Brad Pitt as Billy Beane in Moneyball. Image © Sony Pictures Releasing

Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) sits brooding in the empty Oakland Coliseum stadium. He switches on his radio to listen for a few moments to the commentary of a baseball game, [...] No related posts.]]>

This article was first published on Culturewatch. © Tony Watkins, 2011

Brad Pitt as Billy Beane in Moneyball. Image © Sony Pictures Releasing

Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) sits brooding in the empty Oakland Coliseum stadium. He switches on his radio to listen for a few moments to the commentary of a baseball game, then turns it off. It’s only moments before he turns it on again. Off. On. Off. A little later, as Billy sits in his truck, it is clear from the snatches of commentary that the Oakland A’s have lost the match. He hurls the radio out of the window into the rain before climbing out of the truck to angrily stamp on it. It’s October 2001, and the A’s, the team for which Beane is general manager, has just lost the American League play-offs to the New York Yankees. The problem, as Beane sees it, is that the wealthy teams can pay huge salaries to buy the best players, leaving modestly funded teams like the A’s unable to compete on equal terms. And straight after the play-offs, those rich teams rub salt in Beane’s wound by poaching his star players. It’s a classic sporting underdog story. Bennett Miller’s engaging Moneyball, written by Aaron Sorkin (reworking an earlier script by Steven Zaillian), is based on a non-fiction book of the same name by Michael Lewis which explains how a statistical approach to baseball, developed by Bill James, transformed the game, starting with Billy Beane’s 2002 team. The arc of the film is, therefore, familiar – in that the story is about the changing fortunes of a losing team – yet also refreshingly unfamiliar in that the focus is on changing attitudes rather than achieving success.

The solution is obvious: the A’s needs more money. ‘I can’t compete against a hundred and twenty million payroll with thirty eight million dollars,’ Beane complains to the team’s co-owner, Steve Schott (Robert Kotick). But Schott insists, ‘We’re going to work with the constraints that we have. . . . I’m asking you to take a deep breath, shake off the loss, get back in a room with your guys and figure out how to find replacements for the guys we lost with the money that we do have.’ Billy is ambitious, determined, and haunted by the spectre of failure. So if the obvious solution is not an option, he will need to find another approach. By the time he meets with his scouts to consider players for next season, he has concluded that the game is fundamentally unfair because it all comes down to money. And he knows that the conventional ways of assessing the worth of a player are flawed. As a young man, Billy had turned down a scholarship to Stanford in favour of joining the New York Mets because, the scouts had said, he had the makings of a baseball superstar. Only it hadn’t happened. All Beane’s promise as a player had come to nothing; the scouts had been wrong. Now, he is certain, they must think differently.

The difficulty is always how to find a significantly different perspective. How are we looking at things within the wrong framework? How can challenges be approached in a different way? Louis Pasteur once noted, ‘chance favours only the prepared mind,’ so when Billy Beane meets with his opposite number at the Cleveland Indians, his mind is ready to notice the discreet influence of one of their front office team: Peter Brand (Jonah Hill). After the meeting, Beane quizzes Brand about his role, and discovers that this young economist, just out of Yale, has precisely the alternative perspective that the A’s need. ‘There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening,’ he says, ‘and this leads people who run major league baseball teams to misjudge their players and mismanage their teams. . . . Baseball thinking is medieval. They’re asking all the wrong questions and if I say it to anybody I’m ostracized.’

Beane wastes no time in recruiting Brand as his assistant so that the young man can bring his mathematical approach to finding players. ‘We’ll find the value of players that nobody else can see,’ he tells his new boss. ‘People are overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws: age, appearance, personality. Of the 20,000 notable players for us to consider, I believe there’s a championship team of 25 people that we can afford because everyone else in baseball undervalues them. Like an island of misfit toys.’ Together, the two men identify a number of players whose careers had been all but written off, or who were considered almost worthless. But in everyone else’s mind, it is a completely wrong-headed approach; Billy is ignoring years of accumulated wisdom in favour of some economist’s computer projections.

Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill in Moneyball. Image © Sony Pictures Releasing

Sport is a rich source of metaphors for life, and the central thread of Moneyball reflects the way in which the value we place on people is so often subjective and superficial. Peter Brand, for example, is the sort of person who is often undervalued: far from being athletic and cool, he is overweight, diffident and nerdy. One of Beane’s new acquisitions, Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), was considered of no value after an injury to a nerve in his elbow, but Beane and Brand knew that he still had immense value – if he learnt new skills to play in a new position. The Oakland A’s as a whole was looked down on as a hard-up team (especially when Beane signed up a collection of ‘losers’), but once each individual’s specific contribution was properly recognised, it became a powerful force which could give the rich teams a run for their money.

Billy learns to re-evaluate himself as well as others. He comes to understand that his unsuccessful career in baseball was a result of being swept along by other people’s views of what he could and should be. He comes to think differently about what really has value in life, and when he is faced with a similar choice to the one he faced as a teenager, he takes a radically different decision. Having been in a situation of desperation, he was forced to look at things differently, and, with Peter’s help, he learns to look beyond the obvious to the things that really matter.

The real value of a person is not on the surface, in baseball or in life. Indeed, the true worth of a person as a person, rather than as a baseball player, is not revealed by any statistical analysis, but by what they do, how they speak and behave towards others, how they respond to adversity, and a host of other actions that we might easily overlook in a world preoccupied with money, status and looks. As Jesus noted, ‘A tree is identified by its fruit. Figs are never gathered from thorn bushes, and grapes are not picked from bramble bushes. A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart. What you say flows from what is in your heart’ (Luke 6:44–45). Billy finally recognises that his worth does not lie in achieving victory in the play-offs, but in who he is: what he contributes to the team as a whole and, even more, his role as a father. From a Christian perspective, one would want him to go even further and discover that his true worth is found in his standing with God, but he nevertheless becomes a more rounded human being who has discovered the immense value of looking beyond the surface. Whether he is aware of it or not, his approach actually reflects that of God, who ‘chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful’ (1 Corinthians 1:27). There’s a warning, and an encouragement, in this for all of us: the value this world puts on people is, all too often, a result of looking at things from the wrong perspective altogether.

Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) sits brooding in the empty Oakland Coliseum stadium. He switches on his radio to listen for a few moments to the commentary of a baseball game, then turns it off. It’s only moments before he turns it on again. Off. On. Off. A little later, as Billy sits in his truck, it is clear from the snatches of commentary that the Oakland A’s have lost the match. He hurls the radio out of the window into the rain before climbing out of the truck to angrily stamp on it. It’s October 2001, and the A’s, the team for which Beane is general manager, has just lost the American League play-offs to the New York Yankees. The problem, as Beane sees it, is that the wealthy teams can pay huge salaries to buy the best players, leaving modestly funded teams like the A’s unable to compete on equal terms. And straight after the play-offs, those rich teams rub salt in Beane’s wound by poaching his star players. It’s a classic sporting underdog story. Bennett Miller’s engaging Moneyball, written by Aaron Sorkin (reworking an earlier script by Steven Zaillian), is based on a non-fiction book of the same name by Michael Lewis which explains how a statistical approach to baseball, developed by Bill James, transformed the game, starting with Billy Beane’s 2002 team. The arc of the film is, therefore, familiar – in that the story is about the changing fortunes of a losing team – yet also refreshingly unfamiliar in that the focus is on changing attitudes rather than achieving success.

The solution is obvious: the A’s needs more money. ‘I can’t compete against a hundred and twenty million payroll with thirty eight million dollars,’ Beane complains to the team’s co-owner, Steve Schott (Robert Kotick). But Schott insists, ‘We’re going to work with the constraints that we have. . . . I’m asking you to take a deep breath, shake off the loss, get back in a room with your guys and figure out how to find replacements for the guys we lost with the money that we do have.’ Billy is ambitious, determined, and haunted by the spectre of failure. So if the obvious solution is not an option, he will need to find another approach. By the time he meets with his scouts to consider players for next season, he has concluded that the game is fundamentally unfair because it all comes down to money. And he knows that the conventional ways of assessing the worth of a player are flawed. As a young man, Billy had turned down a scholarship to Stanford in favour of joining the New York Mets because, the scouts had said, he had the makings of a baseball superstar. Only it hadn’t happened. All Beane’s promise as a player had come to nothing; the scouts had been wrong. Now, he is certain, they must think differently.

The difficulty is always how to find a significantly different perspective. How are we looking at things within the wrong framework? How can challenges be approached in a different way? Louis Pasteur once noted, ‘chance favours only the prepared mind,’ so when Billy Beane meets with his opposite number at the Cleveland Indians, his mind is ready to notice the discreet influence of one of their front office team: Peter Brand (Jonah Hill). After the meeting, Beane quizzes Brand about his role, and discovers that this young economist, just out of Yale, has precisely the alternative perspective that the A’s need. ‘There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening,’ he says, ‘and this leads people who run major league baseball teams to misjudge their players and mismanage their teams. . . . Baseball thinking is medieval. They’re asking all the wrong questions and if I say it to anybody I’m ostracized.’

Beane wastes no time in recruiting Brand as his assistant so that the young man can bring his mathematical approach to finding players. ‘We’ll find the value of players that nobody else can see,’ he tells his new boss. ‘People are overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws: age, appearance, personality. Of the 20,000 notable players for us to consider, I believe there’s a championship team of 25 people that we can afford because everyone else in baseball undervalues them. Like an island of misfit toys.’ Together, the two men identify a number of players whose careers had been all but written off, or who were considered almost worthless. But in everyone else’s mind, it is a completely wrong-headed approach; Billy is ignoring years of accumulated wisdom in favour of some economist’s computer projections.

Image © Sony Pictures Releasing

Sport is a rich source of metaphors for life, and the central thread of Moneyball reflects the way in which the value we place on people is so often subjective and superficial. Peter Brand, for example, is the sort of person who is often undervalued: far from being athletic and cool, he is overweight, diffident and nerdy. One of Beane’s new acquisitions, Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), was considered of no value after an injury to a nerve in his elbow, but Beane and Brand knew that he still had immense value – if he learnt new skills to play in a new position. The Oakland A’s as a whole was looked down on as a hard-up team (especially when Beane signed up a collection of ‘losers’), but once each individual’s specific contribution was properly recognised, it became a powerful force which could give the rich teams a run for their money.

Billy learns to re-evaluate himself as well as others. He comes to understand that his unsuccessful career in baseball was a result of being swept along by other people’s views of what he could and should be. He comes to think differently about what really has value in life, and when he is faced with a similar choice to the one he faced as a teenager, he takes a radically different decision. Having been in a situation of desperation, he was forced to look at things differently, and, with Peter’s help, he learns to look beyond the obvious to the things that really matter.

The real value of a person is not on the surface, in baseball or in life. Indeed, the true worth of a person as a person, rather than as a baseball player, is not revealed by any statistical analysis, but by what they do, how they speak and behave towards others, how they respond to adversity, and a host of other actions that we might easily overlook in a world preoccupied with money, status and looks. As Jesus noted, ‘A tree is identified by its fruit. Figs are never gathered from thorn bushes, and grapes are not picked from bramble bushes. A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart. What you say flows from what is in your heart’ (Luke 6:44–45). Billy finally recognises that his worth does not lie in achieving victory in the play-offs, but in who he is: what he contributes to the team as a whole and, even more, his role as a father. From a Christian perspective, one would want him to go even further and discover that his true worth is found in his standing with God, but he nevertheless becomes a more rounded human being who has discovered the immense value of looking beyond the surface. Whether he is aware of it or not, his approach actually reflects that of God, who ‘chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful’ (1 Corinthians 1:27). There’s a warning, and an encouragement, in this for all of us: the value this world puts on people is, all too often, a result of looking at things from the wrong perspective altogether.

No related posts.

Craig Roberts in Submarine (image courtesy Optimum Releasing. © 2011)

‘Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.’ Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) would probably agree with Tom Stoppard’s wry comment. Oliver is fifteen years old and anxious to be grown up, yet struggling with [...] No related posts.]]>

This article was first published on Culturewatch. 

Craig Roberts in Submarine (image courtesy Optimum Releasing. © 2011)

‘Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.’ Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) would probably agree with Tom Stoppard’s wry comment. Oliver is fifteen years old and anxious to be grown up, yet struggling with the transition to adulthood. He’s a rather serious boy, full of both the self-importance and the insecurity of youth, and desperate to feel like he really belongs in the world. This desperation is a prominent feature in the landscape of adolescent experience. But Oliver feels it particularly keenly as he struggles with social isolation at school and frets about his parents’ (Noah Taylor and Sally Hawkins) marital problems.

Like many teenagers, Oliver is insecure about his identity, not yet sure what kind of person he really is. In a voiceover at the outset of Richard Ayoade’s sharply observed and slightly surreal film, based on Joe Dunthorne’s novel, Oliver says, ‘Most people think of themselves as individuals, that there’s no-one on the planet like them. This thought motivates them to get out of bed, eat food and walk around like nothing’s wrong. My name is Oliver Tate.’ He knows he is different from others of his age, but we soon realise that he senses plenty wrong with his own personal world. We first see him daydreaming in a lesson in which his teacher challenges the class to deliberate on the question, ‘Who am I?’ Later, Oliver reflects:

I don’t quite know what I am yet. I’ve tried smoking a pipe, flipping coins, listening exclusively to French crooners. Other times I go to the beach and stare at the sea. Someone made a documentary about a prominent thinker who struggled with unspeakable loss. I’ve even had a brief hat phase. But nothing stuck.

A sense of identity is not something that we form in isolation from others, however. Oliver must work out for himself what kind of person he is, but, like all of us, he can only do so in relation to others with whom his life intersects. He fantasises about being respected and adored by his peers, and about being somehow greater than ordinary human beings. He imagines himself as the subject of a film documentary, and daydreams about how the news of his death would shake, not just his school, but the whole country:

I find that the only way to get through life is to picture myself in an entirely disconnected reality. I often imagine how people would react to my death. Mr Dunthorne’s quavering voice as he makes the announcement. The shocked faces of my classmates. A playground bedecked with flowers. The empty stillness of a school corridor. Local news analysis. . . . The steady stoicism of my parents. . . . Candlelit vigils. . . . And finally, my glorious resurrection.

Oliver may have a particularly dramatic imagination, but he voices the yearning to belong which everyone feels. Psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs sees only physiological requirements and the need for physical security as more basic than the need to belong and be loved. But Oliver makes a common error and confuses this desire with his hunger for physical intimacy. He badly wants to lose his virginity, and has his eye on Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige), an abrasive, sullen pyromaniac who is also rather a loner. He is so desperate to win her approval that he joins in the bullying of a classmate, though he feels guilty for doing so. As is so often the case, mistreatment of others stems from personal insecurity and the drive to be seen as powerful in the eyes of others. The tactic seems to have worked when Jordana tells him to meet her secretly after school, and to bring a diary and a Polaroid camera. Yet Oliver’s self-doubt and confusion is reinforced by the realisation that Jordana is toying with him.

Craig Roberts and Yasmin Paige in Submarine (image courtesy Optimum Releasing, © 2011)

Although a strange kind of bond develops between Oliver and Jordana, his world becomes even more precarious when he realises that Graham (Paddy Considine), the New Age motivational speaker who has moved in next door, was his mother’s first love. Oliver decides that his mission is to save his parents’ marriage, at least partly because in doing so he can save his sense of who he is. Whatever changes he may have wanted in his relationships at school now fade away in comparison to his desperation for his world to stay as it was. ‘I don’t want a mystic ninja as a stepdad,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to be from a broken home like Chip’s . . . I want my family back. I don’t want anything to change.’ Hampering his mission, though, is the impossibility of discerning what is actually going in another person’s mind and heart. Oliver says:

Tonight I stumbled across an encyclopaedia entry on ultrasound. Ultrasound is a sound vibration too high frequency to be audible. It was first developed to locate submerged objects – submarines, depth charges, Atlantis and such. Some animals, like bats, dolphins and dogs, can hear within the ultrasonic frequency. But no human can. No one can truly know what anyone thinks or feels. What’s inside Mum? What’s inside Dad? What’s inside Jordana? We’re all travelling under the radar undetected. And no-one can do a thing about it.

The famous developmental psychologist Erik Erikson outlines eight stages of human development, the fifth of which is adolescence. He argues that the key crisis at this stage is that of identity (he is credited with coining the term ‘identity crisis’) and confusion about roles in life, as teenagers struggle to work out their own intentions and those of others. He says that the main question which adolescents grapple with is, ‘Who am I and where am I going?’ This question burns at the core of Oliver’s existential crisis, but it is fuelled by the realisation that his solid home is suddenly fragile.

Submarine repeatedly uses water as a metaphor for the feeling that life is overwhelming, particularly in one surreal sequence when Oliver despairs of resolving his situation. When his father Lloyd sinks into depression, Oliver asks him what it feels like. ‘Like being underwater,’ replies Lloyd, prompting Oliver to ask, ‘Is that why you became a marine biologist?’ Water may also function as a metaphor for Oliver’s perplexity about his identity. If so, the two would be closely related: the sense of being swamped by life compounds his uncertainty at the very time when he most needs to know who he really is.

This growing up story appeals strongly to viewers. As well as being very funny, skilfully directed, and with fine acting performances, perhaps Submarine also connects with our own uncertainty about life. The question of ‘who am I and where am I going?’ is no longer one only asked by adolescents, but one which puzzles many people. Indeed, our society as a whole sometimes seems so bothered by the question that it’s tempting to see our culture as, in some sense, adolescent. It’s a burning question, yet many of the things which might once have provided firm foundations for answering it now seem flimsy and vulnerable. It’s a question which is right at the heart of most religions. Christianity, in particular, provides not only an answer to it, but a comprehensive explanation of why the question is such a vexed one so often.

In the Christian worldview, our identity is grounded in the fact that we are created by God, in the image of God, to be in relationship with God. The biblical understanding of human beings is that we, uniquely, are both physical and spiritual, and that while we are disconnected from God, we are inevitably failing to discover our true identity. But the Bible also recounts the dreadful facts of human rebellion against God, so that our default state is one of rejecting or ignoring God. As a consequence, our human relationships are compromised since, on the one hand, we expect other people to meet all our needs while, on the other hand, we let people down, or abuse or exploit them again and again. We end up trying to define our identity in relation to other people, yet we are all broken and damaged. It’s no wonder that we struggle.

The biblical story, though, isn’t a pessimistic catalogue of despair at our brokenness; it also offers us the hope of finding a new identity in relationship with God through faith in his son, Jesus Christ, who died and rose again in order to reunite us with God. The consequence of that is a new destination in life: no longer need we be condemned to drift through life, alienated from God and doomed to separation from him for ever. Instead, the Bible anticipates the day when God will renew his creation, purifying it from all that corrupts this present order so that the redeemed humanity can live in an intimate relationship with God for ever.

This is a story that both makes sense of who we are now and holds out to us the possibility of us discovering our true identity and ultimate destiny. None of this is on Oliver’s radar – or sonar. He says, ‘No one can truly know what anyone thinks or feels. . . . We’re all travelling under the radar undetected. And no one can do a thing about it.’ No human can, for sure. Except the one human being who was also fully God: Jesus Christ. We cannot define ourselves; we cannot rescue ourselves. Until we realise that God is reaching down to us, we’re all sinking under the waves.

No related posts.

Peter Mullan as Joseph in 'Tyrannosaur' (dir. Paddy Considine). Image courtesy of StudioCanal.

Life in a broken world is deeply unjust. Some people breeze through life with material security, happy marriages and hardly a care in the world. Others struggle through every [...] No related posts.]]>

This article was first published on Culturewatch. 

Peter Mullan as Joseph in 'Tyrannosaur' (dir. Paddy Considine). Image courtesy of StudioCanal.

Life in a broken world is deeply unjust. Some people breeze through life with material security, happy marriages and hardly a care in the world. Others struggle through every miserable day. The central character in Paddy Considine’s astonishing and harrowing debut as writer-director, Joseph (Peter Mullan), is a struggler. Living on a sink estate in Leeds with only his dog for company, he spends his time in pubs and betting shops. We first hear, rather than see, him in a betting shop, roaring and bellowing with rage while his dog is tied up outside. Fuelled by booze, and boiling over with fury, Joseph unleashes his anger upon the first thing he sees as he stumbles out of the door. His boot connects with his dog with a sickening thud, and the reality of what he’s just done knocks all the wind out of him. The next day, Joseph hurls a brick through the window of the Pakistani-run post office after being banned for his abusive behaviour, and then gets into a brawl with three lads in the pub.

When the lads turn on Joseph, he flees and takes refuge behind a clothing rail in a charity shop, to the surprise of Hannah (Olivia Colman), who runs the shop. She offers him tea and prayer.  When Joseph remains silent, she asks God to touch him, and thanks God for bringing him there for a purpose. Joseph, crouching behind the coats, quietly weeps. The next morning, Hannah finds him, badly beaten, asleep outside the shop. ‘I prayed for you last night,’ Hannah tells him, but Joseph is dismissive: ‘It didn’t ******* work. . . . I don’t think he heard you, love.’ She presses him to explain why he has returned to the shop: ‘Do you want God to forgive you for something?’ she inquires. Joseph laughs bitterly: ‘I don’t want anything.’ ‘God loves you,’ she tells him. Joseph’s anger and hatred towards God come pouring out. He hurls abuse at Hannah, sneering at her middle class life, and questioning both her faith and her motivation for working in the shop. Afterwards, Joseph is appalled at his behaviour, asking himself, ‘What the **** is wrong with you?’ He returns to the shop the following day to apologise, they go for a drink, and Joseph asks Hannah to pray for his friend whose death is imminent.

Hannah’s life is far from the untroubled existence which Joseph imagines, however. Her husband, James (Eddie Marsan), may appear charming and pleasant to most of the world, but in the privacy of his own home he is an abusive monster. When he grills her about why she wasn’t in the shop that day and why she was seen with a man, she ends up with a black eye. Later, he too is full of regret over his actions and cries, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me. . . . I don’t deserve you. . . . I prayed to God but he doesn’t hear me.’ Hannah’s life spirals out of control, driving her to take refuge with Joseph. The unlikely, but deeply touching, relationship between Joseph and Hannah is brilliantly portrayed by Peter Mullan and Olivia Colman. Colman, in particular, delivers an extraordinary performance. Peter Mullan remarks that ‘Olivia had by far the most difficult part, because on the one hand she’s playing someone who has a certain social face, that she has to put on, and then also has to keep her private misery behind that mask. That’s a more difficult part than what Eddie and I had to do. To pitch that role is difficult, because on the one hand you’ve got to be someone who is a credible human being with a relatively straightforward life, but inside there’s this terrific turmoil from the abuse she’s suffering. I think she’s astounding.’

Olivia Colman as Hannah and Peter Mullan as Joseph in 'Tyrannosaur' (dir. Paddy Considine). Image courtesy of StudioCanal.

It is very interesting that Paddy Considine chose to have a Christian as one of his main characters, though it’s very hard to know what he really thinks about faith. The inspiration for Hannah came from Considine’s research for his role as a Christian in Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2004 film, My Summer of Love:

As I was doing my research, I found out about this charity shop, and how people would come in drunk and just vent their anger at the volunteers. One of the women would close the door and pray for them; a lot of the time she’d be afraid but she had this faith that overrode everything. She’d pray for these people and they’d come back day-on-day, oftentimes quite sober and apologetic. That shop became like a haven, and she was the sort of person who attracted these kinds of people.

There is a sense in which, as a Christian, Hannah embodies the idea of redemption. Her faith is no naïve wish-fulfilment lived out in a bubble of unreality, but one which both sees God as rescuer and also results in practical care for those in need. This drives her to deep compassion for Joseph – despite his sneering abusiveness – and for his dying friend. Yet at the same time, she is deeply damaged by James’s violence, driven by it to actions which are profoundly unchristian. She is desperately in need of redemption herself, as is Joseph, though he makes the all-too-familiar mistake of assuming that he is beyond the point of ever finding it. Both Hannah and Joseph are so used to the pain in their lives that they expect no change, but their encounter with each other transforms them. Peter Mullan observes:

When I read the script I took it as an allegory; It’s about saving souls – whether that’s domestic abuse, social violence or a neighbour from hell – it’s not a single issue piece. It’s about two souls who are adrift, confused and desperate to find some kind of solace, some kind of peace in their lives. Theirs is a spiritual connection – not necessarily religious – and a spiritual journey, about the connection of souls. There’s this anger, the spirituality, the hope and the loss, and on a more grounded psychological level all the characters are trying to stay afloat in a variety of ways, and, ultimately, in very destructive ways.

While watching Tyrannosaur is a harrowing, traumatic experience, the film is nevertheless infused with a delicate hopefulness. Life can be bleak and violent and chaotic, but there are hints of joy and optimism – in friendship and community, compassion and tenderness. In his book Useless Beauty, Robert K. Johnston writes about films in relation to the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, which recognises the meaninglessness of life when people live without reference to God, and yet reminds us that God is still at work. The writer of Ecclesiastes says that ‘God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end’ (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Johnston refers to the glimmers of this reality as ‘fragile beauty’, which seems precisely right for describing the developing relationship between Joseph and Hannah, as well as for the hope that begins to take root and grow in their hearts.

Considine seems to see Joseph and Hannah as bringing about each other’s redemption, rather than God doing so. Yet at the same time, perhaps he cannot quite shut the door on the idea of God being at work, in the way that Joseph did when he raved at Hannah. Is Considine aware that, when Hannah thanks God for bringing Joseph into the shop for a purpose, the whole film could be seen as an outworking of that? And as a testament, too, to the terrible consequences of human freedom expressed in a will to power over others? When, right at the very end of the film, Joseph confesses that he found himself praying although he doesn’t believe, Considine is – perhaps unwittingly – hinting at the way God sometimes gently draws to himself those who find themselves at the absolute end of their own resources to put the world right.

Joseph asks himself the question, ‘What the **** is wrong with you?’ He confesses to not being ‘a nice human being’, but deep down he longs to be. He knows that, however bleak his circumstances have been, the answer to the question of what is wrong does not, ultimately, lie in the world around him, but in his own heart. He refers to his late wife as a ‘tyrannosaur’ because of the way she clumped around the house, but he is the monster, attacking and biting anyone who gets in his way. So is James. So is Hannah. A tyrannosaur lives in all of us, and the only way it can ever become a mere fossil is for us to discover the extraordinary truth that Hannah insisted on to Joseph: ‘God loves you.’

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1. Resources for churches and communities: Creation the movie (UK release: 25th Sept.) Charles Darwin: eminent scientist, loving husband, grieving father. The film...
2. Nativity! Image courtesy E1 Entertainment © 2007 As we gear...
3. Aagh! Christmas! christmas from Crestock Royalty Free Images Two young children...