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.

This article was first published on Culturewatch.org. © Tony Watkins, 2010.

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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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The King’s Speech is bookended by two speeches. The first is a disaster, a deeply humiliating experience for Prince Albert, Duke of York (Colin Firth), because of a severe stammer which had afflicted him since early childhood. He gives this speech on behalf of his father, King [...] No related posts.]]>

First published on Culturewatch © Tony Watkins 2011.

The King’s Speech is bookended by two speeches. The first is a disaster, a deeply humiliating experience for Prince Albert, Duke of York (Colin Firth), because of a severe stammer which had afflicted him since early childhood. He gives this speech on behalf of his father, King George V (Michael Gambon), at the closing ceremony of the British Empire Exhibition of 1925. It had been the world’s largest exhibition, with only two of the 58 Empire nations not participating, and had run for more than a year. Bertie, as he’s known within his family, is virtually paralysed by fear of being unable to speak the words. The struggle to even utter the first syllable seems interminable for both speaker and listeners, and just as he seems to have found the composure to begin, a horse whinnies and he has to psych himself up all over again. And yet, despite the anguish of the experience, he struggles through. To make matters worse, this is the first occasion on which one of Prince Albert’s speeches is being broadcast by the BBC.

Colin Firth’s performance is brilliant and thoroughly deserving of the Best Actor in a Drama award at the Golden Globes. He brings to the role great warmth and sensitivity, as well as an extraordinary sense of pent-up frustration. He movingly conveys the fear of a man confronting his inner demons every time he opens his mouth and, even more movingly, the courage and determination of someone who places his duty ahead of personal comfort.

It is this bravery and resolution which takes him eventually to the closing speech of the film. By this point he has become something he never expected or wanted to become: King George VI. Within three years, Britain declares war against Nazi Germany and he must address the nation on the radio. To do so is a major ordeal, and every listener knows it. The fact that he himself is suffering as he speaks gives his words about enduring suffering both poignancy and power. Everyone knows that when he talks about fighting against bondage and fear, he has some personal experience because he is doing so as he broadcasts.

Firth is helped enormously by two other superb performances. Helena Bonham Carter stars as Bertie’s wife, Elizabeth, and Geoffrey Rush plays Lionel Logue, the unconventional Australian speech therapist who enables Bertie to find his voice.

One of the many reasons why The King’s Speech works brilliantly is that it’s so authentic about the issue right at its heart. David Seidler, who wrote the film, based on his own play, suffered from a severe stammer himself as a young boy in wartime Britain. King George VI was his hero because he had learnt to cope with his speech impediment in order to fulfil his very public role. The king’s speeches on the radio encouraged Seidler to believe that he, too, could learn to manage his problem. He wanted to write a film about the king years ago, and met with Lionel Logue’s son, Valentine, who advised Seidler to write to the Queen Mother (King George VI’s widow) first. She requested him not to do so during her lifetime as ‘the memories of these events are still too painful.’ When, in 2005, Seidler finally commenced work on a stage play of the story, he discovered that he was able to reflect much more insightfully on his own experience. He says:

You know, I couldn’t have written this story when I was 33. Life provides all sorts of terrible obstacles and only later do you realize that they are really all for the good. I was crushed when the Queen Mother told me not to write this in her lifetime. But I wasn’t ready. To tell the story correctly, I had to plunge myself back into the experience of being a stutterer. That meant going back to the pain and isolation I knew as a child. And I know inside that I just couldn’t have done that as a younger man. I wasn’t ready until now.[1]

Director Tom Hooper and Colin Firth studied archive recordings of the king in order to capture his particular problem as well as they possibly could. ‘We had to find a way to make this sound authentic, and have it be painful,’ Firth insists. ‘[If] it was inauthentic it would be a catastrophe.’[2] It was vital that the audience should feel something of the pain and fear which his character lived with, yet not be alienated by feeling too much of it. Firth says that his two previous experiences playing characters with a stammer gave him no help at all because here he was playing someone else with different issues and therefore different difficulties. David Seidler was immensely helpful to Firth, who says:

If I remember, [Seidler] compared it to being underwater. That there was this panicking, drowning sensation, which seemed to have no way out. Terrible, endless silence that you can’t climb out of. He also talked about how it conditions the way you approach your day, down to the last detail. If you have an important encounter that day, the outcome of which might change your life, you’re still only focusing on whether you’ll be able to get the words out. That will loom larger . . .  than the bigger picture of what you’re trying to achieve. . . .

And it made me realise that this was not something that you could isolate. It is something which absolutely consumes you and your identity. And I think that the struggle we witness in the film isn’t about curing a stammer. It’s about managing it to the extent that that is no longer what’s happening. And that is absolutely achievable.[3]

Sufferers have been fulsome in their praise for the authenticity of Firth’s performance. Norbert Lieckfeldt, Chief Executive of the British Stammering Association, says, ‘I have been deeply moved by the authenticity of the stammering experience. These silent blocks – they were me. I came away feeling incredibly tense and worn out by a kind of sympathetic “phantom stammering”, going through every block that was on screen.’[4]

After the mortifying experience at the British Empire Exhibition, Bertie sought help from respected physicians, but conventional techniques for treating stammerers at the time were ill-founded and ineffective. Bertie’s humiliation is compounded by having one of them stuff his mouth with marbles because it had worked for Demosthenes. ‘That was in ancient Greece,’ observes Elizabeth. ‘Has it worked since?’ Bertie wants no more of this nonsense, concluding that he cannot be helped. But in 1934 Elizabeth comes across Logue and visits his treatment rooms in Harley Street under a pseudonym, leading to Logue’s amusing discomfiture when he discovers who his visitor really is. Despite the importance of Logue’s potential new client, he insists that he will only treat the prince on his own premises. He admits to being unorthodox and controversial, but guarantees that his method will work if he is given total trust and confidence.

When the prince arrives for his first session, Logue asks to be called by his first name and states that he will call his client Bertie, despite the royal protestations. This cheerful lack of deference is one of the aspects which makes Geoffrey Rush’s character so appealing and engaging: he treats Bertie as a human being. ‘In here it’s better if we’re equals.’ ‘If we were equals,’ responds the prince, ‘I wouldn’t be here. I’d be at home with my wife and no-one would give a damn.’ This encounter is something which is totally outside of Bertie’s experience; anyone outside his own family treated him with the utmost respect and honour. Lionel asks him not to smoke, and when Bertie responds that his physicians told him that it helped to relax the lungs, Lionel dismisses them as ‘idiots’. ‘They’ve all been knighted,’ Bertie observes. ‘That makes it official then,’ Lionel wryly retorts. The speech therapist insists that it’s ‘my castle, my rules’, but Bertie and Elizabeth are adamant that there is to be no discussion of the prince’s personal life; Logue is to deal only with the mechanics of speech.

What follows is a very amusing sequence in which Logue takes Bertie through a series of exercises which he claims will help the royal voice, but which actually seem designed to break down Bertie’s reserve. Eventually, something of a friendship begins to develop, particularly in 1936 when King George V dies and Bertie’s brother David becomes King Edward VIII. Bertie is in some despair about the situation, feeling that his father had been right to say that David would ruin himself, the family and the country. As Bertie sits gluing parts onto an aeroplane model belonging to one of Lionel’s sons, he finally starts to open up to the therapist about the struggles of his childhood and the cruel treatment he had received at the hands of his nanny and his father. ‘You know, you’re the first ordinary Englishman I’ve ever talked to,’ reflects Bertie. ‘What are friends for?’ asks Lionel. Bertie replies, ‘I wouldn’t know.’ Firth precisely captures the vulnerability of someone who has always been defined in terms of a particular role, rather than being accepted and treated as a person first and foremost.

As Ian Nathan rightly observes in Empire, ‘What Hooper sensed of Seidler’s play is that this is not about fixing a voice, but fixing a mind bullied by his father . . . and brother since boyhood, a soul imprisoned by the burden of forthcoming kingliness.’ He continues, ‘Hooper plays on the idea of childhood. We meet Logue’s scruffy brood and the twee Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret; while in another scene loaded with codified meaning, George begins to open up as he gently completes a model plane. The tragedy is that he never had a childhood. Friendship is a voyage into the unknown for Bertie. Logue is gluing him together.’[5]

Tom Hooper reinforces this through the way that he has filmed The King’s Speech, with many close-up shots, particularly of Bertie and Lionel, and often with Bertie set against a large amount of blank space emphasising his isolation and lostness. It subtly communicates that what is really important in this story is not the grand corridors of state, but what is going on in the minds of ordinary people. The connection between Bertie and Logue transformed the prince and played a very significant role in enabling him to become the much-loved king that people still recall. It was a friendship that continued throughout Bertie’s life. The King’s Speech makes it clear that Bertie had great strength of character, and Lionel declares that he is ‘the bravest man I’ve ever known’, but it’s equally clear that the relationships with his wife and with Lionel were vital to him.

Many people, film critics included, expected The King’s Speech to be a somewhat ordinary period royal drama – albeit with a first-rate cast – set in vast and magnificent rooms and all being somewhat removed from our everyday experience. But the unexpected triumph of this is that it is a profoundly human story. None of us face the peculiar pressures of being a member of the royal family, let alone unexpectedly becoming the monarch just before a world war, yet we can identify so easily with what is going on his life. We all face pressures of some sort or other, and even if we don’t have a debilitating speech impediment, we are all acutely aware of our own particular weaknesses and fear. So the story of a genuine friendship that transcends boundaries, and of a man’s deep resolve to come to terms with his problems and carry out his responsibilities unswervingly is inevitably heart-warming and inspiring. To see Lionel effectively conducting Bertie through that final speech in the film (as we know happened from Lionel Logue’s own diaries) is intensely moving as it is the culmination of so much struggle, yet at the same time heralds the beginning of a truly terrible struggle for freedom and peace.

Bertie is in stark contrast with three other figures in The King’s Speech. The obvious one is Lionel Logue, but the second is his older brother King Edward VIII, who is only concerned with his own personal happiness. ‘Haven’t I any rights?’ he asks Bertie, concerning his intention to marry Wallis Simpson. ‘Many privileges,’ responds Bertie, to which David grumbles, ‘Not the same thing.’ That’s the most insightful thing David says in the film; they’re not the same thing at all, and Bertie understands that the privileges of their position entail immense responsibilities.

Bertie is also strongly contrasted with Adolf Hitler. When Bertie, Elizabeth and their children see a newsreel of the Nuremberg rally, one of princesses asks her father what Hitler is saying. He responds that he doesn’t know, ‘but he’s saying it awfully well.’ Bertie’s hesitant, quiet, humble delivery is poles apart from Hitler’s impassioned eloquence. It reflects something of the Apostle Paul’s statement that ‘God 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).

We live in a world where many people are much more like David than Bertie, preoccupied with rights and desires, rather than with responsibilities to others. And we live in a world that still pays more attention to charismatic leadership than the moral values which undergird their ideas. In such a world, Bertie’s story is one that warrants repeated viewings and thoughtful reflection.

[1] Patrick Goldstein, ‘Oscar’s real Cinderella storyteller: David Seidler, screenwriter of The King’s Speech’, Los Angeles Times, 10 January 2011.

[2] Katey Rich, ‘Interview: Colin Firth Finds His Royal Voice In The King’s Speech’,Cinemablend, 29 November 2010.

[3] Michael Leader, ‘Colin Firth and Tom Hooper interview: The King’s Speech, Rocky IV and more’, Den of Geek, 7 January 2011.

[4] ‘The King’s Speech: chatting with Colin Firth’, British Stammering Association, October 2010.

[5] Ian Nathan, ‘The King’s Speech’, Empire, January 2011.

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When I interviewed Philip Pullman, I found him genial, generous and engaging. He has a sharp mind, a clever wit, and he’s a brilliant writer. He has justifiably been acclaimed as one of Britain’s finest writers, having won several awards including the Whitbread Book [...] Related posts:

1. Philip Pullman’s next book is a reworking of the story of Jesus. And a denial of the truth of Jesus. Children’s author Philip Pullman says Jesus wasn’t the Son...
2. Another article on Pullman’s next book Canongate to publish Pullman on God 07.09.09 Catherine Neilan...
3. More on the book Here’s an outline of what the book will include:...

This article was first published in Idea magazine (March/April 2010) and on Culturewatch.org. © Tony Watkins, 2010.

Yet another film foray into Wonderland demonstrates the abiding charm of Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories. But Tim Burton’s surreal fantasy isn’t just a retread of the much-loved children’s story, however; it picks up Alice’s story several [...] No related posts.]]>

This article was first published in Idea magazine (March/April 2010) and on Culturewatch.org. © Tony Watkins, 2010.

Yet another film foray into Wonderland demonstrates the abiding charm of Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories. But Tim Burton’s surreal fantasy isn’t just a retread of the much-loved children’s story, however; it picks up Alice’s story several years on. Now 19, Alice (played by relatively unknown Australian actress Mia Wasikowska) doesn’t know what to do when someone proposes to her. She runs off without answering, then spots a curious rabbit and soon tumbles after it down a hole.

Alice has been this way before, of course, but she has no memory of it. The bottle and cake again play havoc with her size, but soon she finds herself in a fantastical world inhabited by the bizarre characters we know so well.

It’s curious that Carroll’s mad tales should have become as embedded in our culture to the extent they have. The Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter and the White Queen’s statement about believing ‘six impossible things before breakfast’ are all very familiar. References to the stories crop up again and again, even in films like The Matrix.

Maybe this is just because it is all such cheerful nonsense. Maybe it’s thanks to Disney’s much-loved animation. Or maybe there’s something more going on under the surface. Readers have often wondered whether there really is any point or moral to Carroll’s fanciful tales, just as Alice does when talking to the Duchess. But the Duchess assures her that, ‘Every thing’s got a moral, if only you can find it.’

Hidden meanings

Lewis Carroll was the pseudonym of Rev Charles Dodgson, an Oxford mathematician, so it’s not surprising that if you study the conversations within the books, you discover that there are many hidden meanings. As well as telling stories, Carroll was clearly having fun with ideas from mathematics, logic, languages, history and politics.

Even more importantly, there are ideas from philosophy and theology about such fundamental matters as existence, meaning, knowledge, morality, justice and, perhaps above all, identity. ‘Who in the world am I?’ asks Alice. ‘Ah, that’s the great puzzle!’

These kinds of question are all very well, but the books themselves are rather disjointed and episodic. So Tim Burton felt he needed to create a film that had a much stronger sense of being a unified story with a greater emotional drive. ‘I’ve never seen a version I’ve really liked,’ he says. ‘It’s always been about a passive little girl wandering around a series of adventures with weird characters. There’s never any kind of gravity to it.’

Having forgotten her childhood experiences, Burton’s Alice is as unsure of herself and her place in the real world as she is in Wonderland – or Underland, as it’s now known. It’s a dark, turbulent place, suffering under the harsh rule of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter).

It’s inevitable that film versions of the Alice stories ignore many of the hidden meanings from the books. This one is no exception, but it does retain more of the depth than its predecessors. And by telling the story of Alice’s return to Wonderland as a young adult, Tim Burton is able to introduce some significant new elements.

A mad world

The most important new dimension is that Alice is no longer passive, merely reacting to everything that happens. Now she has a clearly defined goal: to fight against the Red Queen’s oppression. In the process, she grows in self-confidence, discovering who she really is and what she wants in life.

The Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) tells Alice that Wonderland is ‘Like no place on Earth – a land full of wonder, mystery, and danger. Some say to survive it, you need to be as mad as a hatter.’

But in some respects, Wonderland is just like the world we live in. It is a place of ‘wonder, mystery and danger’, and there are times when it feels completely mad and out-of-kilter. And we find ourselves longing for a world which makes sense, a world of justice and order. Many people don’t recognise the yearning in the human heart for what it is, a hunger for home – a home with God in the new heavens and new earth. People often dismiss the idea as impossible. But as Alice realises, that doesn’t make it any less real.

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Warning: this article contains plot spoilers

When Susie was small, she was worried for the penguin trapped inside a snow globe. ‘Don’t worry, kiddo,’ her father Jack (Mark Wahlberg) reassured her. ‘He has a nice life; he’s trapped [...] No related posts.]]>

Dir. Peter Jackson (Paramount Pictures, 2010)
This article was first published on Culturewatch, © Tony Watkins.

Warning: this article contains plot spoilers

When Susie was small, she was worried for the penguin trapped inside a snow globe. ‘Don’t worry, kiddo,’ her father Jack (Mark Wahlberg) reassured her. ‘He has a nice life; he’s trapped in a perfect world.’ Several years later, Jack could do with someone offering the same reassurance to him about his daughter (Saoirse Ronan) when she is abducted, raped and murdered. This tension between perfect and imperfect worlds runs right through Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, based on the best-selling novel by Alice Sebold.

The Salmon family seems to be perfect. A loving couple with two delightful daughters, living in a nice suburb; what more could they want? Jack even constructs perfect worlds through his hobby of making ships in bottles, which Susie delights to help him with. The biggest tension in the family is whether or not Susie will wear her new knitted hat to school. But the evil desires of one man wreck everything, devastating Susie’s family. Ironically, Susie’s murderer also constructs perfect worlds: he makes dolls houses with obsessive attention to detail. But he also brings the same compulsion to building places where he can lure his victims to their destruction.

Jack instinctively wants to restore the situation somehow. ‘I’m going to take care of this. I’ll make this right,’ he tells Susie’s mother, Abigail (Rachel Weisz). ‘You can’t make this right,’ she replies. Jack becomes increasingly consumed with trying to work out who is responsible, since the police fail to identify the culprit, while Abigail begins to feel that she needs to put it all behind her and move on. Jack knows he cannot bring the near-perfect life they had enjoyed back again, but he longs for justice to at least put things into the right balance. Later, when he thinks he knows the identity of his daughter’s murderer, he sets out with a baseball bat, intent on revenge. Even this proves impossible, though, and he becomes a victim of violence himself.

Although none of them realise it, Susie is trapped in what seems to be a perfect world. She says, ‘I was alive, alive in my own perfect world.’ She is not in heaven, as she first assumes, but in limbo, an in-between state. She is still connected to the world by her memory of it and her reluctance to let go of her father’s love. This in-between state is an extraordinary environment, where Peter Jackson uses impressive special effects to create her surreal, dream-like existence. But Susie finally admits that, ‘in my heart, I knew it wasn’t perfect. My murderer still haunted me.’ Susie meets another of her murderer’s victims, Holly (Nikki SooHoo), who tells her, ‘This isn’t heaven. You’re not there yet. . . . You need to let go of earth. You’re dead, Susie. You have to leave.’

Susie is held back by her memories. Some are lovely memories, such as the snow globe and being given a camera. ‘I love the way it captured a moment before it was gone,’ she recalls. This is what memory does, too. The film suggests that Susie and her parents are both trapped by their memories of the awful event, and that people can only begin to really live again when they begin to forget, or at least to hold less tightly to those memories. Susie reflects at one point, ‘My murderer began to feel safe. He knew that people wanted to forget, that they needed to move on. But there was one thing my murderer didn’t understand. He didn’t understand how much a father could love his child.’

The Lovely Bones is, of course, a deeply disturbing film because it confronts us with the desperately imperfect nature of the world we live in. It is not only a world in which terrible things can happen, but one in which justice is not always achieved. Even justice’s defective relative revenge is not always possible. It’s a world in which a young girl’s potential for joy and love and creativity can be snuffed out in a moment, yet an evil man’s desires can go unchecked. It is a desperately broken world – a perspective which is entirely consistent with that of the Bible.

The biblical account of humanity is that we enjoyed an idyllic existence at first, in perfect harmony with each other, with our environment and, most importantly, with God in whose image we were created. But we rebelled against God, exerting our free will to become autonomous from God, and seizing for ourselves the role of deciding what is right or wrong, good or evil. That rebellion twisted and corrupted the image of God within us, so that as well as being capable of great good, every one of us is now also capable of great evil. And the same urge to be utterly autonomous from God lives on in each one of us. It’s what the Bible calls sin: a fundamental bias against God and in favour of giving in to our own self-gratifying urges. The freedom to choose that we have misused so dreadfully is what has broken our world. Why didn’t God intervene to stop it? Why doesn’t he intervene now to stop evil acts? Simply because he cannot give us free will and withhold it at the same time. It is a logical impossibility and, as C.S. Lewis famously said, nonsense is nonsense even when you talk it about God. Why is our free will so important? Without it, relationships with each other and, more fundamentally, with God, would not be based on genuine love, but would be merely programmed into us. It may seem a costly price to pay, but genuine love is surely the ultimate good which we would not want to be without.

However, the Bible’s account of our world’s brokenness does not end with an explanation for why it is like this. Instead it goes on to tell the story of God’s plan to deal with our sin and rebellion. That could simply be a story of justice. Watching The Lovely Bones, we, like Jack, long for Susie’s murderer to face justice. But we forget that God can legitimately want the same for each of us. He would be perfectly just in judging us for our rebellion, our self-gratification, our abuse of others, our deception and violence (in thought if not deed), our exploitation and greed. Yet the Bible is clear that God wants us back in relationship with him. The Bible is the unfolding story of the need for justice and love, of God’s desire to eliminate sin and to show grace to sinful people. These two strands come together in the incarnation, death and resurrection of his son, Jesus Christ. This is the point in history at which God steps into our world and becomes a man. He is not remote in heaven, merely grieving over our brokenness and weeping for our pain. Instead, he came to live in our broken world, as one of us yet perfect. He came to die for us, taking on himself the judgment we deserve – an act of the most extraordinary grace. It is worth remembering that God himself has been the victim of the worst of human evil and violence, and he understands fully the pain it causes. The cross of Christ means that God’s justice is satisfied, the price has been paid for us, and – if we accept it – we can be forgiven and come into a relationship with God himself. It means that God’s kingdom breaks into our broken, imperfect world.

The limbo in which Susie finds herself is not a biblical idea, and there is no sense in The Lovely Bones of God having anything to do with it (Peter Jackson insisted on not portraying a particular religious perspective on heaven). Heaven is a place of perfection that Susie can move on to, but there is no hint that God makes is possible for her to do so. And while the film’s picture of the brokenness, senselessness and injustice of this life is accurate, there is no assurance whatsoever that God will one day establish perfect justice. But the Bible does insist that judgment is coming. We either accept Jesus bearing it on our behalf, or it falls on us. For those who do respond to Jesus’s offer, there is the promise, not of some surreal limbo world in which we are haunted by memories of this imperfect life, but of eternal life with God – an absolutely perfect world.

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The 1995 Rugby World Cup final was an unexpectedly significant world event. It had a resonance far beyond the excitement of rugby fans because of its particular historical context. Rarely, if ever, has a sporting event been such a powerful cohesive force within [...] No related posts.]]>

This article was first published on Culturewatch.org. © Tony Watkins, 2010

The 1995 Rugby World Cup final was an unexpectedly significant world event. It had a resonance far beyond the excitement of rugby fans because of its particular historical context. Rarely, if ever, has a sporting event been such a powerful cohesive force within a society. Invictus, based on John Carlin’s book Playing the Enemy, tells the inspiring story of how it played such a crucial part in the first year of South Africa’s new era under the presidency of Nelson Mandela.

Mandela (brilliantly played, in an Oscar-nominated performance, by Morgan Freeman) was elected as the President of South Africa in 1994. He had been released from prison in 1990, become president of the ANC and had already committed both himself and his party to the path of reconciliation. Black South Africans were overjoyed at the ANC sweeping to power in the elections, but many Afrikaners were fearful of what would happen. Mandela was insistent that it was not a time for revenge or even petty point scoring. He formed a ‘government of national unity’, with all ethnic groups represented, and set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Invictus shows something of his attempts at building the ‘rainbow nation’, beginning in his own offices as he urges white civil servants to stay and work for their country. His fiercely loyal black security men are dismayed to discover that they will be working with white Special Branch officers who served the previous president. ‘The rainbow nation starts here,’ Mandela insists. ‘Reconciliation starts here. Forgiveness starts here, too. It liberates the soul. That is why it is such a powerful weapon.’ However, he knew full well that much more was necessary to unite the bitterly divided nation.

At the time of Mandela’s inauguration, nobody could have possibly imagined that rugby could help bring this about. Almost everyone saw it as a white man’s game. Afrikaners supported the Springboks, the national team, enthusiastically, and as a result the team, and the sport generally, was hated within the townships. The opening scene of Invictus shows the sharp divide. At a school for white South Africans, boys are playing rugby on a beautifully maintained pitch when they see a car with a police escort going down the road: Mandela on his way from prison in 1990. The rugby coach tells the boys, ‘It’s that terrorist Nelson Mandela. Remember this day, boys. This is the day the country went to the dogs.’ On the other side of the road, a group of poor black boys have been playing football on a dusty patch of barren land. They, of course, are overjoyed to see their hero released.

Four years later and Mandela becomes president. Following the lifting of sporting sanctions against South Africa, the World Cup is due to be staged in a year’s time, but it promises to be an embarrassment to Afrikaners as well as an irrelevance to black South Africans. The Springboks are in a mess, suffering humiliating defeats, and Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon), the captain, comes in for stinging criticism from the media. President Mandela, however, sees a golden opportunity to build bridges by actively supporting the national team.

When the ANC-run National Sports Council votes to change the name of the team to the Proteas (the national flower of South Africa) and get rid of the green and gold strip, he intervenes personally to persuade them to reverse their decision. He drives straight to their meeting and addresses them, explaining that he spent 27 years in prison studying Afrikaner prison guards. ‘They love the Boks,’ he says. ‘If we take that away we will be what they expect us to be. We must surprise them with generosity.’ It was a dangerous move, as it appeared to be a betrayal of his race. John Carlin explains:

What you have to understand is that the green shirt of the Springboks was a powerful reminder to black South Africans of apartheid. They hated that shirt because it symbolised, as much as anything else did, the tremendous indignities to which they were subjected. Mandela’s genius was to recognise that this symbol of division and hatred could be transformed into a powerful instrument of national unity.[1]

It is a mark of Mandela’s genius, but it is also a mark of his deep understanding of the vital importance of reconciliation, and its power to transform lives. His attitudes and actions are a powerful reflection of God’s grace – undeserved kindness – towards those who reject him and rebel against him. In his autobiography, Long Road to Freedom, Mandela identifies himself as a Christian,[2] and says that this explains his convictions and actions in later life. His insistence on forgiveness and generosity of spirit, though not at the expense of truth, is thoroughly, authentically Christian, and his towering example is both an inspiration and a challenge to people around the world.

The National Sports Council agrees to the President’s request, somewhat reluctantly, but there is much more to do. Director Clint Eastwood remarks:

This story takes place at a critical point in Mandela’s presidency. I think he demonstrated great wisdom in incorporating sport to reconcile his country. He knows he needs to pull everybody together, to find a way to appeal to their national pride – one thing, perhaps the only thing, they have in common at that time. He knows the white population and the black population will ultimately have to work together as a team or the country will not succeed, so he shows a lot of creativity using a sports team as a means to an end.

His next move is to invite Francois Pienaar for tea. He quickly wins the rugby captain’s respect and galvanises him to inspire his team to achieve greater things. Mandela asks Peinaar, ‘How do we inspire ourselves to greatness when nothing less will do? How do we inspire everyone around us?’ He mentions that, while he was in prison, he was inspired by a poem, though he doesn’t tell Pienaar what it was. Soon afterwards, the Springboks players are dismayed to hear that they are to do rugby coaching in the townships as part of the PR for the World Cup. Pienaar refuses to challenge the order, however. ‘We’ve become more than a rugby team and we’d better get used to it,’ he insists. It is a hugely successful move, with children in the townships responding enthusiastically and the players becoming inspired by the reactions. Matt Damon comments:

Mandela basically asks him to exceed his country’s expectations and his own expectations and win the World Cup. It’s an enormous request, but Francois knows that it’s actually bigger than any rugby match. And along the way, the entire team realise they have become an important instrument in bringing their country together.

By the time the Rugby World Cup starts, President Mandela has positioned himself as the Springboks’ number one fan, and the slogan ‘One team, one country’ seems to be  becoming a reality. Screenwriter Anthony Peckham says:

Mandela realised he had a perfect opportunity to address the part of the electorate that had not voted for him . . . that, in truth, feared him. White South Africans followed the Springboks religiously, so to use the forum of the World Cup was brilliant. But it wasn’t just a game; it was the fact that Mandela embraced a team that black South Africans hated and almost by force of will dragged all of the people into following them.

The Boks’ extraordinary, and completely unexpected, performance in the tournament is in itself an inspiring story of an underdog triumphing against the odds. But because of Mandela’s investment of energy into the team and how it is perceived in South Africa as a whole, the final becomes a defining moment for the nation. Unfortunately, this is the point at which the film loses its way somewhat, particularly for anyone who knows what happened in the final when the Springboks faced the apparently invincible New Zealand All Blacks. Eastwood is evidently attempting to create the feeling of the game and to enable viewers to feel something of the tension of a thrilling match which went into extra time. But it dominates the last third of the film, and the match is stretched out far beyond what is necessary. It doesn’t help that much of it is filmed in emotionally overwrought slow motion and with frequent cutaways to scenes of black and white South Africans uniting in their support for the team. It’s a great shame that such an inspiring true story should be weakened at the end by sentimentality and a rose-tinted vision of a divided nation made whole by sporting heroism and the shrewd political manoeuvrings of a enormously gracious man. Yes, it was a watershed moment for the rainbow nation, but it wasn’t the end of the story. The Government of National Unity collapsed just weeks later, and it seemed that South Africa was about to plunge into chaos. The country has made real progress, but Mandela and his successors have struggled and failed to eradicate the violence that stills tears out its heart.

Nevertheless, the story which Invictus tells is an important and a moving one with valuable lessons for all of us from the conduct of these two men. Francois Pienaar is a great example of commitment and dedication to being the best it is possible to be. Nelson Mandela is not a saint and is far from perfect, as he is ready to admit, but he has arguably been the most significant example of reconciliation, forgiveness and grace in the modern world. Morgan Freeman doesn’t just capture Mandela’s voice and posture, he conveys the warmth and generosity of a man who accepts and values everybody, regardless of their status, wealth or the colour of their skin. But what is most inspiring about Mandela is his willingness to be generous even to those who were once his enemies. He lives out the instructions of the apostle Paul in his letter to the church in Rome: ‘Bless those who persecute you. Don’t curse them; pray that God will bless them,’ (Romans 12:14). What makes that possible is not force of will, or a pragmatic evaluation of what results it might bring, but a recognition that every human being is a sinner before God, deserving only judgement but being offered forgiveness through Jesus Christ. Mandela’s claim to be a Christian is a claim to have experienced this grace, and a commitment to the same grace working through him. It is ironic, therefore, that the poem which inspired Mandela, which he passes on to Pienaar, and which gives the film its title, celebrates being ‘captain of my soul’, because Mandela’s Christian profession means that the captain of his soul is really Jesus Christ.

[1] This and other unattributed quotations come from the film production notes, or from the film itself.

[2] Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, London, Abacus, 1995, p.620.

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