Films Worth Thinking About

Faith and philosophy found in four recent releases

The Wonder (Netflix)

A young girl living in the Irish Midlands in 1862 grieves the death of her brother, and is reported to have abstained from eating food for four months. Many members of the local community, deeply religious, claim the the affair is a miracle. Newspapers are reporting on the girl’s miraculous survival without food, but with a skepticism that is foreign to 19th century Ireland. A committee is formed of the town’s elders—including the parish priest—who determine to hire two nurses to observe young Anna O’Donnell 24 hours per day for two weeks, in order to confirm the truth of the miracle. The first nurse is a religious sister with medical training, while the second is a nurse from England, carrying a grief of her own, with experience serving in the Crimean War.

The Wonder closely follows the experience of nurse Lib Wright during her two weeks spent with Anna O’Donnell. The film is well written, and the performances of Florence Pugh (Nurse Elizabeth Wright) and Kila Lord Cassidy (Anna O’Donnell) are excellent. The Wonder is listed by most as a drama/mystery, a description that fits the tone of the film. Director Sebastian Lelio captures the raw harshness of a rural Ireland still recovering from famine: the color tones of the film are dark, with characters working by way of candlelight indoors, warmth coming from open fires, and the sun nowhere to be found. The music score of Matthew Herbert is deliberate, ethereal, and eery—the aesthetic form of The Wonder becomes an immersive experience for the viewer, an invitation to enter into a mystery that equally haunts and inspires a rural community.

As far as themes go, The Wonder is all about faith, belief, and narrative. Based on a novel by Emma Donoghue, the film brilliantly focuses on the personal experience of belief. Much is made of belief as a matter of good storytelling: we human beings craft narratives to help us make sense of the realities of life; realities that are often difficult for us to confront. In this way, the film reminded me of quote by Charles Sanders Pierce, a 19th century American philosopher, who once said that “belief is the scratch that soothes the irritation of doubt.” We Roman Catholics, of course, think differently about belief and the life of faith. But The Wonder gets at a deep truth about our human lives: a belief that is not compelling—that does not correspond to our desires and confront the realities of life that afflict us—is not a belief that will take root.

There are other themes to be found in The Wonder: sin and shame, the evil of abuse, the impact of culture on a human life. These themes result in a movie that gets hard to watch at times, despite the fact that there is little material in the movie that is overtly problematic (a single scene depicts a moment of passion between two characters). But The Wonder is a film that is worth thinking about. We talk about belief and loss of faith all of the time in the Church, while rarely discussing the power of narrative to make sense of the inchoate, harsh realities of life. The Wonder forces us to think seriously about the beliefs we possess and the stories we tell about our lives.

The Wonder is available to stream on Netflix. As far as a prospective audience goes, the film is relatively clean, while its intense thematic content is not suitable for children. My audience recommendation is 18+ and open to serious thought about some of the tough stuff in life.

Tár (Focus Features)

Lydia Tár is not living well. A world famous conductor, trained by the great Leonard Bernstein, Lydia reveals a self-centeredness for the duration of the film that is sometimes difficult to watch. The film, written and directed by Todd Field, follows Lydia as she prepares to record Mahler’s 5th Symphony with the Berlin Philharmoniker. Tár is also preparing for a book release. These moments are supposed to confirm Tár as a generational talent—as a genuine master of her craft who will be remembered for time immemorial. But “circumstances” conspire against Lydia, and viewers are invited to behold a two-fold act of destruction: the destruction of a career, and the destruction of a personal life.

The “circumstances” that conspire against Lydia are other people, human beings who make demands upon her life by virtue of possessing lives of their own. Todd Field does an excellent job of collapsing the distinction between artistic sentiment and personal character in Tár. Lydia is a person whose craft is driven by a heightened sensitivity to sound. Lydia hears everything, every tick of a clock, every conversation behind a closed door. Her hearing is extraordinarily sensitive, and it is likely that Lydia possesses perfect pitch as well. As a result, Lydia fights a perpetual battle against distraction: peripheral noise is the constant threat lurking in the background that will keep Lydia from her work. But peripheral noise is not the only threat for Lydia. Other people are also career distractions—a homosexual lover, a talented assistant with career desires of her own, a fellow conductor seeking to learn from Tár, a kindly assistant at the Philharmoniker who is slowly losing his skill, a former student deeply wounded by Lydia and her ambition—these are just so many lives that become another form of the peripheral noise that threatens to distract Lydia from achieving her goals.

Tár, I suppose, is a tragedy. We watch a character slowly lose control of her life because of her own poor choices and lack of character. There in the heart of the film is a commentary on the sickness that ambition causes in the human soul, and of the profound harm that we human beings can inflict upon one another in relationships when we do not love well. Ambition—artistic drive in this case—turns Tár into a carnivore, a person who consumes the lives of others for her own gain. Cate Blanchett turns in another marvelous performance in her own career as Lydia Tár, and to see the resolve, the seriousness, and the conviction on Lydia’s face after her fall from grace is a wonder of its own. Todd Field also does an excellent job of using sound—and the absence of sound—to establish tone within the film. Through the use of music and silence, we are drawn into the experience of Lydia Tár as she works to push back against the peripheral noise that would keep her from realizing her ambitions.

There is also in Tár a focus on the nature of art, beauty, and innovation. Speaking of the life of Leonard Bernstein and his conduction of symphonies that we would suppose classical musicians to have heard a thousand times before, Lydia tells an audience that, “ . . . he often played with the form. He wanted an orchestra to feel like they’d never seen, let alone heard, or performed, any of that music.” Lydia, like Bernstein, is driven by artistic vision: she beholds in Mahler’s 5th Symphony something that the world has never heard before, and refuses to allow distraction to keep her from an act of genuine creation. The passion of the artist and the nature of art is there on display in Tár, and the viewer is invited to witness the destruction that comes from passion and the power that beauty can command over a human life.

Tár is playing in select theaters. In Baltimore you can still see the film at The Charles Theater on North Charles Street. The film is for mature audiences only due to its thematic intensity and the depiction of a homosexual relationship. There is little language, violence, or sexual explicitness to worry about . . . just a very intense film about some of the worst parts of our human nature.

God’s Country (IFC Films)

A middle-aged woman watches the lifeless body of her mother pass into a cremator, and then carves out a shallow grave for her ashes from the frozen earth of Western Montana. The opening scene sets the tone for God’s Country, based on the short story “Winter’s Light” by James Lee Burke. In the hands of director Julian Higgins, the story transforms into a tour de force of narrative conflict—man versus nature, man versus man, man versus God—in the life of Sandra Guidry, a college professor with a personal history that remains a mystery for much of the film, but that is obviously of relevance for the story that plays out on the screen. Thandiwe Newton depicts Sandra as a character who is world-weary but determined, a woman who nears a breaking point but with a fierceness inside of her that drives the plot of the film.

And the plot of the film is simple enough: two hunters trespass on Sandra’s land not long after she buries her mother, she asks them not to trespass, they refuse, and the drama unfolds from there. Though the conflict between the hunters (portrayed with a reluctant malice by Joris Jarksy and an authentic malice by Jefferson White) and Sandra drives the narrative of God’s Country, the conflict at the heart of the film is much more cosmic in scope. There in the background of God’s Country is the menace of nature: the Montana landscape is wonderfully stripped of its beauty by cinematographer Andrew Wheeler and depicted as a frozen, raw, and unforgiving reality that brutalizes human life. And though to say much more on the theme would risk betraying a mystery at the heart of God’s Country—what is it that really drives Sandra? what is it that brought her to Montana?—there is a struggle with faith in God’s Country that made me want to take my copy of David Bentley Hart’s masterful The Doors of the Sea off the shelf and spend some time contemplating the hard edge of Christian metaphysics.

God’s Country also touches on the theme of revenge and sympathy in an interesting way. Though revenge—with all of its cosmic and anthropological fury—serves as a great source of motivation in Sandra’s life, there remains within her a profound capacity for fellow-feeling; she just no longer knows what to do with sympathy; relationships are too hard for her now. An unexpected moment of openness and connection in a church is real but fleeting. A genuine concern for the well-being of a student becomes a means to the end of Sandra’s fight for justice. The tragedy of God’s Country is seeing the genuine goodness within Sandra unable to take root, as love becomes increasingly choked out by the passion for revenge in Sandra’s life. Conflict in human life—with other persons, with nature, with God—is there threatening to turn any of us into creatures desperate for vengeance, and God’s Country is there to show us how such corruption enters into human life. We are a species in need of constant conversion.

God’s Country is no longer in theaters, but is available to stream on most platforms. The film’s focus on revenge comes with the expected depiction of violence that is suitable for audiences 18+. There are some instances of profanity, and nothing at all sexual.

The Banshees of Inisherin (Searchlight Pictures)

How do we push back against the boredom of life? How does a good person become a sinner? How does conflict arise within a community? Why do we fight wars? These are the kinds of questions that the marvelous playwright and director Martin McDonagh wants to answer with his fantastic The Banshees of Inisherin. The film is set on a rural island off the coast of Ireland in 1923 in the midst of the Irish Civil War. The Irish Civil War is there in the background of the film, a reality that is heard in gunfire and seen in far-off wisps of smoke and spoken about through small town gossip regarding political executions—but the only conflict seen on the screen concerns longtime friends Colm Doherty and Pádraic Súilleabháin.

One afternoon, Pádraic calls on Colm for the usual afternoon pint at the pub, but Colm ignores Pádraic. Pádraic can make no sense of Colm’s actions. His sister, Siobhán, mocking his confusion and over-dramatization of the conflict, offers Pádraic an explanation-in-jest: “maybe he just doesn’t like you no more.” The explanation turns out to be true. Colm has grown bored of his friend. Life is short, and boring. Only those who invest in meaningful projects are remembered as having done something good with the time they have been given, and so Colm—a fiddle player—sets out to compose an original song, something for which he will be remembered. And the tedious gossiping and endless chattering of Pádraic no longer interests Colm. In fact, Colm is convinced that Pádraic will keep him from using well the remaining years of his life. So, he tells his erstwhile friend that he will no longer talk to him.

The film is wonderfully existential, something like a contemporary riff on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a story about what can happen when human beings start to ask questions about meaning in life. The Banshees of Inisherin also confronts the realities of depression, and about how the crushing weight of the ordinary is sometimes simply too much for us to bear.

The Banshees of Inisherin is a dark tragicomedy, and fans of the work of McDonagh will immediately identify the tone of the film as familiar. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson reprise the banter and push-pull relationship dynamic that made In Bruges (also written/directed by McDonagh) such a wonderful movie. As Pádraic suffers—genuinely suffers—from the decision of his longtime friend, the conflict between the two becomes a force that corrupts moral sentiments. The seeming irrationality of one character’s life-choices results in choices that are cold, rational, and calculated for others. A small, seemingly insignificant decision can cause enormous conflict within a community, and soon enough wars are being fought and no one knows the real cause behind the violence. This is the story that The Banshees of Inisherin wants to tell.

The Banshees of Inisherin is still in theaters, and in Baltimore can be found at The Charles Theater on North Charles Street. The movie turns on an absurdist depiction of self-harm, and features the regular use of some casual profanity.