Movie Review

Columbia Pictures, starring: Albert Finney, Hope Lange, Danny DeVito, Ewan McGregor, William Crudup, Helen Bonham-Carter, 125 minutes, 2003.

This movie with an all star cast presents a fantastic tale with several levels of interpretation. On one level it is about the power of Story and fairytale; a metaphor of the ways we make sense of our experience in a post post-modernist world. That's a mouthful but for me as a Christian it is also a story about how we interpret the Bible.

Billy Bloom (Crudup) is a young married man with a child expected. He has been estranged from his father Ed (Finney) for a number of years but has returned home after a call from his mother (Lange) announcing that his father is near death. His anger with his father stems from Ed 's penchant for telling huge involved stories about himself that Billy fears bear no resemblance to reality and in fact are misleading lies. He resents that he knows only the stories and not his 'real' father. He tries several times to have a conversation about 'the truth' but each time is put off by yet another very familiar story or a newly invented one. He is outraged when his search for factual truth yields little solid data. He even enlists his wife's help in trying to find out the 'true' story, to little avail. He cannot trust his father and in that despairing position cannot find the boundaries of his own identity. His is a Search for the Historical Father, The Historical Ed; The Life of a Georgia Salesman.

The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur coined the phrase "Second Naiveté" to describe the position Christians come to when we have moved from a naïve, literalist interpretation through skepticism, doubt and dismissal regarding the Bible to a new naïveté and wonder about Biblical truth. In that second naïveté we are able to enter Biblical stories and teaching with a capacity to incorporate their truth without a disabling regard for their factualness or literalness. Literal interpretation fossilizes scripture. Scientific skepticism dismembers scripture. Yet, they are stages we must pass through in order to arrive at a mature and workable way of interpreting Biblical truth for ourselves, our families and our communities.

Perhaps an apt parallel is the way we come to view Santa Claus through our lives. As young children he is literally the one who arrives by sleigh, drops down the chimney and leaves presents, until some radically postmodern skeptical 8 year old shatters us with the news that "He's just your Dad"! In our second naïveté we become Santa Claus ourselves and enter into the myth in a new way.

Ed, in an attempt to get the 'real' story goes through a pile of his father's old documents and discovers something fantastic and untold by his larger-than-life, blowhard, story telling father. It opens up to him the possibility of seeing his father in a new light. But first, he confronts him on his deathbed about these new found facts only to be invited into telling the final story of Ed's life. Billy, the skeptic and hard nosed fact seeker is able, naively, to enter into the final story of his relationship with his father- for REAL. The moment of conversion brings New Life. Truth is too important to be 'just the facts'.

This is a touching, fantastic and amusing story. It is not a religious movie in any traditional sense but I invite you to watch it through the lens of your own understanding of scripture and your relationship with Jesus. I think it will yield much fruit.