Beliefnet’s “How Spiritual is Your Family” quiz made me think of these movie families, among the very few on screen who are unabashedly spiritual.
1. The Blind Side Based on a true story, this movie makes it clear that a wealthy white family’s decision to adopt a homeless black teenager was not an impulse but was strongly grounded in a deep religious conviction.
2. The Friendly Persuasion is a rare movie that grapples with a loving family’s challenges in applying religious principles to difficult and complicated circumstances but with a supportive community. It is an even rarer movie that shows a character praying for guidance.
3. The Sound of Music a postulate brings not just music and warmth to a motherless family, but also the strength of her faith.
4. Fiddler on the Roof We see the family’s connection to their Jewish traditions and faith and to each other in the way they work to apply God’s laws and in their Sabbath rituals.
5. Not Easily Broken A young couple finds that it takes three to make their marriage work — the husband, the wife, and God.
Socalled: A Documentary about a Klezmer/Hip-Hop/Cowboy/Video-Artist
Posted on March 19, 2010 at 3:42 pm
Socalled is a documentary with 18 short films about klezmer hip-hop music and video Montreal-based artist Josh “Socalled” Dolgin, featuring Katie Moore, Fred Wesley, C-Rayz Walz, David Krakauer, Matt Haimovitz, Arkady Gendler, Benjamin Steiger Levine, D-Shade, Gonzales and lounge legend Irving Fields. For a limited time, the entire Socalled movie is available for viewing for 99 cents on YouTube.
Larry Gopnik (theater actor Michael Stuhlbarg) is a physics professor in 1967 Minneapolis. He covers a blackboard the size of a movie screen with equations, confidently lecturing his students about the uncertainty principle but outside the classroom unable to cope with the uncertainty all around him. He can explain that Schrodinger’s (hypothetical) Cat inside a box may be both dead and alive, but he has a much harder time understanding his wife (who is leaving him), a student who may be attempting to bribe him for a better grade, the tenure committee that will decide his professional fate, all of which has him feeling as though he is in a box and both dead and alive, too. Larry’s son does not seem to care about anything but being able to watch the western sitcom “F Troop.” His daughter seems to spend all of her time washing her hair. His brother (Richard Kind) seems to be either a genius or completely mad, but in either case he does not seem capable of living on his own. Larry wants to be a serious man, and he wants some answers.
So, like a character in a fable or a fairy tale, he brings his questions to three rabbis, a young one who wants him to see everything as an expression of God’s will, an experienced one who tells him a mesmerizing but pointless story about a non-Jew’s teeth and tells him to do good works, and one who is very old and remote and is too busy thinking to talk to him. Internally, he becomes more stressed but his reactions are passive and conciliatory. The audience feels a sense of helplessness and dread as it seems we are more aware of the disasters heading for Larry than he is. A record company calls to tell him he needs to pay for the records he ordered. He says he has not ordered anything and they tell him that under the terms of their agreement not doing anything means ordering. And Larry is as poorly equipped to resolve that problem as he is to stop his wife from leaving him for a neighbor who somehow has the confidence, admiration, and deference he wishes for. Throughout the movie, there are many close-ups of ears, but no one seems to be listening to what is going on in front of them. He goes up on the roof to adjust the antennae, but still has trouble receiving the signal.
Under pressure, he begins to make some compromises that are contrary to his values, and that increases his stress and sense of losing control. As he searches for some sense of meaning or connection or even (he is a scientist after all) rationality, he does not realize that the answer is what he tells his students: that everything is uncertain but you are still responsible for it on the midterm.
Much has been made of the fact that for the first time Joel and Ethan Coen have made a film with autobiographical elements. Like Larry’s children, the Coen brothers grew up in a Jewish suburb of Minneapolis in the 1960’s, and like Larry, their father was a professor. But you get the feeling that they have once again appropriated and embraced and tweaked a genre just for the fun of it, and that it has no more meaning to them than any of the others. As Larry says, the stories are just illustrative; the math is how it really works.
Once again, as with Wes Anderson, meticulous and imaginative production design and a level of opacity far beyond most mainstream releases is often confused with profundity. Perhaps this is an ink blot for us to project our own questions on. Or perhaps it is their version of what Larry tells his students, and our midterm is coming up.
Take a look at Phil Hall’s great list of the most important religious films of all time from website Film Snobbery. My favorite film about the life of Jesus, “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” is number 2 on the list. I was pleased to see some provocative and even irreverent titles including “The Life of Brian” and “Dogma.” The list includes well-known crowd-pleasers like “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Chariots of Fire,” and “Ben-Hur” along with some almost-unknowns like “Plan 10 from Outer Space” (“Trent Harris’ low-budget underground comedy reimagines Mormon history with a singing Karen Black as the extra-terrestrial wife of Brigham Young”) and “Man in the Fifth Dimension” (“Billy Graham’s film essay on the spiritual dimensions of the human condition had its premiere at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. It is also noteworthy as the only non-theatrical film shot in the widescreen Todd-AO process”). It has a number of films that are truly inspiring. It includes some movies that frankly explore the mistakes, arrogance, and corruption that have been committed in the name of religion. It has documentaries, fact-based feature films and fiction, movies from the early silent era to a 2007 documentary. It includes films about Christianity, Judaism, Catholicism, Islam, and Buddhism, films about saints, sinners, and a pair of friends who happen to be a tomato and a cucumber. And it has one of the funniest movies I know, “The Mad Adventures of ‘Rabbi’ Jacob.”
Because this is the 20th anniversary of the Washington DC Jewish Film Festival, all of the previous festival directors were given the chance to pick their favorites from past years to put on this year’s schedule. That is how I got to see “From Swastika to Jim Crow” today.
Hitler came to power in January of 1933. In April of that year, Jewish professors started being dismissed from universities and within a month, most of them were gone. About 1200 came to the United States. And of that group, about 50 ended up at one of the traditionally black colleges. Finding themselves in areas segregated by law and culture, these “refugee scholars” were in “double exile.” They had lost their home, their country, their friends, their families, their jobs, and their language. And they were in a place where they were seen as triply suspicious outsiders — Jews, immigrants, intellectuals.
Interviews with the professors, their families, and their students and archival footage bring us into the world of these immigrants, who found they had more in common with their black students and colleagues than with the white members of the community. It is especially poignant when one explains that the black students were better able than whites to comprehend the information that came out about the Holocaust atrocities because “the notion of man’s inhumanity was not foreign” to them. The white community did not accept the refugee scholars but that does not mean they did not tell them how to live. One was threatened for entertaining students in his home. A newspaper headline notes: “White Professor Fined $25 for Eating with a Negro.”
One-time students, now distinguished scholars themselves, talk movingly about these professors, whose struggle, survival, and commitment to excellence and knowledge was itself an education.
An exhibit inspired by the movie is now at the New York Museum of Jewish Heritage and will go on tour.
