HOLLYWOOD SOMETIMES GETS IT RIGHT

• First, consider the movie, Juno.  After taking three pregnancy tests, a 16-year old Minnesota high school student named Juno MacGuff discovers she is nine weeks pregnant.  The father is her friend, Paulie Bleeker.  Although she initially opts for an abortion, she changes her mind and makes plans for the child’s adoption.  She finds a couple who can provide a suitable home for her child.  During the course of the movie, this couple’s marriage falls apart.  After an emotionally wrenching time, Juno agrees to go ahead with giving her child to Vanessa, the now single adoptive mother.  The movie is coarse, rude, at times offensive, but the pro-life theme is incontrovertible.  You see Juno seeing her baby on an ultrasound projection.  You see Juno affirming the value of her baby and the need for loving parents.  Amazingly, you also see accurate presentations of the dysfunction of so many families and homes—and the tragic consequences of such dysfunction.  Hollywood normally puts out pro-abortion films, but Juno could not be more pro-life.  In that sense, it is refreshing and hopeful.  See Wikipedia on Juno.  

• Second is the movie The Kite Runner, a movie version of a best-selling novel by the Afghan, Khaled Hosseini.  The movie depicts ordinary family life in a Muslim world and follows the childhood friendship of Amir, a boy from a well-to-do Kabul family, and his faithful servant Hassan.  Amir has no mother and struggles to please his father, who is domineering and controlling.  Tragically, Amir neglects to save Hassan from being raped by a bully.  It is a momentous act of cowardice.  This cowardice haunts Amir, who flees with his father to the US after the Soviet invasion in the late 1970s.  As an adult, Amir returns to Afghanistan to find Hassan’s son.  The theme of redemption permeates the film.  Priya Abraham writes:  “We pity Amir, longing for his father’s approval.  We ache for Hassan, whose plain goodness, loyalty, and kindness contrast with this young master’s growing pettiness.  Viewers will also delight in the story’s simple homage to family values. . .”  Among other things, the film reminds us that there are real people and real families in the troubled country of Afghanistan.  See World (15 December 2007), p. 12.

• Finally, consider the award winning move, Atonement.  Mark Earley of BreakPoint writes that it “touches one of our deepest spiritual needs.”  The story revolves around a little girl named Briony Tallis, who tells a lie.  She claims she saw a man who molested her cousin one night, when it was actually too dark for her to be certain of what she saw.  Her lie sends an innocent man to prison and lets the real criminal go free.  Her guilt haunts her for the rest of her life.  In so many ways, she attempts to atone (hence the film’s title) for her sins.  She is never able to earn forgiveness from the people that she wronged.  Earley writes that “She has, as the novel [on which the film is based] suggests, played God with people’s lives, but she has neither God’s power of omniscience nor His power to bring good out of evil. . . [T]he film also makes us face our own desperate need for atonement and forgiveness.  It just goes to show, yet again, that the truth of the human condition and the law of God are written on our hearts, no matter what we tell ourselves we believe.”  The movie is an immense tragedy, emotionally wrenching and powerful.  There is little hope and no atonement or forgiveness possible for Briony.  But with God there is and because of the finished work of Jesus Christ, full atonement has been made and total forgiveness is available.  What is immensely ironic is that the author of the novel on which the film is based—Ian McEwan—is an atheist.  Ultimately, his worldview offers no hope, only despair.  He will never admit this, but, in his book, McEwan demonstrates the horror of the human condition without God.  If there is no God, there is no final atonement and no ultimate forgiveness.  Life is barren and hopeless no matter what we might discover or no matter how much comfort we might find in the arts, in music or in nature.  None of these opportunities, so important to McEwan, can ever provide the atonement and the forgiveness that his character Briony Tallis seeks, but never finds.  But, praise be to God, that atonement and forgiveness are available—in Jesus.  See Earley’s review in BreakPoint (21 February 2008).

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