I just noticed on Facebook that Bryan Caplan listed as his status message that he’s “watching *Frailty* yet again.” That reminds me that two and a half years ago, I created a list of my “Top 5 Religious Films” for The Cinematheque’s Top 5 Project. I didn’t submit my list before the deadline, so it wasn’t included with the others. But I think it’s probably worthwhile to resurrect it now for the blog’s more or less permanent record. The other Cinematheque lists were filled with almost certainly more worthy films, like La Passion de Jeanne d’arc and Andreï Rublev, but I have my own cinematic hobbies and obsessions. This list reflects that.
Copied from an email message I sent, dated Sept. 9, 2007, here goes:
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I always have trouble with lists like this. I tend to want to create lists of favorites, rather than judgments of “best,” which could change with varying criteria anyway. So, although I might agree that films like The Rapture, The Apostle, The Life of Brian, or even Dogma are some of the “best” religious films, there’s stuff that I don’t necessarily think is better that I’m more likely to include on my own list.
So…
- The Book of Life (Hal Hartley, 1998)
- Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
- Frailty (Bill Paxton, 2001)
- The Believer (Henry Bean, 2001)
- Bash: Latter-Day Plays (Neil LaBute, 2001)
This illustrates one problem with using favorites. Four films from 2001? That can’t be right. And the last one is really just filmed stage readings, anyway.
But this list contains some powerful stuff, all the same. The Book of Life, for me, is like a distillation of everything that makes Hartley movies so great. Searching, philosophical dialogue mixed with deadpan absurdist humor and occasional explorations of the artifice of making the films themselves. That wouldn’t be enough, though, if he didn’t pull it off so well. It also had perfect lead casting. Martin Donovan had become the iconic conflicted hero in Hartley’s movies by this point, and Thomas Jay Ryan had nailed down a perfect performance as a Hartley antihero in Henry Fool. So, sharing the bill as Jesus and Lucifer? Kind of like the Hal Hartley version of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino sharing a scene together for the first time, in Heat…
Spirited Away is rife with Shinto references, so the elements that seem like pure fantasy to American audiences probably make it more of a religiously-themed movie for the Japanese. It’s not only the best anime film ever made, it’s one of the best films ever made in any category.
The Believer shows how religion can stay embedded within us even when we try to reject it — and that an obsession with fighting a belief system stems from an impulse that’s not too far removed from faith and acceptance.
The list also represents my inordinate fascination with Mormon movies, even if the connection is tangential (like the brief appearance of gun-toting Mormon thugs in The Book of Life, or the fact that the star of The Believer grew up in a Mormon family). I’ve become hopelessly addicted to “Big Love” on HBO, and I might well be inclined to put States of Grace (Richard Dutcher, 2005) on the list, I’ve spent so much time following Dutcher’s career for the last several years. But there’s no getting around the fact that Dutcher’s movies released to date aren’t quite ready for prime-time (despite the fact that each is better than the last, and they’re all light years better than just about anything else in the fledgling “Mormon cinema” trend). Dutcher’s films are also likely to be seen by outsiders as vehicles for proselyting, at least a little — even though he’s left the church.
Bash: Latter-Day Plays was written, staged, and then filmed while LaBute was still a Mormon. A convert during his days as a theater major at BYU, Bash takes an unflinching look at some disturbing cultural traits LaBute saw in some of his fellow students. Belief can lead to an in-group/out-group dichotomy that can make it easier for some people to fail to recognize the humanity in outsiders.
And last (but not last), Frailty hit home for me because of my own religious background. A lot of Mormons were upset about Jon Krakauer’s book Under the Banner of Heaven, because he suggested that certain violent episodes in the history of the church — both the mainstream group and splinter groups — stemmed from an integral part of the religion. When I saw Frailty, I immediately thought of the Lafferty brothers, polygamists who left the mainstream church and had a “revelation” that God wanted them to kill a disapproving sister-in-law, her baby daughter, and a couple other people. Frailty came a few years before Krakauer’s book, but I made a similar connection when seeing it.
To my mind, there’s no question that Krakauer’s thesis was at least partly correct. Close to the beginning of The Book of Mormon, we have the story of Nephi and Laban. Nephi’s father, having had a vision that Jerusalem would be destroyed, took his family to live in the wilderness. Not long after they left, he sent his sons back to talk to a local rich guy named Laban, to retrieve from him the “brass plates” — which supposedly contained the books of Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and some other stuff that didn’t survive to become part of the eventual Old Testament (Zenos, Zenock, and Neum, for those keeping score). The Lord had told them they needed the writings of the prophets for their journey.
Laban wasn’t having it. They asked for the plates; he said no. They tried to buy the plates; he took their payment and kicked them out, plateless. Nephi’s brothers were ready to give up. Then Nephi, “led by the spirit,” came across a drunk man lying on the ground who turned out to be Laban.
The spirit tells Nephi to kill Laban. Nephi demurs, having never killed anybody before. The spirit insists: “Slay him, for the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands; Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes. It is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.”
So Nephi lops off Laban’s head, dresses up in his clothes, fools Laban’s servant, and makes off with the brass plates.
This is the tension at work in Frailty. Your dad tells you the Lord has revealed to him that he should start killing people to fulfill a higher purpose. Is he crazy? Is it an actual revelation? The movie doesn’t let us off easy. We can say with confidence that we believe people like the Lafferty brothers to be crazy, but all indications are that they were sincere in their belief that God wanted them to kill a couple of relatives.
In modern Mormonism, there’s an interesting dynamic between the church’s structure of top-down, hierarchical leadership and the religion’s focus on the ability to receive personal revelation. The structure of the church may keep potential crazies in check more than would be the case with breakoffs like the Laffertys, but still…
When I was in seminary during high school, in the year we spent focusing on The Book of Mormon, the first verse of scripture we were asked to commit to memory was 1 Nephi 3:7:
“And it came to pass that I, Nephi, said unto my father: I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them.”
This is one of the best-known Book of Mormon scriptures in the church, although I believe Mormons think of it out of context most of the time — considering it simply a powerful statement about faith and obedience. But the context is bleak — it’s the prelude to Nephi’s murder of Laban. Killing a man is the way that the Lord prepared for him.
The idea is there, in a fundamental portion of Mormon theology, that God can decide he wants you to kill somebody to accomplish a greater mission — and in a more personal sense than most of the God-approved killing in the Old Testament.
Although religion may discourage some forms of rigorous thought, I don’t think it creates insanity where there was none before (although I grant there may be exceptions). Religion may, however, give that insanity an extra sense of confidence and purpose.
And, Frailty asks, what if that insanity isn’t really insanity at all? Chilling stuff.
There are also a few movies I’d want to include just for the sake of seeing them represented by anyone at all — Malcolm X; Saved!; Cremaster 2; Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones; South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut; Orgazmo; Salome’s Last Dance; Heaven Can Wait; Defending Your Life; The Ten; even The Devil and Max Devlin and Oh God, You Devil (Bill Cosby, Elliot Gould, and then George Burns in dual roles! I haven’t seen these last two since I was about eight years old, though).
