Movie Review

Directed by Paul Greengrass, starring: Kenneth Branagh and Helen Bonham Carter, Alliance-Atlantis, 1 hour 40 minutes, 1998.

Richard (Branagh) is a hapless, failed artist who suddenly realizes that as a modern man he doesn't understand how planes fly. He conducts an experiment in which he constructs a kite and jumps off the roof of the bank in which his girlfriend works. It doesn't work! He is arrested as a public nuisance and sentenced to 120 hours of public service. He leaves London for the country and takes his canvases with him in order to construct an airplane out of the failed projects of his former life. He is assigned to be a companion to Jane (Bonham Carter) who is a 25 year-old woman with ALS. So, this "flimsy" man with a long history of failure meets the "cripple" Jane who is a very resilient woman. This is not a heroic story. Jane has had a succession of ineffective companions and is a bitter sarcastic person. But it is also very funny in the way that the relationship between these two "cripples" develops.

They both have projects. He wants to construct a plane and fly it, independently and with no help. She wants to lose her virginity and asks for his help! After all, he knows London and has transportation. Richard is shocked and refuses. She is not asking him to "do the awful deed". They part. Jane gets a new companion (there is a lesson here for us all in the way we infantilize the disabled). Richard is assigned new clients for his community service and tries to fly his plane. In defeat they come together again and he agrees to help. They explore several agencies (the shocked reply is "No!") and a club for the single disabled (Jane is mortified and bolts from the club). She wants a romantic setting, "something special" and proposes the hiring of a gigolo like Richard Gere in American Gigolo.

So, Richard sets about to hire one. It will cost 2000 pounds. Richard's brilliant idea is to rob a bank; the bank that he tried to jump off. The attempt is comic and pathetic. He fails and runs back to their hotel to find Jane in full hysterical reaction to the presence of the Adonis of a gigolo hired to accomplish her end of the project. What a mess! They flee back to the country. Richard finally flies "their" airplane and Jane's project is accomplished because in the end they truly become lovers.

The movie is based on the true story of Jane Hatchard who died in 1997. I remember a B.B.C. documentary film of her life and death.

One thinks of the story of Abraham and Sarah (old and childless). At the climax of this story, contrary to all human expectations, the miracle of grace occurred. Since God's grace comes without people deserving it we are all recipients of the tender mercies of God (Romans 12:1) that come when there is no reason to expect them. Paul considers such tender mercies to be the hidden plot of every person's life. God, who gives life to the dead, (Romans 4:17) provides a future for those who have lost everything, even life itself.

This is a very funny romance with scenes that will tighten your throat and mist up your glasses. In it we are reminded that we have no final assurances, any more than Abraham and Sarah did but we can respond in faith to the mercies we have received.