Oscars for the Academy

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Mark Greene finds Hollywood calling us to make a stand.

Last week, a friend of mine resigned from their job. They’d been there over four years.

They didn’t have another job to go to, they don’t have a lot of money in the bank and they aren’t prone to self-destructive, melodramatic gestures. However, the organisation was putting them in a position where they couldn’t do the work in a way that appropriately protected the people they were there to serve. Warnings had been given about falling standards. The warnings had been ignored. So, regretfully, painfully, the resignation letter was written – short, gracious, clear, legally careful.

Sometimes a man gotta do what a man gotta do. Sometimes a woman gotta do what a woman gotta do. Integrity costs. Sometimes for a disciple there is no other way, much as we would prefer it. Jesus prays three times in the Garden of Gethsemane that there might be some other cup to drink than the cup of the cross. There is a time to make a stand.

All of which may seem, at first glance, a long, long way from the films celebrated in this year’s Oscar nominations. Still, even a cursory glance at the nominations and winners in most categories reveals a taste for the serious and a preference for films of artistic ambition.

Atonement was a long, long way from a traditional rom-com and the twist in its tale of unconsummated love and self-centred cowardly lies only served to reinforce the truth that not all love ends in happiness, that not all our dreams will be fulfilled, that our failures must be confronted and that the consequences of our actions may be terrible beyond repair.

As for Let there be blood, the title gives you a hint that this will be no skip through the daisies. However, despite its promise of gore, it is more about a visceral exploration of where individualism leads than a Tarantinesque carnival of carnage. What happens when our goals, whether for material wealth or religious ‘success’, are apparently unachievable without personal compromise? Will integrity triumph? It is a story played out in an epic manner that demands, despite its setting in the early 20th century, to be applied to all our modern and post-modern times. The Guardian described is as “so potent, so strange that it almost seems to have been delivered from another planet.” No lack of artistic ambition there then.

This year’s best film, the Coen Brothers No Country for Old Men may not have come from another planet but it has all the potent menace and gravitas of a Pinter play and the kind of calm-eyed determination to make us face the reality of evil that is reminiscent of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Indeed, whilst the film has more than its fair share of violence ( I’m the kind of person who can’t even watch ER without averting my gaze) there is no point at which that violence feels gratuitous. On the contrary, it almost always comes as a saddening shock, not because the violence always catches us by surprise, but it because its essential unrightness, its injustice, its unnecessariness but curious inevitability makes it profoundly disturbing. Indeed, the couple behind us in the cinema were so befuddled by the apparent lack of resolution or a clear message in the film’s ending, that they said, “Do they expect us to come aback and see it again to work out what it was about?” In fact, you could feel the confusion in the cinema. Something important had been said, but what exactly? As such No country takes a risk and trusts its audience to go away and think. Like Jesus’ parables, and indeed much great art, it is meant to trigger a process of thought, not send us away with a cocktail party soundbite that tantalises the taste buds for a moment but nourishes hardly at all.

No Country, like most of the Coens’ films, is set in small town America. The plot follows the story of a Vietnam veteran who stumbles on the aftermath of a drugs-related shoot-out in the scrublands. There are no survivors but there is a briefcase with two million dollars in it which he promptly takes back to the trailer where he lives with his wife. This simple but understandable act of greed, like Snow White grasping for the apple, triggers an appalling concatenation of events.

Naturally, someone wants their money back. And that someone despatches a hitman, played by the Oscar-winning Xavier Bardem, to retrieve it. This man’s evil avoids all the clichés of cinema – he is not psychotic, he takes no particular pleasure in the killing, he does not froth at the mouth, he is not unthinking or stupid or wantonly violent. He is big, yes, but not in a taut, bodybuilder way. Bardem isn’t Rambo or Schwarznegger or Cruise. He looks like a construction worker – strong, ordinary, rumpled. Still, whenever he appears he brings his own glowering Antarctic microclimate with him.
 
Indeed, there is a terrible, cold logic to his every action. He will do whatever it takes to get the 2 million dollars back, to honour the contract he has agreed and ensure that there will be no one around who can identify him. His victims, therefore, are as likely to be an innocent shopkeeper or an old farmer who stops to help fix his car as any associates of the man who has taken the money.

Still, the film’s central theme is neither greed, nor the depth to which unhistrionic evil can sink but rather whether the evil of our times can be opposed, whether we have the courage, the determination to fight it. This is explored through Tommy Lee-Jones poignant, subtle portrait of the old sheriff who has to investigate the killings on the scrublands and the strange events that follow. He feels himself to be ‘outmatched’ by what he perceives to be this new level of evil and wonders what the old-time sheriffs who used to patrol these lands would have done. They were men, he muses, some of whom didn’t even need to carry a gun to assert their authority.

Has it got worse or has he merely forgotten what it was like? And how do you come to terms with the damage done to yourself, or to others who tried to make a stand against it? Subtly the film also questions, even if the sheriff doesn’t, whether it was the American experience in Vietnam that has somehow allowed this virulent strain of evil into the country’s bloodstream.

Yes, No Country makes us ask whether indeed our world is getting worse or more violent. Doesn’t it seem that the victims and the perpetrators of violence against pensioners or fathers retrieving a football are getting younger, that our city centres have been rendered no-go areas on Friday and Saturday nights by packs of underage feral teenage drinkers and their twenty something role models spewing out of the clubs and pubs into random fights, random destruction and inebriated physical collapse? But this is not the kind of evil that disturbs the sheriff. What has shaken him is a confrontation, not with a substance-driven or emotionally driven evil, but with a calculated, merciless evil, that knows no convention, has no rationale beyond self-protection and the achievement of its goal – Terminator made flesh.

And so the sheriff tries to staunch the flow of blood but he fails and he retires slightly earlier than he absolutely had to. This is no job for old men. Against such evil, he cannot stand. Yet he knows it is a kind of failure, that maybe he should have ridden on through the blizzard, come what may. However, this is not just no job for old men it is that his nation has become no country for old men, not only no place for an old man to have to fight such a fight but no place for old men to live out their days. In this the Coens evoke an emotion that rubs against the grain of all our hopes – the outrage, not only of having to live a life of struggle and pain, but the outrage of not being able to live safely and at ease in the evening of our lives.

Is this us, we wonder? Oh, yes, with every reason not to carry on the bruising fight for justice and truth and mercy in our workplaces and schools and streets, with every reason to suppose that we should withdraw into our own somewhat safer communities, retire from the battle, to leave it to the next generation and hope that somehow it might be OK for us. Will our aging baby boomer generation be like Hezekiah, accepting God’s healing from his own deadly disease and the promise of peace in his own time, but not crying out against the doom that awaits the next generation, and the shadow that surely casts over whatever happiness we now know?

Interestingly, No country was not the only recent film to explore the question of making a stand. So did the popular Juno in its portrait of a teenager choosing to have her baby and give it up for adoption. Similarly, 3:10 to Yuma is a post Civil War Western that tells the story of a band of men hired to escort a winsome but utterly ruthless outlaw to the train that will take him to trial and justice: the 3:10 to Yuma. But the outlaw has friends. In the end, only one man has the courage for the job, to go to almost certain death, to stand up for what he believes, and pass on to his son a legacy of courage and integrity to emulate.

In similar vein, the Oscar-nominated Michael Clayton offers us George Clooney as a corporate legal fixer who after a long career in compromise finds a way to act courageously, even though it will leave him with nothing. Soberingly, there is no triumphalism in this, no magic wand is waved. In the final scene, Clooney, having consigned the well-dressed white collar criminals to the police, gets into a cab, gives the driver $50 and tells him to drive til the money runs out. He has no particular destination, no job awaits him, no one to celebrate with but he has broken his dependence on money… he can blow it on a drive to nowhere.

Integrity costs. Hollywood has been telling us that. The cross tells us that too. But the Gospel of the Crucified one is also the Gospel of the resurrected one. We are called to make a stand, but not in our own strength. Our world has seen much of people making stands in their own fanatical strength and much of it has been appalling. We must show a different way. We are called, like Caleb, to take the hills that God has calls us to take, even if we may need a younger person, as Caleb did and some of us certainly do, to lead the fight. Sometimes we may need to resign, but that does not mean that we should become resigned to the way things are, for the way things are is rarely the way things might be, still less the way the King wants them to be.

May you, whatever your age, be able to sing with the psalmist that the righteous do flourish like a palm tree and bear fruit in old age, staying ‘fresh and green’ and proclaiming that “The Lord is upright, he is my Rock, and there is no wickedness in him.” (cf Psalm 92:12-15)

Mark Greene