Time for movies

We will be in New York through this upcoming weekend because our children and grandchildren will be visiting their other parents/grandparents next weekend. We have a list of movies we hope to see, and we were able to get started on that yesterday.

The first movie we saw was “Philomena”. The film is based on a true story in Ireland that begins in the 1950s, as told in the book by Martin Saxsmith, Philomena: A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search. Philomena was a sixteen year old high school student who became pregnant. Apparently it was not uncommon in those situations for girls to be sent off to live through their pregnancies and deliver their babies in convents. To “pay” for this, they were forced into menial labor at the convent for five years, and to sign a contract agreeing never to inquire into their children’s whereabouts. When the babies were born, the mothers were given limited access to them until they were adopted and simply taken away, often with no prior notice to the mothers. This part of the story is told in flashback. When we meet Philomena, she is looking for the baby boy she had been given up over 50 years earlier. Against all odds, and with an amazing amount of what you might call righteous dishonesty from everyone involved in the separation of mother and baby, she does eventually find her son while somehow maintaining a great deal of dignity and grace, even forgiveness. The movie, while portraying a rather dark subject, has some very light and funny moments.

Like all such stories, we watch this in 2013 through rather different lenses than the ones worn by those who lived during the period this occurred. It is simply inconceivable to us that there could be such a cruel separation of babies from their mothers. But I have to keep telling myself that it was a very different time and place, one we cannot appreciate through today’s definitions of good and bad. The nuns were not completely evil, although it becomes clear that there were financial benefits to the church from these arrangements, with the usual rules of privacy being bent for the “right” people. 

The second movie we saw was “Her.” We had seen previews for this movie quite a few times, and it seemed like a charming film, precisely what I was looking to see. I just re-watched the movie trailer (attached here), but now I am seeing it from a different perspective. While the film has many light moments, it is definitely neither a fluff piece nor a romantic comedy. In fact, it is a thoughtful look at relationships: what we seek in them and what makes them work.

The movie is set in California at an undefined future time, perhaps 10-20 years from now. Theodore, played by Joaquin Phoenix, is a young man who works as a sort of ghost writer, writing letters for people who have things to say but apparently cannot either say or write the words themselves. His wife has left him, and he is living a rather sad and lonely life when he learns about and begins running a new operating system on his computer and phone; imagine the voice of Scarlett Johannson as a sort of “Siri - plus,” who greets him in the morning, chats with him throughout the day, and has deep conversations with him at night, and you can see how his relationship with the voice quickly becomes romantic.  Manohla Dargis described this well in her New York Times review:

At once a brilliant conceptual gag and a deeply sincere romance, “Her” is the unlikely yet completely plausible love story about a man, who sometimes resembles a machine, and an operating system, who very much suggests a living woman. 

You know that this has to unravel, but I do not want to give away just how that happens. The end of the movie does not really tell you what the future will bring to Theodore and his (human) friend, Amy (played by Amy Adams, who is making more movies than would seem humanly possible), who also has one of these operating systems. Watch the trailer, and if you have a chance, go see the film. 

The temperature is dropping today; looks like our last brief flirtation with summer will be ending shortly. The heavy rain we have been having all day could have been snow, so it’s not so bad.

  

Love,

Rebecca