Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
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| Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
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Thursday, July 18, 2002 The Road to Perdition - the movie, not our colleges I saw The Road to Perdition the other day. I believe it may be one of the greatest movies ever made. It is ten times better than The Godfather, which was an Italian mafia soap opera, revenge story. This new movie is like a Greek Tragedy with the power to arouse pity and terror just as Aristotle described in his Poetics. This movie is pure art - beautiful to the highest degree - and great story telling because of its moral dimension. It is simply awesome for a movie. It is not as powerful as Greek drama, though, only because the characters are not heroic in the Greek sense and because it is not staged. The characters' fall is not as far as Oedipus', or Agamemnon's who were kings. Shakespeare's tragic characters were also men of importance - Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, MacBeth, Anthony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus. Shakespeare, unfortunately had to invent, for the most part, the groundwork for the stories. Thus a reliance on melodrama which weakens the power compared to the Greeks who had the legends and myths already in place and simply had to illustrate one small episode in dramatic fashion. Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guilderstien are Dead" ( a bad play, but a good idea) is a modern example where the author assumes the entire background of Hamlet as a takeoff point. Much more of this could be done with Shakespeare if we wanted to. Take the last act of Othello and collapse it into a Greek tragedy. It would work very well. Anyway, if you do not appreciate Greek drama, you will not love The Road to Perdition, for this movie has about it the same inevitability of character creating destiny. Nor is it a Catholic movie as some critics say, but it is Christian with Catholic trappings. It is about Sin (harmartia, in Greek - to miss the mark) and Damnation. Where The Godfather glorified violence and gangsters, this movie illustrates the pure ugliness and wickedness of evil and violence. But there is a saving grace or hope in it at the end as Hanks' character manages to break the cycle of violence (in a way) for his son. This movie has a gravity and weight rarely encountered in any cinema. It is profoundly serious in ways that so many other films (or examples of art) are not. It is full of so many "holy moments' that the entire movie is a holy moment of art. It is not pretty, though. It is a terrible holiness which exposes the utter falsehood which sin is and illustrates what damnation is - a choice. It is a painful story, an agony (agon - Greek for contest), and horrific. I don't know if movies can ever get more powerful than this. Live theater is more powerful than any other medium because of its immediacy, human scale, and presence. A movie always maintains a remoteness or detachment that interferes with its complete desire. This movie, though, comes off the screen and possesses the viewer in a way most people have probably never previously experienced. It has abundant gravitas. Greek drama was aligned with a religious festival for very intuitive and awesome reasons - it was a form of liturgy in which the participants (audience) was called upon to soberness - purgation (catharsis) and humilty in the face of Life - the importance and seriousness of human actions and fates (when character is destiny unless a true repentance and reform is made). Dramatic tragedy is funereal. Sin and Death stand at centerstage and will not let us avert our gaze until we acknowledge our nature as we are and not as we want to pretend we are. The Road to Perdition has an inevitability like death, which is what gives it true power. Critics who complain of this, the predictability of the plot, have no aesthetic sense if they find that to be a flaw. We know we're going to die just as we know what must happen to Sullivan, but it doesn't lesson the shock to us when death occurs to us no more than when the denouement comes for Hanks in the film. (I know. I thought I was prepared for death, but when my heart attack came - I was ready for Heaven, but I was shocked at having to suffer the agony of dying. It was a severe blow and nearly mortal. I have not yet recovered and probably never will from the pure insult of grasping, painful, immediate death.) This movie also has elements of Kabuki theater and Kurosawa's later movies. (See Ran - a great movie, also.) It is a highly stylized presentation - which is not a detraction as I've heard some critics say, but an enhancement of the action. Kabuki drama and Greek tragedy are highly stylized forms of art and have had lasting power in our cultures precisely because the ritual aspect of it carries so much weight and meaning. To want this movie to be more 'realistic' (as if that's not an artifice, too) would be to ruin it. This movie has so much truth, beauty, and suffering in it that this is the one they will be studying years from now as they do Citizen Kane. Not everyone will like or admire this movie, but the loss will be theirs; and it will prove how weak, shallow, and dull so many critics are. I probably have more to say about this great film, but it will have to wait for me to remember all I've thought about it. Go see it and then tell me what you think. Furthermore If you want to read a really thoughtless and stupid review of this movie for contrast between what one person can see in a movie and what another can't, go here. posted by Mark Butterworth | 8:37 AM | |
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