This Review Reveals Minor Details About the Plot.
Go West, Young Man.
Plot Overview
Here Lincoln is home to the University
of Southern Nebraska whose residents are football fans, not the
least of which is the family of foxy Frances Jones (Zooey Deschanel)
who declaims, “I hate football,” but whose dad is
a cultural icon in the sport. Furthermore, Frances being the
remaining singer in a family group—after they lost her older
sister—is a minor celebrity in her own right. Her mother/manager
gave her pills to help her cope with the rigors of travel and charity
concerts. She also fell into the habit of shining on her audience
with half-truths and outright lies after she discovered they
readily believed her every word. In an attempt to live a normal life,
she got married two years ago, after telling her guy who knows what.
He was dissatisfied with what he got and fell into homosexual sin and
got caught. She divorced him a year ago. Now her family has granted her a
leave from singing in order to recover. She has taken to going to the
Capitol theater in town to watch old movies with show tunes.
Strictly small
potatoes is 25-year-old Jason Prayer (Mark Webber) whose dad was a
cop who lost it from dealing with all the crazies on the job and offed
himself. Jason still lives with his mom Diane (Deborah Rush)
in a rundown dwelling. He pumps gas by day, and by night he works
at the Capitol theater that can't afford new movies so they stick with
vintage. He strikes up a conversation with the aforementioned
Frances who declares they are soul mates and initiates a slow-burn
relationship with him, she being more sexually mature for having been
married. Their mutual solace and encouragement helps them grow until they
can move on to what's next.
Ideology
TGL provides us a map embedded in the plot: “It's the
road ahead and the road behind. It's the first step and the last and every
one in between, because they all make up the good life.” It follows
(Prov. 30:24) “There be four
things which are little upon the earth, but they are exceeding wise:”
(Prov. 30:25)
“The ants are a people not strong, yet they prepare their meat in the
summer.” The first step is to get busy while young, in the summer of
life, with an eye to future provision. Frances started singing when she was
five, her role model Judy Garland at eight. Gus (Harry Dean Stanton) the
old coot who owns the theater “started working here as an usher when
I was 14-years-old.” Jason started there in high school. His nemesis
Tad Tokas (Chris Klein) “starts as defensive tackle at Lincoln
high” and becomes “Number one high school draft choice to a
college of my choice.” Well, whoop-de-doo! Everyone got started
on the right foot. What could go wrong?
(Prov. 30:26) “The conies are but a feeble folk, yet make they their houses in the rocks.” The next step is location, being situated in a place conducive to thriving in one's field. This screen Nebraska is an offshoot of the wild and wooly west. The coach has it, “We're gonna attack as aggressively as possible.” A billboard ad has them blasting away their opponents above the caption, “Guns don't kill people; we do.” Jason's place in this setting is like one in a Ralph Cotton western:
He'd been small and frail as a child, and unlike other boys his age in the territory, he'd never adjusted to this harsh land. It was not his fault, and it most certainly wasn't his choosing. He simply wasn't right for this place and time, and he knew it. He was a timid young man, and this world frightened him. It always had.Sure, he could handle a horse if he had to—and if it was well saddle-broken. He could chop wood. He could do most of the things that ordinary life here on the desert frontier required of him. But these things were not part of his makeup. They did not come naturally to him as they should have.
Jimmy kept this way of life at arm's length as much as possible. His father had always called him a fingertip worker—this in a world carved out by and for the two-fisted, the rough and tumblers of this wild young land. (37)
Sure, he could pump gas and pop popcorn, but when an irate customer, two years his junior, started a fist fight, Jason lost it on the first blow (“Baby bitch took only one punch.”) Jason laments, “I hope to leave here someday, … but like the snowflakes trapped inside a snow globe, I wasn't going anywhere.” He's a snowflake in the desert, not protected like the conies.
(Prov. 30:27) “The locusts have no king, yet go they forth all of them by bands.” The next step on the road to success is to cultivate an informal support network. When a crisis at the theater forced Jason to miss his bus, and he couldn't reach his family on the phone, a sympathetic patron Robbie (Bill Paxton) offered him a ride home. Tad the “psycho,” on the other hand, was unable to form any kind of alliances, even his sister tried to sabotage his prize muscle car, and nobody has picked him now five years out of high school. He was stuck where he was (“Some of your aspirations are unrealistic considering you live in Nebraska.”)
(Prov. 30:28) “The spider taketh hold with her hands, and is in kings' palaces.” Those palaces get dusted regularly, but the spider keeps giving it another shot and his web is up the next day. Sure, your dreams fall through, but that's the nature of the game. Give it another go; that's how to succeed. Frances ought to give singing another chance.
She does sing a beautiful rendition of
“The Sunny Side of the Street” to Gus whose health is on the
decline, but with the right attitude he's living the good life as is a
darky in the movie, “The Harvey Girls” shown doing a soft-shoe
number as happy as can be though he's working in the service sector.
Production Values
“” (2007) was written and directed by Stephen Berra. It stars Mark Webber, Zooey Deschanel, Harry Dean Stanton and Bill Paxton. The acting was good for an indie film. Especially noteworthy was Mark Webber who played Jason.
MPA rated it R for
language. Jason's family & friends had rather perverse customs of
gift-giving involving practical jokes often in poor taste. They even
infringed on cultural norms of: Peter Pan, The Easter Bunny, the tooth
fairy, Santa Claus, and the apostle Paul. This latter warrants some detail.
The minister eulogized Jason's dad with words (Romans 5:3-4) from the New International Version
Bible (NIV)
comforting the mourners for their “sufferings” rather
than for their “tribulations” found in the King James
Version (KJV.) The updated
version would explain Jason's strong reaction to his mom taking up
with Fred who bought her some cowgirl boots for to join him in
dancing at a club. Jason was a churchgoer as was his whole family,
we assume, but not Fred.
Paul rightly commanded, (2Cor. 6:14) “Be ye not unequally yoked
together with unbelievers.” That means Christians shouldn't
mix their church services with pagan practices. Fred's go-go dancers
would have no place there. The plural pronoun “ye” applies
to such congregations and group settings. There is no singular
pronoun thou or thee, which would apply to an
individual marriage, nor does Paul anywhere else prohibit
a mixed marriage. It's even clearer in the Greek, but we do our best
in English with the KJV.
Modern translators to make English versions more palatable have substituted you for thee and thou and you and ye. They still call them “formal equivalent” translations, i.e. word for word, but apart from the KJV dialect there is no distinction in second person pronouns between singular and plural—unless one wanted to tap into some southern dialect. So they read something along the line of “Be not unequally yoked” leaving the you-understood undefined-number save by context that nobody reads.
The NIV translators have gone to a “dynamic translation” philosophy, which consists of meaning for meaning rather than word for word. That means they specify in common lingo their ideas of what the text said rather than what's explicit in its words. To their minds this you was singular as well as plural. That colors other of their passages, as well. The apostle Paul allows a widow to marry any (eligible) man she wants to, just so she doesn't backslide in the process (i.e. she remains in the Lord), (1Cor. 7:39) “The wife … if her husband be dead, is at liberty to be married to whom she will; only in the Lord.” The NIV translators have by their lights reworked the adverbial phrase “only in the Lord,” modifying the action of entering into matrimoney, into a new adjectival one modifying the intended, “but he must belong to the Lord.” They have made up words to fit their own ideas. With this supposed prohibition against a mixed marriage, Jason is dead set against his mom taking up with Fred. But the romance is not developed beyond this tension here; in the movie it's used for another example of a person, a minister no less, on stage playing fast and loose with the truth.
The show tunes where found were divine. Don Davis also contributed some effective music. It was filmed on location in Manitoba, Canada. Runtime is 1½ hours.
Review Conclusion w/a Christian's Recommendation
Here is an unfolding
drama of people seeking the good life whose success seems to depend
on whether they have wisdom one can read of in the proverbs. Charlie Chaplin's soliloquy
projected in “The Great
Dictator” suggests the good life should be open to all,
Jews, Gentiles, blacks, whomever, but part of that has to do with
contentment with what one has. It touts horse sense rather than movie
magic. It is what it is. Go for it if that's what you like.
Movie Ratings
Action Factor: Weak action scenes. Suitability For Children: Not Suitable for Children of Any Age. Special effects: Average special effects. Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day. Suspense: A few suspenseful moments. Overall movie rating: Three stars out of five.
Works Cited
Unless otherwise noted, scripture was quoted from the King James Version. Pub. 1611, rev. 1769. Software.
Cotton, Ralph W. Justice. Copyright © Ralph Cotton, 1999. New York:Signet Books, 1999. Print.
Scripture quotations marked NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION or NIV are taken from the
HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION.
Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society.
Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. From memory & print.
bibles.n7nz.org