Michael

I have enjoyed John Travolta in nearly every part he has played. When I heard that he was going to be the Archangel, Michael, I knew I didn’t want to miss it. I saw it and I liked it and I didn’t think anything more about it for several years. Then it struck me that most of the screen time of the movie is spent on things that have nothing at all to do with the plot. That interested me.

If you arrange all the events of the plot, some explicit and others only implied, you get something like this. Michael, the Archangel (THE Michael) likes earth and wants an excuse to come back. He makes a bet with someone. He tells it as the old story of the North Wind and the Sun betting who can get a man to remove his coat. In this story, someone—Michael doesn’t say who but he is an advocate of coercion—bets that by treating Frank Quinlan (William Hurt) harshly, he can get Quinlan to open his heart to love. It doesn’t seem all that plausible, but there must be a bet so Michael can come to earth. Michael plays “the sun” in this bet. His idea is that Quinlan can be brought to vulnerability and love in a more caring way.

So Michael comes to earth in response to Pansy Milbank’s insistent prayers that the bank not be allowed to foreclose on her little motel. While Michael is there, Pansy writes to Quinlan, a reporter for a supermarket tabloid, saying the there is an angel living with her and that he should come and see it. Quinlan shows up with his buddy, Huey Driscoll (Robert Pastorelli) and a supposed “angel expert,” Nancy Winters (Andie McDowell). All are satisfied that Michael is, in fact, an angel and they get him to agree to go to Chicago with them. He gets them to agree to go by car. “We need more time,” he says, not saying what the “more time” is for. We know that it is so he can shine on Quinlan long enough for him to take his jacket off.

At that point, all the rest of the movie happens. Quinlan and Winters fall in love. Then Michael dies (goes home) and they fall out of love again. This shows good judgment on Winters' part because Quinlan instantly returns to being the cold manipulative SOB he was at the beginning of the story.

Now comes the part that really interested me this time. Michael is gone. Quinlan has been fired from his job. He and Winters are “over.” Quinlan and his buddy Driscoll meet at a bar and discuss all that happened. All those days and nights of unforgettable wonder.

Quinlan.: As far as I’m concerned, it never happened.
Driscoll: But we were there. We saw it.
Quinlan: No. Never happened.
Driscoll: So…where’s your raincoat? (he gave it to Michael)
Quinlan: It never happened and you know why? Because if it happened, I’d have to believe that wonderful and unaccountable things could happen to me for no reason at all. And I don’t want to believe that. I refuse to believe that such things are possible. So I resolutely deny what you and I both saw and lived for all those days.

What Quinlan actually says is played out on the screen as an alternative and unacceptable chain of events, but I have described what it really means. He’s right, in a way. If he continues to remember all those events with Michael, he would have to believe in the possibility of a fundamentally different life than he is living.

It is easier to deny the facts you know are true than it is to allow for the possibility wonderful gifts you didn’t deserve.

Fortunately for Quinlan—and for Winters as well—Michael hasn’t “gone home” yet and he has not because his work isn’t done. Really, that means he hasn’t yet won the bet, but the plot requires him to be more serious, here at the end. So Michael leads Quinlan on a wild goose chase through Chicago and simultaneously leads Winters on a similar goose chase, the result of which is that they run into each other on the street corner where both thought Michael was. They reconcile. Quinlan “opens his heart to love.” Michael wins the bet. And the movie is over.

The Wages of Sin

This brief note is based on three things. The first is those early years of my life during which my mind was marinated in the King James Version of the Bible. The second is my oddly analogical cast of mind. I see a lot of things by analogy with other things. It makes me an unpredictable movie companion, certainly. The third is my recent viewing of the fourth of the "Die Hard" series of movies, this one called "Live Free or Die Hard." I want to tell you about the first two minutes of the show. The only plot fragment you really need is that the bad guys in this movie are very sophisticated computer users and mean to take control of the U. S. To do this, they have put out a call for free lance hackers to devise and deliver to them an encryption algorithm. The hacker who figures most prominently in the movie is Matthew Farrell, but the one we actually see getting blown up is Ken Terry. On the master display screen in the villain's den, Ken Terry is listed as "assigned," meaning that he is one of the hackers who has been promised $50,000 for delivering the algorithm. When he delivers it, the panel next to his name changes to "delivered." Unfortunately, this does not refer to Mr. Terry. (The next hacker, Matthew Farrell, is shown being "delivered" by the principal good guy.) "What about my account?" the hacker asks the bad guys. "Delivery," says the principal bad guy. At that point, they upload a virus which will cause his computer to explode the next time he hits the Escape key. Ironies abound, you see. But the virus also causes the program to malfunction, so hitting the Escape key is pretty likely to happen and when it does, there is a huge explosion. Back at the lair, the panel next to Ken Terry's name changes to "Deactivated." If you wanted a tighter or more visually persuasive commentary on Romans 6:23a, I don't know where you would find it. Mr. Terry did the work and received the intended, not the promised, wage. That's really the whole post, but maybe I ought to take just another paragraph to say that I realize the producers and the director of the show did not have a commentary on this famous passage in Romans 6 in mind. I am describing how I heard and saw it, given the aforementioned marination in the King James and the aforementioned analogical mind.

Valerie Plame Wilson is Fair Game

Bette and I saw Fair Game last night. I’ve already admitted I don’t have a discriminating taste in movies and if you do, you ought to remember that when you are reading this reflection on it. I thought it was really good. This is the story of the Bush Administration’s outing of Valerie Plame Wilson, a CIA undercover operative and wife of Joe Wilson, a diplomat. Here's Naomi Watts as Valerie Plame Wilson.

I liked it in part because I remember all this. I read Joe Wilson’s piece in the New York Times in which he said his findings in Niger had been misrepresented. I remember the search for the administration tool who slipped Plame’s CIA status to Robert Novak, the columnist. I remember the controversy about “the sixteen words” in Bush’s address to Congress.[1]

In the movie, there is no ambiguity at all about the decision to out Plame. They need a new story. Wilson asks in a speech near the end of the movie, “How did the question change from whether there are WMD to who is Valerie Plame? How did it change from who put in the sixteen words’ to whether Joe Wilson was sent to Niger by his CIA wife?”[2] As the media master says in Wag the Dog, “Change the story, change the lead.”

I liked it because of very strong performances by Naomi Watts as Plame and by Sean Penn as her husband, Joe Wilson. We see her in the field in some very dicey situations. Very competent, very cool. We see her confronted by the publishing of her CIA identity. Incredulous and angry at the politics; hurt and disappointed by the response of the friends she had before they knew she was CIA. We see her practical and strategic with her mercurial husband; then, persuaded, contrite and supportive. She covers quite a range of action and passion and I thought she was very good.

The movie reminded me a lot of Matt Damon’s Green Zone, where he discovers first that there are no WMD at the places he is told to look, then why he is being asked to look where there are no WMD, then why President Bush really wants this war and what he will do to get it. In Fair Game, we see the domestic policy side of the same shell game.

Finally, I think the approach of the movie that moved me most was how the Wilsons’ lives just kept on during all this. A convention of moviemaking is that you introduce a character as an employee of some kind or other and after the introduction, you never see him at work because the movie can’t spare the time. Wilson and his wife go right on caring for their children. Bedtime stories are interrupted by the most brutal news from the CIA world. They have to choose between meeting a crucially important political ally and making sure the kids have breakfast. One afternoon they have the most important fight of their marriage at a playground. As important as it is, it is broken up by “he’s got my truck” squabbles between the kids..

Really important people in the middle of a major crisis, still taking their kids out to the playground and trying to come to grips with their separate approaches to the crisis. It is so realistic it hurts a little.

[1] “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa .”
[2] There is an ongoing gag about how to pronounce Niger. Wilson says, correctly, Nuh=zhare”” The tools, the dupes, and the bad guys all mispronounce it. It is a funny spot in a movie that needs a funny spot.

A Life Sentence

There’s an odd collection of boys out roaming the streets at night. They are looking for something exciting to do and they come upon an old man lying in a subway station. The leader of the boys starts kicking him. It’s more an entertainment for him than anything. One of the other boys objects. We shouldn’t be doing this,” he says. The leader replies, “He’s a bum,” and goes back to kicking him.

When I saw this movie, probably Between Strangers, I was struck by what a complete answer the leader of that pack of boys gave. It does away with motive entirely. There doesn’t need to be a reason to keep kicking this old man. The old man’s right not to be murdered has been waived, apparently, because he is a bum. So there’s really not reason not to kill him. Several questions that would seem prominent in other settings, such as why this boy might take pleasure in killing him and what right he has to do it, simply do not come up. It is, as I said, a “complete” answer.

This scene has been coming back to my mind for a couple of days now, since seeing The Secret in their Eyes, a Spanish-language thriller set in Argentina. It is a very well-made movie. I would recommend it as widely as I have recommended Invictus if it were not so violent. I’m going to end with Invictus; I will set it as the place where the solution to an unsolved dilemma in Secret is proposed.

First a little plot and two quick confessions. Confession 1: I didn’t see the whole movie. I spent some time staring at my shoes in the dark so I wouldn’t have to see what was going on on the screen. I heard it all, though. Confession 2: I really don’t mind knowing how stories turn out. When I know how they turn out, I can watch how they get there, which I find much more enjoyable and, as in this movie, much less horrible. Still, I’m just about to tell you what the crucial plot twist is, so if you don’t like knowing and think you might see the movie, stop here.

PLOT SPOILER: Gomez rapes and kills Liliana, the beautiful young wife of Ricardo Morales. We see that in the first 10 minutes with, I regret to say, flashbacks throughout the movie. Benjamin Esposito, the investigator of this crime, figures out that Gomez did it and sees to it that he is captured, convicted, and sentenced. Life in prison. A political rival of Esposito’s gets Gomez out of jail and hires him as a hit man. He comes after Esposito almost immediately, but kills Esposito’s partner instead. Esposito has been dogged in pursuit of Gomez and a life-giving support to Liliana’s distraught husband, Morales. And now a merciless killer is coming after Esposito.

That’s all back story. We actually meet Esposito 25 years later. He hasn’t done much with his life since his partner was murdered and he was shipped to the countryside for safety. Finally, he realizes he will have to go back, at whatever cost, and close the Gomez case. But Gomez has disappeared. That happened to a lot of people in Argentina in this period. Esposito goes to see Morales, also hiding out in the countryside. He said his bank transferred him to a rural branch. Esposito tries to engage Morales in remembering the case; the horrible Gomez who raped and murdered Morales’s wife, beat a life sentence somehow, and killed a few more people, and then disappeared. Morales refuses to go back. He gets angry. “That was 25 years ago,” he says several times, louder each time. “Let it go. Move on.”

Esposito leaves, but he comes back that night and hides in the garden. That is when he sees Morales taking a meal out to a shed in the back yard, where he has imprisoned the “disappeared” Gomez for most of the last 25 years. Morales’s life is threadbare. It is desolate and unproductive. But he felt strongly that Gomez deserved life in prison and that is what he is getting. Not death. Too easy, said the much younger Morales. He deserves, instead, an unending life of hopelessness and despair. And that is what Gomez is getting in the prison in Morales’s back yard. “Let it go. Move on.” That was his advice to himself as much as to Esposito, but Esposito takes the advice and Morales does not.

Gomez is getting his life sentence. Of course, that is what Morales is getting, too. The way things are in Argentina, the only way for Morales to make sure Gomez is in prison for life requires that he, too, be in prison for life. Gomez is in prison for the rape and murder of Liliana. Morales is in prison for the satisfaction of making sure Gomez gets what he deserves. But it turns out not to be all that satisfying. His wife is still gone. He is still consumed by his hatred for Gomez. His life is still bleak almost beyond his endurance.

Is that really the best we can do? No. It isn’t. It’s all most of us would be willing to ask of Morales, but it is not the best he can do. It is the best he is willing to do.

Final stop: Invictus. Please see this movie. Take what you learn from it into every deadlocked and suboptimal organization or cause you belong to. Nelson Mandela, after 27 years in prison, becomes President of the Republic of South Africa. He campaigns for his dream of a “Rainbow Nation.” In practice, that means whites, blacks, and coloreds: not really much of a rainbow.[1] He is faced, from his first day in office, with the task of creating a government appropriate to a “Rainbow Nation.”

The first man to be hit squarely in the face with the implications of this commitment is Jason Tshabalala, the head of President Mandela’s presidential protection unit. Jason knows he needs more men to adequately protect the president, but he isn’t prepared for the four really big white guys from the previous administration’s (white administration’s) presidential protection unit. They have an order signed by President Mandela. Jason is furious and bursts into Mandela’s office, his anger visible on his face. Here’s what happens then.

Mandela: You look agitated, Jason.
Jason: That is because there are four Special Branch cops in my office...

Mandela: When people see me in public, they see my bodyguards. You represent me directly. The “Rainbow Nation” starts here. Reconciliation starts here.

Jason: Comrade President. Not long ago, these guys tried to kill us. Maybe even these four guys in my office tried and often succeeded.

Mandela: Yes, I know. Forgiveness starts here too. Forgiveness liberates the soul. It removes fear. That is why it is such a powerful weapon. Please, Jason. Try.

Jason: Sorry to disturb you, sir.

Of course, forgiveness is Morales’s other option. It is the way he can liberate his soul.[2] It is the only way his own sentence can be commuted. Gomez was sprung through dirty politics by a direct order from the President. No one will spring Morales if he will not. Neither dirty politics nor clean will help him. He had hoped his imprisonment of Gomez would be satisfying. He knows now it is not. He had hoped it would somehow establish forever his love for his wife and his grief for her death. He knows now that it will not. There is no instrumental rationale for what he is doing. If he continues, nothing will be better and everything will be worse.

That is the price of withholding his forgiveness. And it may be the best he can do.

[1] I am reminded, however, of God’s promise to put His “bow” in the sky so Noah will know God will never again destroy the earth by water. This is a bow like a “bow and arrow” bow. God is going to put his six shooter on the table so we can all see that it is not in his holster any longer. Invictus is a story that supports the six gun notion of bow much better than it does the rainbow notion of bow, but that’s the way it goes, sometimes.
[2] In the context of The Secret in Their Eyes, there are additional reasons why Morales can not let Gomez go. One is that if he did that, Gomez would immediately hunt down Esposito and kill him. Another is that there is no way to make sure the government will keep Gomez in prison even if there were a way to return him to the authorities after all this time. In this post, I am considering only the effects of Morales’s decision on his own life. I know it’s more complicated.