Click. Watch. Talk.
Mark Greene offers some questions to accompany Adam Sandler’s new comedy
“These days we spend a lot of time thinking about food, about what we put in our stomachs, but how much time do we spend thinking about what we put in our heads?”
Thus spake Andrew Graystone, TV producer, who, if not yet the Jamie Oliver of broadcasting, is certainly passionately concerned about what he puts in our heads. Indeed, it is a curious thing that we pray before we slide food into our eager mouths but perhaps not before we slip that lozenge of digital data between the hungry lips of the DVD machine. Similarly, we probably pray before reading the Bible but are less likely to do so before reading a novel or watching an episode of The Simpsons: “Lord, teach me through this programme. Use this to make my heart, my soul, my mind more loving and discerning, and my hands more eager to do your will. And less likely to wring my son’s neck like Homer does.”
And what happens afterwards?
Do we intentionally stop to discuss and process what we’ve just taken in? As one script writer put it, “I want to make people feel so much that they start to think.”
This all came to mind because we recently sat down as a family to watch Click. And Click made me and my family both ‘feel and think.’
And I am now going to do what film reviewers are not meant to do – tell you too much about the plot. I’m doing it so that I can illustrate the kind of discussions this film might generate and so I can offer you both some general questions you might use to think about any film, as well as some specific questions you might find helpful if you choose to watch this one.
Click is a rambunctious, middle of the road, and surprisingly poignant, powerful Hollywood comedy whose arrival in your DVD store fortuitoiusly coincided with the release of the UNICEF report that concluded that Britain is the worst country of the 21 ‘developed’ nations to be a child. This is, by the way, not because our kids are materially poorer than kids in Greece, Portugal, Spain or 13 other developed nations but because their relationships with friends and family are worse, the overall education we offer woeful, and their sexual promiscuity, consumption of alcohol and drugs the highest. Not surprisingly, they are also the least happy.
Click, you may be relieved to hear, does not take on all these issues but it does explore one of the core problems that almost every family in Britain struggles with – the knotty conundrum of how to put work and relationships in the right place and keep them there under the inexorable pressures of ambition, competition, fear of redundancy, long commutes, material competitiveness, emotional insecurity, personal greed and the legitimate desire to provide well for one’s family. Obviously, it’s not the first film to address the problem – nor even the only one on the shelf right now. The Devil Wears Prada is a more elegant, more critically acclaimed exploration but it had nowhere near the emotional impact on me or my family.
Click is a 12. Cautions include: some ripe, if not obscene, language and a caricature imitation of sex that involves the cartoonesque shadow of a man thrusting his pelvis at comically absurd speed. Watcher beware. That said, this is the everyday tale of Michael Newman, a talented young architect with a passion for Twinkies, a lovely, loving wife, two adorable children under seven and a golden Labrador who is rather too affectionate towards a giant cuddly toy duck. They’re not wealthy by American standards but their neighbours are and come complete with an obnoxious son who loves nothing more than to vaunt his superior toys and pour scorn on the general shabbiness of all that the Newmans own. And they feel the pain. What follows is a Faustian tale, told with humour that ranges from slapstick to adolescent gross-out to one-liners fit for Friends.
The plot is simple enough. One day, Dad, fed up with being unable to remember which remote is which and tired of opening the garage doors when he wants to turn on the tele, goes looking for a universal remote control. He comes back with a remote that, much to his surprise, does exactly what it says on the box – controls his whole universe. When irritating people irritate him he can press the mute button. When he’s in an argument with his wife he can press the fast-forward button so he only ‘wakes up’ when it’s over.
This remote, however is, like Amazon. It remembers your choices, and, unlike Amazon, begins to automatically programme your life in line with previous decisions you’ve made.
One of the decisions that Dad makes is not to take his kids camping on the July 4th weekend so that he can work on a special project for his boss that ‘needs’ to be done by the end of the weekend. If they win the business he’ll be made a partner. He works the weekend, they win the business, he assumes he’s made partner and celebrates by buying gorgeous bikes for his kids. But the boss whips the carrot from his mouth and dangles it just a little further ahead. The bikes have to go back. And it is the pain he feels as he overhears his kids’ disappointment that triggers his decision to work really hard til he makes partner. He instructs the remote accordingly. And it does and also learns that whenever it’s a question of a choice between work and home, work wins.
From then on, the universal remote fast-forwards his life, knowing that he doesn’t want to know what’s going on between the beginning of an ambition and its accomplishment. He is ‘there’ in the room with his kids or at his work but never really ‘there’, just like many an exhausted parent at the end of a stressful day. From time to time, he wakes to discover that he’s obese, or that his daughter’s skirts are too short, or that he’s divorced, that his son is getting married, or that his dog Sunday or his father have died. However, by the time he works out what’s happening it’s too late. The remote can’t be returned, destroyed or re-programmed. His life zips by. He makes a lot of money but misses out on everything that was really precious to him.
In the final scenes, struck down by a heart attack in the middle of his son’s wedding party, his family visit him in hospital. His son tells him that he is going to postpone his honeymoon because of an emergency at work. And then they leave. Dad struggles out of bed, unplugging himself from the machinery that is keeping him alive and stumbles out into the rain in pursuit of his son, even though he knows it will kill him. He collapses on the road but before he dies he manages to deliver the message that will prevent his son ruining his life in the way he has: family first. In the end, he lays down his life for his family because he loves them – as indeed he always did.
Herein is another component of the film’s power. Newman is not an indifferent pig but, like the great figures of Shakespearian tragedy, a man with a fatal character flaw. Othello loves Ophelia but still ends up killing her. So Michael really loves his wife. As Paul puts it in Romans 7: “For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do – this I keep on doing.”
Finally, and very much to the audience’s surprise, Michael then wakes up from what was a dream. However, now that he’s seen how his life might end, he is able to see what they already have through different eyes, and actually enjoy it. Indeed, on sighting his less than glamorous but serviceable car, he exclaims:
“Yes, yes, yes, my crappy car, you mediocre piece of s---, I love you.”
Newman eventually becomes ‘new man.’
Behind this the film helpfully explores how an obsession with the new or with comfort can not only steal the joy of what we have – whether it’s our sex life or our toys – and actually distance us from ‘real’ experience. The neighbours’ son acquires an electronic dog – a robodog that he announces is “so much better than a real one”. Similarly, Michael remembers his youth and his father’s assertion that their tent was far better for a camping holiday than a luxury Winnebago with a TV – “How can you get close to nature in a tin can like that?” At the time, the young Michael only noticed how he felt humiliated as his friends refused his invitation to eat at their tent in preference for an offer of watching TV in someone else’s Winnebago. In reality, the superior technology actually diminishes the quality of everyone’s relationships – the kids aren’t outside eating and talking together but inside glued to the box. More can truly be less. Much, much less.
Click made us all laugh and, unlike Mary Poppins, City Slickers, Hook, The Firm, Parenthood, Jerry McGuire or The Devil wears Prada, made a number of us watery-eyed and indeed generated some interesting conversations. If you watch it, I hope it might do the same for you.
So here are some questions you might use, first in thinking about films in general:
* What is the film trying to say?
* What can we affirm – from a biblical perspective?
* What should we critique – from a biblical perspective?
* What might we learn – about ourselves, about God, about our society?
* What might we do differently?
* What might we pray?
Some questions about Click, some of which might take quite a lot of courage to ask:
How good do you think I am, you are, we are at choosing well between work and family priorities?
What habits do we have that get in the way of our relating well? How can we help each other break those habits?
What behaviours are we happy for our children to mimic?
Is the way I/you are working affecting our health?
What would happen if we carried on living our lives in the way we do now? What would we regret?
For what are we working?
How ‘there’ am I, are you, are we when we are together?
Has Sabbath been killed off – like the dog in the film – without our noticing?
How difficult is it for you not to have things that other kids have?
What are the things you’d really like to have? What difference would they make to your life?
Do you, did you feel deprived as a child compared with other kids?
What things would you really like to do?
Do you think we use the time we have together well?
Have we learned the secret of being content and grateful in what we have?
What Biblical stories or scriptures come to mind? The parable of the barns (Luke 12)? the fourth commandment, or Jephthah who literally sacrifices his daughter on the altar of his own ambition (Judges 11 ).
This article was first published in Christianity magazine and is reproduced by kind permission.
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