"Punch-Drunk Love": a redemptive movie

I love a redemptive movie, and "Punch-Drunk Love" fits the description, even literally. Barry obsesses throughout about collecting pudding for airline miles, and he natters about how he will one day, if all goes well, redeem those miles. If the pudding-mile situation has you confused, welcome to "Punch-Drunk Love."

Paul Thomas Anderson first impressed me in "Magnolia" with his brand of seemingly disconnected vignettes that resolve into a melodious whole. Here again, he mixes pathos and absurdity in a charming and insightful way.

Barry Egan, 30-something head of a bathroom-supply company selling such products as novelty toilet plungers, is played by Adam Sandler, who quite naturally portrays Barry's turns from self-debasement to violent rage. Both those qualities of Barry's have been partially instilled by his sisters' relentless cruelty. At one point, they ask him quite cheerily if he remembers how they used to call him "Gay Boy."

Barry's life begins to turn toward the better when he meets unconditional love in the form of Lena, a mysterious and quiet woman in red who gradually draws Barry out of his self-hatred. Emily Watson, of "Breaking the Waves" and "Gosford Park," is a pro at playing such singular characters.

Barry must learn to navigate through unendurable meals with his sisters, the uncomfortable first steps of dating, and disturbing and ultimately violent confrontations with a scamming phone-sex operator and her sleazy protectors. He tries early on to get help from his family, but no one is open to his needs, and he's unsure at first that he even has a problem. In a wrenching scene early in the movie with his brother-in-law, selected for medical consulting because he's a dentist, Barry asks for a referral to a psychiatrist, admitting that he doesn't like himself sometimes. When his brother-in-law asks what exactly is wrong, Barry responds in a statement that lifts up at the ends like a question: "I don't know if anything is wrong? ... because I don't know how other people are?"

Barry starts out isolated in a sterile, unfeeling world. The opening shot is of Barry alone at a bare desk in his concrete warehouse, in an embarrassing blue suit, calling contacts and trying, without success, to leave his home number so that they can reach him at any time. This is the impetus for calling the phone-sex line, to talk to someone who will listen. Barry is so numb and out of touch with what's normal that a car wrecks in front of his face, and he doesn't blink. A van mysteriously drops off a harmonium, an organ-like instrument, and Barry's only response is to scuttle with it back to his office.

Out of this confusion steps forward Lena in her red dress, seeking him out. It is only their growing relationship and Lena's quiet and continual presence that enables Barry to move beyond self-destructive anger and on to the first steps toward health, awareness of reality, and trust of another human being in community.

Lena, who has been in some places criticized as a one-dimensional, adolescent dream of the perfect woman -- undemanding, uncomplicated, accepting -- seems to me more like grace personified. You can be yourself with grace; you can't take grace for granted, as Barry is admonished when he leaves Lena at the hospital; and yet grace always, always forgives when asked.

I love a redemptive movie.

Much to find, much to discard in "Evelyn"

THERE ARE MANY things to like about the movie "Evelyn," not least of which is the image of a father determined at all costs to reunite his children with himself. In this true story, Desmond Doyle fights against Irish law and church tradition for the right to raise his three children, who have been placed in orphanages. As a metaphor of God the Father, his example perhaps does more for our hearts than the remote, disciplinarian figure many associate with fathers.

There's also a courageous honesty in the film; although aimed for a family audience, it doesn't shy away from the reality of the Irish lower class, complete with fistfights, cursing, drinking, and gambling (albeit at a PG level). It doesn't flinch from its portrayal of an abusive nun or its upholding of single parenthood, both of which might rankle the conservative audiences that many such movies seek to appease.

However, despite such assets, the movie has trouble finding the emotional grounding that would really draw us into the story. Too much of the screentime is taken up by the legal team and their court case, distracting us from Doyle's relationships with his ex-wife, his father, his new love interest, and his children. The title character, daughter Evelyn, has so little screen time she seems more like an emblem of injustice than a human being. Her brothers are barely in the films at all. Doyle's potential girlfriend is apparently so important to him that he gives up drinking for her, but their interactions are so skimpy it's hard to understand what they see in each other. And when Doyle's father dies, it is brushed aside so quickly it becomes a mere story contrivance rather than an occasion for real sorrow.

The movie is also weighed down by a confusing mix of religious messages. The worst is the concept of "angel rays," the shafts of light that beam down through clouds or leaves, which are said to be departed loved ones looking down on us. For starters, human beings do not become angels when they die. And even if you believe that the departed still look down on us, wouldn't it be frustrating to have to wait around for "angel rays" to shine on you?

More encouraging are scenes where Evelyn upholds mercy and Desmond upholds love as two central tenets of Christianity. These moments are simple and pure; they're able to cut through sticky situations with a very basic truth. However, it's somewhat disconcerting that the targets of their speeches are doctrine and methods rooted in Catholic faith. Is the movie trying to simply say that human beings are fallible in carrying out religious practice, or that religion itself is an albatross around the neck of just "having faith"? I could see it argued either way.

In the end, the amount of enjoyment one gets from "Evelyn" will depend on how one approaches the movies: Do you sift through the work of art to find moments and lines of resonance? If so, then there's enough here to get excited about. If, however, you want a work of art to come together as a cohesive whole, for its themes to interweave and support each other, then you'll want to look elsewhere. "Evelyn" is a grab-bag of a movie.

"Bowling for Columbine": Now what?

I watched a lot of Michael Moore before I got to this movie — the various incarnations of his TV show, "TV Nation" and "The Awful Truth"; some of his previous documentaries; and his book Stupid White Men. What keeps me coming back to his material is (1) his in-your-face and yet strangely endearing humor and (2) the way he opens my eyes to issues I didn't know about. And, of course, it doesn't hurt his popularity with me that he's a dumpy and hairstyle-challenged nobody-much from the Midwest and yet still successful.

"Bowling for Columbine" has the humor, and it opened my eyes to new ideas, issues, and theories, and yet it also has what bothers me about Michael Moore: (1) overreaching on some conclusions, (2) possible obfuscation of some facts, and (3) no real direction on where to go from here.

It's the last that bothers me the most. I can accept that people exaggerate when they're impassioned. I do it, making earthshaking absolutes out of isolated examples. I can understand that when people want to prove a point that they believe is valid, and I do agree with Michael Moore's overall dismay about gun violence in America and the need to curb it, that they'll concentrate their efforts on getting that point across, even if it means being occasionally contradictory (saying available ammo isn't the reason for the U.S. record of gun murders and then crusading against Kmart for carrying ammo), embarrassing (a go-nowhere accosting of Dick Clark over bad welfare legislation), or rude (a squirm-inducing interview of a feeble Charlton Heston). I've come to expect that I won't agree with everything Moore says or does, and that doesn't overconcern me.

What does leave me wanting is the question he almost always leaves unanswered: "What now?" In other words, what do I do with this knowledge? Moore's conclusion about the issue of America's high level of gun violence is that the U.S. (the media, especially) breeds fear over gun violence, thereby scaring Americans into owning guns, thereby scaring Americans into using guns, a vicious spiral. Now, granted, he says that violent crime is actually on the decrease, so the fear is unnecessary sensationalism on the media's part. He shows a Candian TV news show doing a story on speed bumps, as if Canadian news as a whole is small-town peaceable.

Moore makes a big deal, too, of the lack of fear in Canada, implying by several interviews that no one even in big-city Toronto locks doors. People tell him, "Oh, sure, we've had a few break-ins. They just take some booze and rough up the place a bit. No biggie." Even Moore seems surprised that they would consider this no biggie, but that's exactly my point: Are we Americans supposed to stop locking our doors? Will that solve the gun-violence problem? Is locking doors an indication of fear and mistrust or of good sense (or both)?

If it's the media's fault for instilling fear, what can I do about it? I already don't watch TV news anymore (no reception, even in hilly Seattle, in our ground-floor apartment), and I don't subscribe to a newspaper. I read news online, picking what stories interest me. I don't own a gun and don't plan to. What else can I do? Write letters to the media, demanding they stop scaring people? Start my own TV news show that concentrates on speed bumps, curling, and moose sightings? Moore's chosen the role of spokesman as his action; he decided at 18 to run for his local school board, and he's been out disseminating information and trying to inspire people to make decisions ever since. The only problem is, he gives the information without a clear idea of what he wants people to do with it. From Stupid White Men, it seemed like he thinks everyone should run for political office or become a media blockbuster like he is. Naturally, that makes no sense, even if everyone were cut out to be a persistent, impassioned loudmouth. Writing letters actually does sound like a good idea for a quiet person like me to do, but just from this movie, I have no idea whom to write or what to say.

My favorite Michael Moore moments are when he does make a change. In one of his TV episodes, for instance, he campaigns loudly and long enough on behalf of some immigrant maids at a Holiday Inn who were about to be deported (they had tried to form a union) that the INS actually takes pity on him and the maids and works out the situation so that they can stay in the country, working to send big bucks home to their families. Moore seemed just as surprised as anyone else that his complaining worked. In the Kmart scene in "Bowling for Columbine," he seems surprised again. In one sense, it's as if he's gotten so many doors slammed in his face that that's what he expects. And, in another, it's as if he thinks the complaining is good enough. But I need expected results, a goal in mind and action to take to get there. "Bowling for Columbine" makes me think about the gun problem, but it doesn't give me any idea what to do about it.

What is joy? (with a few words on "Bowling for Columbine")

WHEN I WAS young, my Bible teachers made a point of differentiating between "happiness" and "joy." Happiness was an emotional state, they told me, which could come and go at any time. Joy was an established state that persisted through the ups and downs of life. Rooted in God, joy was constant even through the tragedies and pains of this world.

Therefore, joy seemed to me something like irrational merriment. Or an oblivious cheer. Or perpetual chipperness. Plain old happiness looked pretty good in comparison.

It wasn't until years later that I would stumble upon a definition that, for me, would work better. I had just graduated from college and was getting my first taste of the real world, and my sister was just beginning college. Her first year went badly, and she felt trapped. The tests and papers and homework mounted up as she got sick, which got her depressed, which added more backlog. I tried to convince her that there was a world outside college, a world where GPAs were of little importance, where studying was not the only valuable skill, where dorms were not the normal living situation. But it was hard for her to see more than one semester ahead, let alone four years ahead.

I began to see that the enemy of joy was a sort of tunnel-vision, where the weight of the world rested on that next step. It wasn't just confined to school, either; when I would obsess over the words and tone of something someone said to me, when I let my job overwhelm me to the point of physical exhaustion, when I would analyze a relationship to death. This kind of small-picture thinking always led to a death of joy. The only escape was a big-picture view, a stepping back and seeing a wider slice of the world. Joy is an immersion in the fullness of life, into the abundance and sufficiency of God. Joy is being alive to the vastness of our world and the vastness of time, and fully participating in both. To lack joy leads to hoarding, to pettiness, to stonewalling. To have joy would look something like selfless abandon.

What does any of this have to do with "Bowling for Columbine," Michael Moore's documentary about the problem of gun violence in America? Well, he doesn't come right out and say so, but in searching for an answer he points his finger somewhere near where I've put joy.

Matt Stone, the co-creator of "South Park" and a former student at Columbine High School, posits a theory of "school tunnel vision" much the same as mine. He complains that schools put too much pressure on kids to measure up, threatening that a misstep in high school will limit the range of colleges, which limits the range of jobs, and so forth, so one's entire future is mapped out. In short, if you're a success in high school, you'll be a success for good, but if you're a loser at that age, you'll be a loser your whole life. He wishes somebody had been able to reach the two killers and just let them know that the world outside high school is so much bigger than they knew.

Moore transitions from this into a segment comparing American society to other countries where death-by-firearms is quite rare -- including our next-door neighbor, Canada. His theory is that Canada, by and large, isn't nearly as afraid as we are. At least in the town he was in, few people locked their doors -- even people who had been robbed before. He chalks it up to the messages sent by the media and the politicians. In America, he says, a politician gets elected by stirring up fear of whatever he or she is promising to fix. The media stirs up fear with its reporting to better serve advertisers who sell a carefree lifestyle.

The biggest error Moore makes in his film is by choosing these scapegoats. (He even tries to talk a producer of "Cops" out of making his show.) Any scapegoats take the blame off the individual to consider his or her role in the tragedies. It would have been far better if Moore had simply taken our culture of fear as a starting point to help us learn how to cope with it. In other words, after depicting America's fear, its smallmindedness, its hoarding of its things, its petty conflicts, and its walling out of its neighbors -- its lack of joy, to use my terms -- he could have sought ways of overcoming such obstacles. Instead of asking "How can we stamp out fear?" (which leads to fear of fear itself), a more useful question might be "How can we create joy?"

This is a question every Christian and every church body must consider. Are our words aimed at stamping out the fears of rejection, the fears of failure, the fears of temptation? Or are they aimed at holding up a picture of something to strive for, an expansive vision of the world where the things we insulate ourselves with, and the pettiness we cling to, are swept away?

The singer Rich Mullins had a way of connecting people to this vision that was very pure -- "a very unique encouragement technique," according to his biography. "When he counseled people who were depressed, he told them to walk around their neighborhoods and learn the name of every tree. Rich believed that if people could get outside of their little shells of pre-occupation, they could be healed of a lot of problems. They might, he surmised, see the wonder of God in the power of an oak or the beauty of a redbud. They might, just for a moment, forget their troubles (which are often self-imposed) and catch a vision of something larger and more enduring. And maybe in that simple act they would become free."

The Scriptures offer the ultimate expanded view: God "will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." To be able to see beyond high school, beyond career and marriage -- and even beyond death -- can free a person from daily disappointments. The assurance of that final destination helps open up the pathway to joy. We discover that a plunge into God's abundance is more than just something to aspire to; it something that one day must be.