The religious veneer of "The Ladykillers"

FOR THOSE WHO enjoyed the relatively non-violent Coen Brothers movie "O Brother Where Art Thou?", do not be fooled by the charming advertisements that promise a sun-sweetened redux of a band of noble outlaws in the South. "The Ladykillers" is much more akin to the Coen's "Fargo", both disturbingly gruesome tales of bad guys getting their due.

To be fair, Tom Hanks is delightfully batty in the lead role, a con-man intellectual who smooth-talks his way into the basement of an elderly woman (Irma P. Hall) in order to dig a tunnel into a vault. I quite enjoyed the first half of the film, where Hanks has to muster all his charm in order to keep the wool pulled over the lady's eyes and keep his band of misfits in order. But then it turns nasty. The violence is in typical Coen Brothers style -- halfway between funny and sickening, which some people don't seem to mind, but I find difficult to appreciate.

"The Ladykillers" has a sort of religious veneer, as scenes within the lady's house are intercut with the gospel music and preaching at her church. There is a sense in which God is looking out for her, and when the criminals' plans start to go awry, it seems attributed to a kind of divine justice. The preacher speaks about God's anger at the calf-worshipping Israelites, and the idea of God's punishment for the ungodly lingers throughout the film. "Be sure your sins will find you out," as my childhood pastor was fond of saying.

But in the end, the film has little to do with how God works. If anything, the criminals are victim to a kind of karmic justice: that people get what they deserve, that things balance out in the end, that what goes around comes around. God does not promise this. He promises justice, but not necessarily on this side of the grave. He certainly does not want us to sit back and wait for him to act when confronted with evil.

I didn't like "Fargo" much when I first saw it (the squeamish factor, again), but in light of this film I appreciate it a lot more. In the Coen's earlier film, it was the dogged pursuit by the police officer (Frances McDormand) that panicked the criminals into self-destruction. It was her confrontation of evil and her upholding of the law that drives the film. It's about human responsibility.

In "The Ladykillers", God takes the role of responsibility. But to the Coen Brothers, he's not the God of the Bible -- he's just the deus ex machina.

"Gentleman's Agreement": a love story

I'M A TOUGH customer when it comes to movie romances. I am not usually fond of the meet-cute and fall-instantly-in-love kind of movie. I want to see something real, messy, and emotional, something that requires growth and change and effort by the participants (movies like "When Harry Met Sally" or "Groundhog Day" on the comic end of things, and "Say Anything" or "When a Man Loves a Woman" on the more serious side.)

In my (admittedly limited) experience with pre-1960s movies, I have come across several good love stories, but, before now, never one I absolutely loved. "Casablanca", of course, is a deeply moving romantic story, but part of what's so great about it is how it lets the lovers' rapturous past bloom in your imagination rather than showing it on screen. It works to great effect (and has been borrowed many times over, most recently with Mickey and Maude in "A Mighty Wind"), but ultimately I like to see the process. "It Happened One Night", on the other end of the comic spectrum, is a bouncy and delightful romp of bickering lovers, an ageless scenario that's worked in "The Empire Strikes Back" and Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing". But in the end, I find that the bickering strategy doesn't work so well in real life, and is largely a dramatic construct.

So "Gentleman's Agreement" came as quite a surprise to me. For starters, it's not a romance per se; it's better known for being an "issue" movie. (The main character pretends to be Jewish in order to write a series of articles on anti-Semitism -- a true story, except it was a woman rather than a man who wrote the real articles.) And to throw me even more off track, the couple in question (played by Gregory Peck and Dorothy McGuire) do meet cute and fall in love instantly.

But things quickly get messy. While Kathy's planning the wedding, Philip is pretending to be Jewish, and is on the receiving end of dirty looks and refused service. Soon his experiment starts disrupting their lives, because she's reluctant to tell her family and friends she's marrying a Jewish man when it's not true. There's a real dilemma here because Philip wants Kathy to get a taste of the prejudice she's experiencing, while she's more concerned with not having to tell her friends someday that she lied to them.

The movie is full of these unexpected touches, these wrestlings not only with the issue of anti-Semitism, but how ethical it is to step into someone else's shoes, and to what extent one's public and private life intersect. Because in the end, one's attitudes and actions are all intertwined, and the point of the story is not simply to stop using racist names or to stop rejecting customers based on their race, but how insidious fear can be, how it can wind its way through the facets of our lives without our being aware of it. It equates the fear of a different race (which most of us know is wrong) with fear of standing up for a different race.

This fear is the force driving these two lovers apart. Fear of growth, fear of change, fear of losing that white picket fence of one's dreams. In many ways their relationship seems doomed, for who can conquer so much fear? Who can leap over all their obstacles placed in life? The movie's answer is fantastic, a litmus test of a relationship that I would pass on to anyone wondering if their love is the real thing. I would reveal it here, but for those who haven't seen the movie, the line on its own would be quite diminished. I encourage you to seek out the movie, and listen for a statement toward the end that answers the question: Do you have to be perfect for a relationship to succeed?

"Gentleman's Agreement" may be most celebrated as a treatise against anti-Semitism, as a 1947 Best Picture winner, or even as a prime of example of art letting you step into other people's shoes. But for me, it is first and foremost a love story. There is nothing I find more beautiful than a pair of deeply divided lovers at last reconciled ... if Biblical metaphor holds true, then such moments are a glimpse of heaven.

"The Reckoning": a muddled morality play

IN ITS PROMOTIONAL materials, "The Reckoning" is described as a story of redemption. Therefore, I expected at least one of the following to take place: 1) the guilty party would confess his crime before his accusers, 2) he would express his penitence to them, 3) he would ask forgiveness of them, 4) he would attempt to make whatever restitution was possible, or 5) he would submit to justice for his wrongdoing.

Sorry, folks, this is a more "cosmic" tale of redemption -- you know, the kind where an act of goodness counterbalances an earlier act of evil. This is a movie that still believes God is going to weigh the sum total of our actions, good and bad, against each other.

The story is about a priest (Paul Bettany) who is on the run from the law (for what crime exactly is unclear until the end ... or I should say is not spoken until the end, because it's pretty clear) in medieval England. He falls in with a group of traveling actors (led by Willem Dafoe) who arrive at a new a town in time to see the sentencing of a young woman for the charge of murder. The troupe decides to put on a morality play about the case, and in doing so discovers that the woman is innocent. A murder mystery ensues.

Everything about this movie screams 21st century. The camerawork and editing, for starters, are flashy and unreal, breaking the feel that you're at all in medieval times. The principle characters are all level-headed, rational thinkers while only the peasants are superstitutious and unscientific. The acting troupe, which has always performed as its plays scenes from the Bible, breaks with convention to put on this new morality play. "I have a feeling someday in the future all plays will be like this," says Dafoe's character, and I couldn't help but chuckle. The priest, who at the beginning is shown preaching an old-school sermon about how God inflicts suffering on us so that we are not tempted to enjoy this earthly life, is somehow transformed by his crime into a nice-guy spiritualist. (I understand the wish that a haughty and prideful person might be brought down to a place of contrition and compassion by a moral stumble -- but at the same time it's hard to swallow the idea that the path to greater openness of the heart is to commit criminal acts.)

There's a lot of interesting fodder in the movie, including the role of art in our society: to make us question, to illuminate, to awaken the conscience. There's plenty of moral wrestling about whether or not to abandon the innocent for the sake of one's own neck. It raises the question of whether people in positions of power in the church, the military, and politics should be held to -- or can be held to -- a higher standard of behavior. But in the end it doesn't amount to much. Any movie where inciting mob justice is condoned doesn't have much of a leg to stand on.

Fisticuffs: a look at the ethics of movie fistfights

A FEW WEEKS ago I was watching "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" for the first time, and I was troubled by one of the scenes early on. Young, patriotic, upstanding Jefferson Smith (played by nice guy Jimmy Stewart) punches a reporter in the face. And what's more, nothing is said about it. No scandal, no charges, no issue whatsoever. It's just assumed that decking someone you don't like is OK.

Several days later I saw "The Best Years of Our Lives," a best-picture winner about soldiers adjusting to civilian life after World War II. And again, one of our heroes belts a guy he disagrees with. The man's boss rushes to the scene, where the fallen man lies in a pile of broken glass that once used to be a display counter. "I know, I know," the former G.I. says plaintively, and I expected him to follow with an apology or a promise to submit himself quietly to the police. "I know, I'm fired," he says instead. It's not even clear what lost him the job: the violence or the ruined store property.

Then I watched "Giant," the sprawling Texan drama that sees macho cattle rancher Jordan Benedict dragged into the twentieth century by an outspoken woman, a son who doesn't follow the family footsteps, and marriage between his family and the hated Mexicans. The film culminates with Benedict's acceptance of his mixed-race grandson, which he proves by duking it out with a racist restaurant owner. His wife tells him she was most proud of him at that moment, and no mention is made of medical bills or property damage or lawsuits.

Now, it might be just coincidence that I encountered a one-two-three punch of pugilistic action in so short a time. Perhaps these three films (from 1939, 1946, and 1956, respectively) are not typical of their time. But I'm having trouble thinking of movies today in which fistfights are treated so cavalierly. While a movie like "Fight Club" (1999) is infinitely more bloody and brutal than these old-time brawls, the morality of fighting is anything but shrugged aside, and is linked to anarchist outsiders rather than upstanding citizens. Certainly a senator punching a reporter would not be an inconsequential act if it were in a movie today.

This is not to suggest that violent movies today always give weight to their character's actions. Macho cops like Martin Riggs and John McClane blow up buildings and maim bad guys in the name of heroism. But such extremes are usually in the domain of action heroes, superheroes, spies — not your average joe. If violence is celebrated, it is usually within the context of a fantasy world, and more often than not performed with guns, swords, or gadgets rather than bare fists.

Is this an important distinction? I think it is. While I don't want to dismiss the effect of ultra-violent movies on the psyche, I think that common violence — a punch in the heat of the moment — is more destructive. This kind of violence, after all, is readily imitable by anyone with hands and a momentary loss of control. It does not involve planning, procuring weapons, premeditation, or any of the barriers inherent to more exaggerated violence. This common violence is the weapon of domestic violence and child abuse, crimes that are quite under-reported and given so little attention in an age where splashier violence grabs headlines. This is a more widespread violence. (In 2000, 15,517 murders were committed in the U.S., while instances of reported aggravated assault numbered 910,744, according to FBI statistics. Some estimates by domestic violence experts place the number of battered women at 3 to 4 million in the U.S.)

By no means am I suggesting that movies are responsible for actions of abusers, nor that abuse was worse in the '30s, '40s, and '50s when more casual fistfighting was depicted on screen. I am simply applauding that more movies today treat fistfights as a moral issue. If one person strikes another to coerce his opinion, to teach a lesson, or to punish, that act does not go unquestioned.

Consider scenes from recent movies in which ordinary guys punch someone (this is not an exhaustive list, just the best variety of scenes from films I've seen): In "Groundhog Day" (1993), Phil Connors decks an insurance salesman who's harassing him for the millionth time as Connors is stuck living the same day over and over. But the scene is played as part of Connors' decent into selfishness and despair — a sort of "No one would ever do that!" moment — rather than a casual act. In "High Fidelity" (2000), Rob Gordon punches out his ex-girlfriend's current beau, but it is then revealed to be an act of imagination, and he does not act on it. In "The Wedding Singer" (1998), Robbie Hart also picks a fight with his romantic rival, only to go down with one punch. (When the rival gets his comeuppance, interestingly, he is not taken down with violence but is locked up, as if in jail.)

Somewhat more aggressive are "The Paper" (1994) and "Bridget Jones's Diary" (2001), which both feature more extended fistfights between rivals and get a little bloody. But rather than being glamorized or casual, both scenes are awkward and disheartening, with no sense of having solved anything.

The last big movie I can think of that glamorized a punch was "Back to the Future" (1985), which finds wimp George McFly knocking out bully Biff Tannen in the climactic moment. Thanks to the wonder of time travel, his son Marty McFly escapes the world of the cowering George and finds himself with the assertive George, complete with nice house, nice clothes, and a nice black truck for Marty — a very positive result. But by the time "Back to the Future Part III" (1990) rolled around, Marty has learned to walk away from a fight. This was an intentional transition; on the director commentary to the "Back to the Future" DVD, Robert Zemeckis said he regretted ending Part I without any emotional or spiritual growth on the part of young Marty.

I do not mean to paint today's movies in a rosy hue, because the violence in many are still ethically questionable. But at least the ethical question is being asked. Even if many movies perform ethical gymnastics to excuse the presentation of violent content, that seems better to me than passive acceptance.

Ultimately, I believe that the context of violent acts is more important than the content shown. This is a distinction completely lost on the MPAA and other watchdog organizations, which consider the images and words displayed more dangerous than ideas and values. The biggest danger about watching movies aren't the controversial issues they present, but the issues that movies leave unexamined altogether. It's the attitudes and beliefs we don't talk about that creep into our lives most insidiously, that keep us from moral growth. Here's hoping that the movies keep openly wrestling over our moral behavior.