reality and experience we all go through, every day of life.

Amazing Grace

Regret, remorse, repentance - hard to find the right word to describe the emotional and mental legacy of John Newton's years of slave trading. It's too easy to take pot shots at him and mock the man who wrote Amazing Grace because he didn't immediately see the reality of the evil under his nose and give up that involvement. But in this film Albert Finney captures with brilliant perceptivenes, the rough sentimentality, the emotional complexity, the sense even after decades that his part in the horrors of trans-Atlantic slavery compounded his unworthiness and self-loathing- so for me Newton and his tears of too late guilt was a crucial questioning presence in the film. Newton's portrayal adds a dimension of pathos to the reality of structural sin, is a counterpoint to the power of institutionalised inhumanity whose default mechanism is greed, and whose interest is to frustrate every attempt at rehumanising the way our world is, especially if the argument implies economic loss. The interests of the Crown in the revenue from the colonies meant that the link was easily made between the movement for abolition, and disloyalty, even sedition, aggravated by the war with France. Some of this complexity was worked into the film and prevents it from being a pious and politically naive hagiography.

So, the film Amazing Grace, (complete with pipe and wind band with drums at the end! - a blatant anachronism I greatly enjoyed without embarrassment!!) - was well acted, with a script that almost entirely, but not quite, avoids the cringeable, and includes just enough of the spiritual burden of Wilberforce the serious evangelical, to make explicit the connection between political activism and inner piety. The relational network between Wilberforce and Newton, and Pitt, and Foxe, and Clarkson and Stephen, was a convincing mixture of political expediency, moral concern and radical risk.

The almost entire white cast made me uncomfortable - yet I wonder how else to convey the sheer weight of the political argument that had to be won, and to portray the pervasive ignorance of the brutal realities linked indissolubly to national self-interest. The truth is, the presence of African people in the circles in which Wilberforce moved would be rare - and the moment in the film when he has the chance to win the freedom of a slave in a game of cards was a finely observed piece of moral theatre - wasted for me by him returning to the gambling den to sing Amazing Grace! I could understand the bewildered outrage of those whose tavern singing was silenced by a Russell Watson soundalike!

The love interest seemed to convey the cliche that behind every great man there is a stunning redhead! The moment in the film when she convinces Wilberforce to take up the fight again, and to marry her, seems to make that a historical hinge point - well, since it is a film for general release that will do a lot of good by bringing Wilberforce back to our attention, as Barry Norman might ask, 'And why not?'

I enjoyed this film. There is enough historical accuracy and detail to root it in the realities it tries to engage. At times it was very moving, and the scale of the issue, morally, spiritually and politically, is communicated with considerable and convincing care. Evangelicals were portrayed with just that amount of seriousness and involvement that seems justified by the facts - by the way the cameo portrayal of Hannah More was sharply observed - a compassionate snob with a sense of humour and an ethical  edge to her piety.

Go see before it moves away from the big screen.