Changeling plus Changing Our Views of Movies and/or Sermons!

My (*spoilers included*) Response to yet another Manifestation of Clint's (recovered) Call(ing)!
















































Loved it, in part because the pacing and ending were quite different from what one typically expects from movies (especially Hollywood movies)... It was real, not just based on a real story. It, not unlike Million Dollar Baby or Mystic River, dealt with the theme of gratuitous suffering. Angela Jolie plays a single mother, Christine Collins, in the 20s in Los Angeles, CA who struggles immensely with the corrupt LA police department after they bungle their attempt at finding her missing son and who chooses to suffer on behalf of her son. Changeling offers no pat answers to Jolie's sufferings from the loss of her son, although others offer quite a few, even suggesting that the Lord works in mysterious ways....

Instead, it offers a subtle critique of hell-speak, lovingly coupled with an affirmation of hope. Clint relates beliefs back to their consequences. The doctrine of hell may have evoked the fear of dying in the likely murderer but it didn't burst his self-centered bubble and, because of his fear of hell, Jolie's character remained tormented by a lack of closure. Finally, It was not an explicit theology of the afterlife that gave her peace; it was the knowledge that her son had done the right thing, risking his own life to save another. This affirmed that she had been a good mother and that because of that, others would not need to suffer so much. The hope caused by selflessness applies equally to her social activism against the corruption that made the LA police refuse to admit that they made a mistake. It doesn't matter that clearly this reform only dealt with the problem of corruption in part (as evidenced later by the beating of Rodney King by LA police officers). But the fact that the institutions were not "converted" is not the point! The point is that it, sadly, took the tragedy depicted in Changeling to move people in Los Angeles to reform their institutions, but then things evidently went back to "business as normal", such that the seeds of Rodney King's beating came from our failure to sustain reform.

I highly recommend the interview with Angela Jolie about her character. Like with Appaloosa, the concern was to avoid revisionism and to be as true as possible to the way the people were back then. Jolie's interviewer actually tries to elicit a confession of a quasi-conversion out of her. He wants to know how she personally was impacted by portraying the character. Angela points out how different she is from the character, who strives to respect all authority, even when it is apparent that the respect likely is not deserved. Jolie, like most of us in the post-Vietnam/Watergate USAmerica, is far more brash and aggressive. However, the movie Changeling seems to suggest that it's not our "in your face" willingness to rebel against authority but rather a commitment to Truth, Love and a willingness to suffer that empowers us to change our world.

I watched this movie after I arrived too late to make a Saturday Night service. The movie impacted me though in similar way as a good sermon does. As such I now view and treat "good" movies in the same way I view "good" sermons. They are not unlike the long sermons Puritans would listen to early on in US history, albeit with our attention sustained through the infusion of considerable ear and eye-candy... This also gives me hope, as how many people who never go to church are serious film buffs? Quite a few, and so we've not truly been as "secularized" as our changing conventions would seem to suggest. We've just lost track of how the radically transcultural "Good News" can be communicated in many ways across many mediums.

dlw