CS Lewis on translating expertise

From Lewis’s 1945 address “Christian Apologetics,” collected in God in the Dock:

“I have come to the conviction that if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts were confused. Power to translate is the test of having really understood one’s own meaning. ”

This passage has haunted me for years.

Lewis was addressing a conference of Anglican priests and youth leaders on the challenges facing them in presenting and defending Christianity. This passage follows immediately after a list of terms which mean one thing to theologians and something almost totally different to even educated laymen. The jargon has been barbarized, and so miscommunication is a grave danger.

I’ve long had an allergy to the kind of arcane scholarly jargon—academese—that characterizes a lot of humanities scholarship nowadays. Such writing and specialist vocabulary has its uses as does all technical language, but more often than not it obscures meaning and functions as a code for initiates, the privileged few who have been admitted to the higher mysteries of the “studies” disciplines. This doesn’t educate students or ordinary people, which is its gravest failing. But an additional, hidden danger is that, in the enclosed hothouse of academic journals and conferences and ever finer splitting of hairs, communicating so often and so exclusively in jargony “educated” language will obscure not only your subject but the failures of your own mind. Compare Orwell.

“[Y]ou must translate every bit of your theology into the vernacular,” Lewis writes. “This is very troublesome and it means you can say very little in half an hour, but it is essential. It is also of the greatest service to your own thought.” I find I have learned as much by teaching, by striving to make my subject understood to my students, distilling complicated historical argument into understandable classroom language, as I ever learned through my own study. On my own, in my yet smaller bubble of interest and study, I might miss something, misunderstand something. Communicating it to them has caught me out more than once, to my benefit.

You can read the entirety of Lewis’s essay here. God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics is an excellent, wide-ranging collection of Lewis’s writings and well worth owning. You can find it on Amazon here.

2019 in Movies

Daniel Craig as private detective Benoit Blanc in Knives Out

Back in the spring I looked ahead to the scheduled summer releases and realized that, with one or two exceptions, I wasn’t looking forward to anything. If, like me, you’re almost totally burned out on Marvel, the summer of 2019 was a bust, and I was beginning to think that 2019 would be another lean year for movies the way last year was. But, lo and behold, after some solid stuff in the spring and a dry spell during the summer—which I used to write the rough draft of my next novel anyway—fall and early winter turned out to be delightful. It ended up being hard to choose what to include here. It was a good year for movies—at least for me.

Two notes before I launch into my favorites of the year:

• First, this is a list of favorites. I might give some opinions on superlatives below—best acting, best made, etc.—but I’m mostly assessing these movies as favorites, as the movies I either most enjoyed or got the most out of, not necessarily making claims about which are the best of the year.

• Second, I’ve actually written about several of these movies before on this blog, so for any film for which I’ve already written a review, I’ve kept my recap here short and included a link to the full review elsewhere.

So here, in roughly ascending order, are my seven favorite movies of the last year:

Richard Jewell

Paul Walter Hauser as Richard Jewell

I remember the to-do surrounding the 1996 Atlanta Olympics quite vividly. The logo and obligatory weird mascot were everywhere, the torch passed through my hometown on its way to Atlanta, and my family watched the opening ceremonies and as many of the events as we could. I also remember the bombing.

Richard Jewell narrowly focuses on the title character and what happened to him as he worked security over the first few days of the Olympics. Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser), a former security guard and sheriff’s deputy, hopes to get back into law enforcement if he can do well enough with his gig doing security at a concert venue in Olympic Park. Clint Eastwood, directing from a script by Billy Ray, carefully reconstructs the events of these first few days, and the scenes surrounding the bombing are tense and shocking. Jewell’s role in saving lives is made clear and the media adulation that unexpectedly envelops him for a few days is made bittersweet by what we know is coming. Especially poignant is the pride Jewell’s mother Bobi (Kathy Bates) takes in her boy.

The bulk of the film follows the FBI’s bumbling investigation into Jewell following a tip from a former employer, the leak to the media via AJC reporter Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde), and the vicious trial-by-media that ruined Jewell’s life for months as newspapers and TV networks dogpiled him. Jewell fights back by calling on lawyer Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell) and the two form a testy friendship as Jewell tries to understand what’s happening to him and Bryant tries to keep Jewell, a believer in law and order who “was raised to respect authority,” from being so obliging to the FBI, who are using his attempts to be forthcoming to railroad him.

The film is full of good performances. Sam Rockwell, good in everything he’s ever been in, is a standout as Bryant. Kathy Bates is excellent as Bobi Jewell, an authentic and sympathetic portrayal of an ordinary Southern woman unprepared to live under the scrutiny of both the media and the federal government, unable to comprehend the callousness of both and the injustice being done to her son. But the best performance in the film is Hauser as Jewell. Hauser is 100% authentic. His accent, the cadence of his speech, his understated sense of humor, his posture as he stands or sits—all are dead-on, as is his attitude toward the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, best described as a worshipful camaraderie that takes a severe hit by the end of the film. I know people just like this. It’s outstanding, and while Hauser’s isn’t the flashiest performance of the year—for that, see below—it’s certainly among the best precisely because it’s so real.

Richard Jewell, we realize toward the end of the movie, bewilders the powerful because he’s a man without an angle. He did what he did because it was his job and he wanted to help people. The tragedy is that the powerful in our world—the feds, the media—can’t understand this kind of goodness. For that reason alone, Richard Jewell is an important movie to watch and a fitting tribute to a decent man.

The Highwaymen

Kevin Costner as a weary Frank hamer in The Highwaymen

The Highwaymen inverts the usual retelling of the Bonnie and Clyde story by focusing on the lawmen who tracked down and killed them rather than the bandits themselves. More a police procedural than an action movie, the film follows aging Texas Rangers Frank Hamer and Maney Gault as they are specially deputized to deal with Bonnie and Clyde’s unique style of interstate violence. The two lawmen, relics of the not-quite-vanished age of the frontier, doggedly track the crooks up and down the highways of Texas, Oklahoma, and finally Louisiana, always traveling in the wake of their thefts and murders. Their frustration and the toll of life on the road mounts, and when we reach the final confrontation on a lonesome road in the piney woods of Louisiana (shot in the actual location, dressed by the set designers to its 1930s appearance), the expertly heightened tension is almost unbearable.

Directed by John Lee Hancock (who directed the underappreciated masterpiece The Alamo) and starring Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson, both excellent as the taciturn Hamer and the damaged and worn out Gault, this is a handsomely mounted, well acted, atmospheric drama that rightly depicts Bonnie and Clyde as destructive thugs without glorifying the means used to take them down. Indeed, the film is comfortable allowing some ambiguity—at least among the characters—about the nature of law enforcement, crime, and personal responsibility, and ends not on a note of triumph but of resignation. It’s almost worth watching just for its wordless final scenes, an eloquent condemnation not of criminality but of celebrity worship. It’s great.

My friend Coyle Neal of The City of Man Podcast and I recorded an episode about The Highwaymen after it came out in the spring. It was a fun discussion. You can read a few notes about that, and listen to the episode, here.

Knives Out

Daniel Craig and Ana de armas investigate foul play in Knives Out

A carefully plotted murder mystery with a colorful cast of characters and a good dose of humor, Knives Out is the most fun I had at the movies this year.

After elderly mystery-thriller writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found with his throat cut the morning after his birthday party, private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) arrives to consult with the police to find the murderer. Murder? A straightforward interpretation of the death scene would indicate suicide. But Blanc is convinced otherwise after interviewing the many members of Thrombey’s self-serving and duplicitous family and enlists Thrombey’s personal nurse, Marta (Ana de Armas), to help him untangle what happened that night.

Knives Out owes a lot to the mysteries of writers like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, with a stately house full of despicable characters, one of whom must have done it, dedicated but unimaginative traditional cops, and a private detective with keen insight and… eccentricities. The setting, a real house in rural Massachusetts, is interesting and the characters are all wonderfully played. Plummer is good in flashback scenes and Ana de Armas brings a freshness and innocent goodness to Marta that serves as a striking contrast to the various members of the Thrombey family. Daniel Craig is especially good as Blanc, affecting a Southern accent that one suspects Blanc might be overplaying as a bit of investigative sleight of hand. Among the family, Michael Shannon as Harlan’s publisher son and Toni Collette as a dippy “influencer” type and natural health nut are standouts, as is Chris Evans, arriving late as the purported black sheep of a family where the whole flock is already pretty black. Everyone is just slightly over the top, which is part of what makes the movie fun instead of being a slog through a bunch of miserable suspects (compare another mystery in which Christopher Plummer plays a weary patriarch and Daniel Craig the detective, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo).

I don’t want to give anything away because the film is well constructed to supply surprises. I went in cold, not knowing much about the movie and not really interested given director Rian Johnson’s reputation following The Last Jedi. But my wife and I heard enough good things about it via word of mouth that we gave it a shot for date night and had a blast.

Midway

The USS Enterprise under fire in Midway

Midway emerged as an unintentional star of my blog in the second half of the year, as my notes and worries about the first trailer got a lot of traffic and my eventual review was one of the most popular posts this month.

Because of the trailer I went to see Midway reluctantly but was almost totally won over. It’s not a perfect movie by any means, but it does what it sets out to do and—what was important to me—respects the real men who fought at Midway. It provides a solid overview of the events between Pearl Harbor and Midway—roughly the first six months of American involvement in World War II—and capably and vividly dramatizes the stakes, both militarily and personally, for the men involved, as well as what it took to rise to the occasion and fight back. It has some overacting, weak dialogue, and dodgy special effects, but the things I hope to see in a historical film are all there. It’s worth your time.

You can read my full review of Midway, written to coincide with Pearl Harbor Day a few weeks ago, here.

Joker

Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck in Joker

Now that the pearl-clutching fainting couch furor over Joker has proven to be overblown, I hope people can untwist their knickers and revisit and reassess it. This movie deeply impressed me, and after I saw it I spent the next several days mulling it over. Joker is not an enjoyable or fun superhero romp—this is no popcorn movie. But Joaquin Phoenix gives the best performance of the year in the title role and the film built around him is a carefully and sharply constructed character study.

Joker offers another origin story for Batman’s archenemy, a man who has no certain or canonical past, a point exploited by Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight. Here, the Joker begins as Arthur Fleck, a man with severe mental problems who has been turned out by the system due to budget cuts, an issue that will recur before the film is over. He works a humiliating job as a clown for hire to take care of his mother, an invalid with—we will learn later, if we don’t infer it before then—even worse mental problems than Arthur’s. Weak, ineffectual, and above all pathetic, Arthur deplores the ugliness of Gotham City and its people but recognizes himself as an utter nullity. Then a chance encounter on the subway gives him a taste of the influence and power to be had from using violence to inspire terror, and we watch this put upon, seemingly gentle man turn toward and embrace the ugliness. The film begins with Arthur crying over the world; it ends with him laughing as that world burns.

There’s a lot to admire in Joker, but it does have its weaknesses. Some of its themes are pretty obvious if not clumsy, especially where mental health and the class conflict within Gotham is concerned, the series of humiliations Arthur endures sometimes feels as though it’s on autopilot, and I never quite believed Robert De Niro as the Carson-like late show host who is first Arthur’s idol and then his nemesis. The film also develops a subplot surrounding Arthur’s mysterious parentage—his mother tells him that he is the illegitimate son of Thomas Wayne, which would make him and Bruce half-brothers—that, while building to an important payoff, drags because the truth never feels in doubt.

But the film’s technical aspects, especially its cinematography and set design, are spectacular in their grime and bleakness, and this careful attention to the reality in which Joker takes place—an early ‘80s Gotham City modeled on the collapsing late ‘70s New York City—makes the violence feel that much more shocking and disturbing. Only a handful of people die in Joker, and none of them is thrilling or exciting and all feel like unalterable, irrevocable acts. (Compare the violence in any of the Avengers movies.) Furthermore, there a lot of nice touches in the details, such as Arthur’s poorly conceived clown makeup (I learn from reading about John Wayne Gacy that professional clowns frown upon—sorry—sharp corners for their painted smiles; the sharp angles make them look sinister). Hildur Guðnadóttir’s droning string score also adds to both the grind of living in Gotham and the dread and tension that build up through the second half of the film.

But the standout, what makes Joker so excellent, is Joaquin Phoenix’s performance. Arthur’s transformation from a man who can barely muster enough strength to pull a coherent sentence together to someone embracing meaningless violence is only believable because of him. “I don’t believe in anything,” Arthur says at the end of the film, not as a declaration but as an explanation. He smiles as he says it, and through Phoenix we see how he reached this point. In any other hands this would have gone wrong. He’s the reason to see this movie, and the reason it works.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Leonardo diCaprio as rick dalton and brad pitt as cliff booth In once upon a time in hollywood

Here’s a strange circumstance: me enjoying and commending a Quentin Tarantino movie. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with his movies since I first saw Reservoir Dogs in college, and while I liked Inglourious Basterds with some reservations and grudgingly admired the craftsmanship and humor of Django Unchained, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, to my surprise, totally won me over.

I won’t get into the plot, but the film follows fading Hollywood star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman-turned-gofer Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) across a few days in the spring and late summer of 1969. Dalton, desperate not to become a has-been, is struggling to remember his lines as the baddie in the pilot of a TV Western and Cliff, out and about on a variety of errands, has a series of run-ins with a creepy hippie girl and her “family” of cronies. The hippies turn out to be the Manson Family and Dalton, we see, is the next door neighbor of Roman Polanski and his luminous wife, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), whom we see in occasional cutaways as she drives around Hollywood, sits in on a screening of one of her own movies, and parties with friends.

There are plot-driven stories and character-driven stories, and while I think Once Upon a Time in Hollywood fits within the latter category, it’s also a uniquely setting-driven story. I haven’t seen a time and place this lovingly recreated since Zodiac—which, interestingly, begins at exactly the same cultural moment, just farther north in California. Tarantino’s Hollywood is beautiful, vibrant, but it’s also deeply historical—everywhere beneath the glossy present of 1969 are relics of what was and the slowly cohering image of what will be. Rick and Cliff are poised precisely at this point of balance, burdened not with the past—those were unapologetically the glory days, now patinaed and given over to hippie squatters—but with an uncertain future.

This is probably the best made movie of the year—gorgeously shot on film by Robert Richardson, with beautiful and intricately detailed sets and costumes that vividly evoke the era without wallowing in a cartoon version of it. The performances are all outstanding, even down to the bit players, for whom Tarantino shows affection, and this is the first Tarantino script where I didn’t feel like it was grossly overindulgent. The film is long, it lingers, lets us stew in the Hollywood of 1969, but it’s all exactly right. It doesn’t whip us along from one plot point to the next but is the first film in a while that just allows us to live in a scene. By the time the film ended I felt like I knew this place and these people.

Without spoiling anything, I did want to nod to the film’s ending, which rewrites history in a way Tarantino has done a couple times now. But where I felt the ending of Inglourious Basterds, for example, trivialized some of the events involved, the ending of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood really made me think and reflect. I finished the film mourning real loss and grateful for the mysterious gift of life. I don’t think I can say anything more without giving it all away, but to finish a Tarantino film with this kind of uplift, catharsis, and affirmation of the good and the beautiful was a revelation.

Tarantino claims he’s done after his tenth movie. Let’s hope it’s another as good as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

1917

George MacKay ventures into no-man’s-land in 1917

I’m grateful I got to see 1917, as it only enters wide release in January. The film, set during World War I and directed by Sam Mendes, follows two ordinary English infantrymen on a mission through no-man’s-land and the abandoned German front lines to deliver an important message. This seemingly simple story is told in one fluid, non-stop shot that takes the viewer with the men into some of the most dreadful and dangerous conditions soldiers have ever had to endure. This technique keeps us that their level, down in the muck, reminds us that these men had to walk almost everywhere they went, and creates a heavy sense of dread as the men encounter new dangers—they can’t escape and the camera won’t look away. We’re in this together.

1917 is my favorite film of the year. It’s well acted and technically excellent and involves the viewer like few other war films I’ve seen. Its depiction of life on the Western Front is dreadfully real and offers a two-hour journey into this terrible lost world that should shock and move. It’s brilliantly done. See if it you can.

There’s a lot more to say about this film, but I’ve already written quite a lot about it. You can read my full review of 1917 here.

Honorable mentions

• Tolkien—An okay-ish but enjoyable dramatization of some of JRR Tolkien’s formative years that takes some serious liberties with the truth in order to force this real, unique man into a Hollywood mold. You can read my full review of Tolkien here.

• Downton Abbey—Essentially a jumbo-sized episode of the show with slightly slicker cinematography and a larger budget for extras, Downton Abbey was an enjoyable trip back to this world and these characters. You can read my full review of Downton Abbey here.

• Toy Story 4—A fun, poignant followup to the first three that takes the characters in some interesting new directions.

• Ad Astra—A thought-provoking and beautifully shot film with a small but very good cast—the standout being Tommy Lee Jones as Brad Pitt’s deranged or fanatical astronaut father—that just dragged for significant stretches.

• Shazam!—One of the most flat-out enjoyable movies I saw this year, a straightforwardly comedic superhero movie with a fun premise and a winsome lead performance by Zachary Levi.

• Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker—I didn’t intend to write anything to contribute to the current Star Wars poo typhoon, but I did want to mention that I’d seen this. It’s not great, but it’s not as bad as I’d heard, and I mostly enjoyed it until it began collapsing under the weight of its own nostalgia in the last third or so. Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, and Oscar Isaac are excellent, the main reason any of these films have held together, and I wish they’d been better served by the scripts thrown together by the committees at Disney over the last several years.

Special mentions

Eero Aho as Antti Rokka In Tuntematon Sotilas

I wanted to make special mention of one film and two outstanding documentaries I saw this year. I mention the film separately because it technically came out two years ago but only became available in the US in March. That film is Tuntematon sotilas or Unknown Soldier, a Finnish film about a company of soldiers fighting Soviet Russia in the Continuation War. Adapted from the novel by Väinö Linna, Unknown Soldier is excellent, one of the best war films in recent memory. You can read my full review of Unknown Soldier, which I posted to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Winter War, here.

The first documentary I want to mention is They Shall Not Grow Old, directed by Peter Jackson. This documentary, which offers a window into the experience of British soldiers on the Western Front in World War I, was assembled from hundreds of hours of footage and oral history interviews in the archives of the Imperial War Museum. Much has been made of Jackson’s “restoration” of the footage—he and his team slowed and stabilized the jerky silent footage, digitally removed a lot of grain, damage, or other artifacts, and colorized it—but it’s not a restoration per se. This footage hasn’t been restored to its original condition. Far from it. But it has been manipulated in such a way as to remove some barriers to a modern viewer’s understanding of what they are seeing, and that's a good thing.

The best aspects of the film, however, are probably auditory. First, Jackson’s foley artists provided ambient sound effects and professional lipreaders provided dialogue for footage that has, for a hundred years, recorded only the silent mouthing of long dead men. This alone makes the footage come to life in a way that startled me when I saw it. Second, every bit of narration in the film comes from a montage of real World War I veterans talking about their experiences, with no modern narrator or talking heads getting in the way. It’s excellent, and profoundly moving. You can read my full review of They Shall Not Grow Old here.

The second documentary is Apollo 11, which came out to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the first moon landing. Like They Shall Not Grow Old, Apollo 11 avoids narrators and talking head interviewees. Instead, it very carefully sticks to contemporary film and television footage to tell the story of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins’s flight to the moon. The story is told in its editing, with the men who participated allowed to lead us through the story themselves, and the rich variety of footage used—launch preparations on Cape Canaveral, the team in mission control, the thousands of people packing the beach to watch the launch, the astronauts inside the command module and on the surface of the moon—gives us a sweeping look at the event that was the moon landing.

Especially noteworthy is Apollo 11’s use of some previously unreleased archival footage shot on 65mm film, giving sections of the documentary an astonishingly sharp clarity. It looks like it was shot yesterday, and when Armstrong or Aldin look into the camera you feel who these men were as men in a way that the scratchy footage used and reused for years on TV never could. It’s excellent, the best documentary on the Apollo program I’ve ever seen.

2019 films I missed but hope to catch in the new year:

• Avengers: Endgame—Yes, I’m burned out, and I have zero interest in Captain Marvel, but I do want to see the (sort of) end of this story. I’ll see it as soon as I can muster the energy to tap this on the screen at Redbox.

• The Irishman—Martin Scorsese’s much talked about return to the crime genre. I’m especially intrigued by the nonlinear structure and the extensive—and widely praised—use of digital de-aging technology to span the decades.

• Ford v Ferrari—The first trailer sold me. I don’t know much about cars or auto racing, especially the high-performance European variety, but this looks immensely entertaining and I do love a good car chase.

• Midsommar and The Lighthouse—Horror films that are long on mood and atmosphere. I’m especially interested in The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers’s followup to The Witch, one of the most engrossing and eerie historical films I’ve seen in years.

• The Peanut Butter Falcon—A widely praised and sweet looking coming-of-age story about a Down syndrome boy escaping his prison-like care facility and learning independence and manhood from an unlikely mentor.

• Unplanned—Based on the story of former Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson and her turn from abortion to the pro-life movement. My friends at the Front Porch Show interviewed one of the stars.

• A Hidden Life—Terrence Malick’s biographical film about Franz Jäggerstätter, an Austrian conscientious objector who was executed by the Nazis. It looks amazing. Here Kyle Smith compares it to A Man For All Seasons. Alan Jacobs writes of its portrayal of the mysteries of faith and courage here.

Looking ahead

2020 has some promising titles. I look forward to Greyhound, Tom Hanks’s adaptation of my favorite novel of last year; the latest Bond film, No Time to Die; Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, which seems to involve crime and reversing the flow of time, because it’s a Christopher Nolan movie; Kenneth Branagh’s second Poirot adaptation, Death on the Nile, which was teased at the end of his Murder on the Orient Express; and Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the weighty Dune, which I read for the first time this year. There’s probably plenty more, but these are the handful I’m most interested in right now.

I hope y’all enjoyed this year’s movies as much as I did, and, more importantly, I hope that y’all had a good year and that the coming year is full of promise and blessing. Thanks for reading, and happy New Year!

Shooting at the Stars

Illustration from Shooting at the Stars, by John Hendrix

One of my favorite kids’ Christmas books, one I have delighted to share with my kids since I discovered it a couple of years ago, is Shooting at the Stars, by John Hendrix. This book does not retell the nativity narratives of the Gospels and there is not a manger scene to be found, but the truth of that story pervades this one.

Shooting at the Stars is based on the true story of the Christmas truce of 1914. The First World War was only in its fifth month by December of that year but had already shocked Europe with its destruction and death toll. Hundreds of thousands had been killed in a war that modern technology was supposed to have ended with a quick and humiliating defeat for one’s enemies. Despite these high hopes on all sides, the overwhelming firepower of modern warfare stopped armies—with horrific losses—and forced them down, into the earth. Trench warfare had already arrived and was a settled reality, especially on the Western Front. Then, over a few days at Christmas, impromptu, unofficial ceasefires brought men from both sides into no-man’s-land to chat, exchange gifts, and celebrate the birth of Christ with real peace on earth—peace made only more real and striking by the context.

Hendrix frames his retelling as a letter home from Charlie, a teenage English soldier. Over the first several pages, Charlie describes the miseries of life in the trenches and Hendrix’s clearly well researched illustrations give the boy soldier’s descriptions weight. We see the rain, mud, the standing water that could flood soldiers out of the holes in the trench wall where they could sleep, and the Western Front’s notorious rats. Freezing temperatures come as a relief because the cold makes the ground solid again.

from Shooting at the Stars, by John Hendrix

Then comes the miracle, “a tale so wonderful that you will hardly believe my account!” On Christmas Eve the English hear the Germans singing “Silent Night”—wonderfully rendered as blackletter calligraphy the color of candlelight, hovering over no-man’s-land—and Christmas trees appear all along the German front lines. That leads to a joke shouted over from the German side, a can of jam (mentioned prominently in They Shall Not Grow Old) heaved over from the English side, and two officers from the two warring nations stepping out of their trenches and walking toward one another to meet in the middle. Hendrix, through his careful pacing and his luminous illustrations, makes these officers’ simple handshake a powerfully emotional moment.

The first thing the soldiers do with their truce is to help bury each side’s dead, the numerous unburied corpses being a somber but important fact about the Western Front that Hendrix rightly includes but keeps kid-friendly. From there the soldiers meet, play soccer with a cracker box, take photos together, and exchange souvenirs, humble tokens like buttons and belt buckles—and one wonders at the accidental appropriateness of the German motto struck onto their belt buckles: Gott mit uns, “God with us.”

But the war intrudes again and the truce cannot last. One officer coming up from the rear berates the men in the front lines: “He said we had acted like traitors to Britain—but how could a day of peace be treason?” Hendrix thus subtly but powerfully contrasts the peace that Christ came to bring with the ideologies that possess modern people—in this case, nationalism and militarism, but it could just as easily be any other ism to which we find ourselves committed today.

A friend of mine who read my short Goodreads review a few years ago told me that, as he read Shooting at the Stars with his son, when those first two officers shook hands and Charlie writes that “For one glorious Christmas morning, war had taken a holiday,” his son stopped him and said, “That's wrong. It's more like the holiday took the war away. Right, Dad?” Amen to that.

Well researched, with a good introduction and afterword and a glossary that will be helpful to younger readers, but, more importantly, beautifully written and illustrated, Shooting at the Stars shows what the hope of the incarnation means in a world as broken and destructive as ours. If Christmas can redeem even a few days in the trenches of the Western Front, how much more can the hope born that night in Bethlehem accomplish before he is through? Shooting at the Stars is a must read, a worthwhile addition to your family’s cycle of Christmas stories, and one that makes that truth and that hope all the more real.

Merry Christmas, frohe Weihnachten, and pax in terra.

Reflections on two years of blogging

John turturro explores the lIfe of the mind In Barton Fink

Yesterday marked the second anniversary of the launch of my author website, which I still think of as new. When I was first setting the website up through Squarespace I almost deleted its blog function but decided to keep it. I’m glad I did. It’s far and away the most visited part of the site and—the reason I kept it at all—it’s become a great outlet for quotations, reflections, reviews, and other small writing projects. It’s helped me stay limber as a writer, kept the gears greased and the engine warm. 

I’ve also learned a lot from it, especially as I’ve tried to use the website to promote my books and tried to figure out the whole independent author thing. Here are a handful of lessons learned from the first two years of writing this blog: 

You can’t always predict what readers will respond to

Some of the posts I’ve put a lot of effort into have gone over like lead balloons. I work on one, sweat over it, post and share it and—crickets. It’s hard not to find that disheartening. I’ve learned to respond to this in two different but sometimes overlapping ways: 

First, drop what’s not working. I ran across this piece of advice in a book on social media for authors. Don’t spend effort on work that gets no result. This is the reason—or at least a reason—I dropped my Historical Movie Monday series. I didn’t have the time or the energy for the paltry response they got and decided to use my limited energies elsewhere.

Second, just keep doing your thing. I mostly write this blog for me—more public but less open than a diary, but serving much the same function. Alan Jacobs has called his blog a “commonplace book,” and I’ve certainly used this one as such. So even when something I’ve worked on and polished to a shine fails, the point has been the doing of it. I’ve gotten practice, I’ve grown at least a little bit. That alone makes it worthwhile. 

What readers do respond to will surprise you

Of the top fifteen most popularly visited posts on this blog, I might have predicted two or three of them. Those are ones I really spent time on and tried to make worthwhile to whomever might read them. Some others are notes or reflections I rattled off and posted and didn’t look back at. The rest are somewhere in between. The point is that there’s no telling what will find a readership and what won’t.

But if the results are as unpredictable as my first point suggests, you need to do your best on everything you put out there. You don’t want the post that finally finds a big audience—because of Google or a share in a newsletter or on Facebook or whatever—to be the post where you were neglecting the craft of writing. Not everything has to be as profound as Shakespeare, as rich as Dante, as insightful as Jane Austen, as polished as Evelyn Waugh, or even as funny as Dave Barry, but everything should be best of its kind that you can make it.

Sometimes it just takes time

I mentioned how I stopped putting together Historical Movie Monday posts because they didn’t get a response commensurate with the effort I had put into them. Well, guess what have proven the most popular posts on this blog in the last two years? 

Since first posting them almost two years ago, my critiques of Kingdom of Heaven, Hacksaw Ridge, The Winter War, and The Alamo have, via Google and other search engines, become the most popular things on this website, and it’s not even close. It just took some time.

That’s a good reminder of the value of patience and endurance. We live in a world of instantaneous results; if we can’t see the benefit immediately, it has no value to us, and nowhere is this more true than online. But patience is the key. No good thing is gotten without effort, and effort requires the patience and tenacity to outlast those who give up. This is a lesson any writer needs to learn—especially if you’re self-publishing—and the reminder has been good for me. 

Humility

So if your best efforts don’t get the readership you want, you can’t predict what will, and you just have to give it time while you put your back into it and slave away, the result should be humility—humility before the tradition and craft you practice first and foremost, but also a humility before the people who may (or may not) read your stuff and the forces that (fairly or not) bring your stuff to those readers.

Railing against failure is a failure of humility. It’s entitlement, perhaps the besetting sin of our world. (Cf the comments on instant gratification above.) And when you reject this kind of humility, refuse to adopt it as part of the necessary discipline of writing, the result isn’t just pride, it’s resentment.

Gratitude 

I don’t think we live in an age of wrath or fear so much as an age of resentment. What we desperately lack is gratitude, which is the best antidote for resentment. It’s something I’ve been working on personally for a long time, and I hope it informs my writing—both here and in my novels. Because if grateful people are also the most generous—as seems to be the case—a grateful writer is going to be most generous to his readers.

So for all the surprises, both good and bad, successes and disappointments, I’m thankful that I have this website and this blog and that I have readers. Y’all mean a lot to me.

It’s been a great two years. I look forward, gratefully, to many more.

Butterfield on faith in humanity

The internet is loaded with clickbait offering to “restore your faith in humanity.” Usually what these stories mean is “Here are some photos that will give you a temporary feeling of blind positivity.” While the clickbait is silly enough, otherwise serious people actually talk this way. But the unasked question—the first that occurs to me—is Why would anyone have faith in humanity in the first place?

Herbert Butterfield (1900-79) is one of the great minds in the historiography of the last hundred years. His most famous book, The Whig Interpretation of History, was an enormously influential critique of theories of constant historical improvement, a book that is still relevant. The following comes from his book Christianity and History, originally a series of lectures delivered at Cambridge in the fall of 1948, on the radio in the spring of 1949, and published in book form later that year.

This passage concludes chapter two, “Human Nature in History,” in which Butterfield examines how an historian’s basic assumptions about human nature fundamentally alter how they perceive, study, and present the past. Unless an historian begins with “individual personalities, possessing self-consciousness, intellect and freedom,” it will become “difficult to write historical narrative at all.” He therefore sets out to examine and defend the centrality of the study of individual human persons to the historical discipline and to push back against mechanistic or reductionist conceptions of history, explicitly naming Marxism a number of times though his critique, lo these seventy years later, is very broadly applicable.

Butterfield concludes by anticipating a criticism that his conception stems from religious belief (he was a devout Methodist), asserting first that the anthropological idea he has sketched is open to anyone, religious or not (in medieval terms, the view he has outlined is not dependent on revealed truth but can be arrived at through unaided reason, meaning anyone can—and should—grasp its truth.) Second, and more importantly, he contends with the idea that stripping out religious belief immediately moves a scholar into the broad, sunlit uplands of pure objectivity. Finally, he puts his finger on one particularly dearly held but unquestioned anthropological assumption perhaps even more common in our own day than his, an assumption that lies behind many of the catastrophes of the modern era—as well as a lot of insufferable feel-good pap, from Oprah to memes to the clickbait I started this post with.

It is necessary for me to emphasize the fact that what I have been outlining in this lecture is not merely a Christian idea—it is not dependent on the truth of any super-natural religion. We are concerned not with theology but rather with anthropology, with our ordinary doctrine concerning man. . . . [I]t is a mistake for writers of history and other teachers to imagine that if they are not Christian they are refraining from committing themselves, or working without any doctrine at all, discussing history without any presuppositions. Amongst historians, as in other fields, the blindest of all the blind are those who are unable to examine their own presuppositions, and blithely imagine therefore that they do not possess any. It must be emphasized that we create tragedy after tragedy for ourselves by a lazy unexamined doctrine of man which is current amongst us and which the study of history does not support. And now, as in Old Testament days, there are false prophets who flourish by flattering and bribing human nature, telling it to be comfortable about itself in general, and playing up to its self-righteousness in times of crisis. When it suits us we may set out to advertise the sins of one nation or another, but we bring in the moral issue here and there as it serves our purposes. While we are crying out against the crimes of an enemy we may be putting the soft pedal on the similar terrible large-scale atrocities that are being committed by an ally. Our own doctrine of human nature leads us into inconsistencies.

“ It is essential not to have faith in human nature. Such faith is a recent heresy and a very disastrous one.”

— Herbert Butterfield

During the war it was put to a British ambassador that after the destruction of Germany Russia would become a similar menace to Europe if she found herself in a position to behave over a large area with impunity. The answer given on behalf of this country was that such apprehensions were unjustified, Russia would not disappoint us, for we believed that her intentions were friendly and good. Such an attitude to morality—such a neglect of a whole tradition of maxims in regard to this question—was not Christian in any sense of the word but belongs to a heresy as black as the old Manichaean heresy. It is like the Bishop who said that if we totally disarmed he had too high an opinion of human nature to think that anybody would attack us. There might be great virtue in disarming and consenting to be made martyrs for the sake of a good cause; but to promise that we should not have to endure martyrdom in that situation, or to rely on such a supposition, is against both theology and history. It is essential not to have faith in human nature. Such faith is a recent heresy and a very disastrous one.

Again, Butterfield is writing during the Berlin Airlift, as the Russians—Britain and the US’s erstwhile ally—sought to starve the western half of the city into submission. One need not dig too deeply to find the self-delusion and self-righteousness Butterfield describes in the Allied conduct of the war a few years earlier; read FDR’s hopelessly optimistic correspondence with Stalin sometime. We could multiply examples.

A decade before Butterfield’s book, about a week after the beginning of the Blitz, CS Lewis wrote in one of his finest essays that chivalry “offers the only possible escape from a world divided between wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things which make life desirable.” Lewis’s thoughts on chivalry are excellent and I want to write on them at length some other time; what brought his essay to mind in this context was his conclusion, which strikes a note similar to Butterfield’s, but with an even darker note of British understatement: “There was, to be sure, a rumour in the last century that wolves would gradually become extinct by some natural process; but that seems to have been an exaggeration.”

1917

Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay) cross no-man’s-land in 1917

One of the books I read in my grad school World War I class was called Eye-Deep in Hell. The book was a break from our reading about strategy and troop movements and the cultural and political substructure of the war and took us instead into the experience of combat. It answers, in enormous and thoroughly documented detail, the question I’ve mentioned on this blog many, many times before in regard to war and the past—What was it like? The horrors of the Western Front as described in that book piled up line by line, paragraph by paragraph, first shocking, then paining or nauseating, and finally numbing the reader.

1917 is the best realization of that experience that I’ve ever seen on film.

The short version

The film begins with two young English lance corporals, Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay), at rest behind the lines. Their rest proves short-lived. When Blake’s sergeant tells him to pick a man and follow him, Blake chooses his pal Schofield. Rather than being assigned light duty or sent on some other errand, Blake and Schofield meet their commanding officer, General Erinmore (Colin Firth). The general personally briefs them for a special mission—a British battalion on the other side of a German salient is scheduled to make an attack across no-man’s-land at dawn the following morning, an attempt to exploit a German withdrawal and force them to continue retreating. Aerial reconnaissance has revealed that the Germans have fallen back to an impregnable new line of defense, meaning that unless the British attack is called off the men going over the top will be annihilated. But the Germans have cut all telegraph and telephone lines to the doomed unit and so the message must be delivered on foot—as soon as possible.

Why send Blake? His elder brother is a lieutenant in the battalion. Fail to deliver the message calling off the attack and he and 1,600 others will be killed. They have about eight hours.

With this simple setup and these high stakes—both military and personal—Blake and Schofield set off. They move up through the labyrinthine lines of trenches and, when they reach the front line, strike out into what used to be no-man’s-land. From there they must work their way through the abandoned German trenches (which are depressingly better designed and built than their own), the emptied countryside beyond, a bombed out village, and finally into the freshly dug trenches of the battalion as it prepares to attack. Much goes wrong.

I don’t want to say much more about it because I want everyone who can to go see it, and to see with the uncertainty that the characters live with moment by moment.

In which I gush over technical matters

1917 is technically brilliant—the most well-made movie I’ve seen all year, a masterpiece of what cinema is capable of. The director, Sam Mendes, and the cinematographer, the great Roger Deakins, have used all their visual and dramatic skills to craft a magnificent, overwhelmingly powerful movie. It’s breathtaking, one of the very few films which I’d describe with the overused word “immersive.” The film is awash in the kind of detail you find in books like Eye-Deep in Hell—the sucking mud, the stagnant water in the craters, the banks of sandbags and miles of telephone wire, the omnipresent rats boldly feeding on corpses. The men wear bulky, filthy uniforms and stagger under heavy packs, often needing to help each other up, and when they lose their breath and pant we understand why.

The film’s depiction of no-man’s-land is particularly harrowing. It’s a barren waste pocked by shell-holes and strewn with dense tangles of barbed wire, dotted all over with the rotting corpses of both men and animals. Blake and Schofield slip and stumble through the muck and up and down the artillery-scarred terrain. 1917 doesn’t just show you what it was like, it makes you feel what it was like. It’s all there but the smell.

In addition to the exceptional production design, Deakins’s camerawork helps create this sense of immersion. It’s well known by now that the film is a single continuous shot lasting its almost two-hour running time. There is, in fact, one cut—blackness as a character is knocked unconscious—and the film is not really a single shot but multiple long takes stitched together digitally. But thanks to meticulous planning and seamless editing, for most of the film the impression is of a continuous, unbroken shot. I’ve never seen it done better.

I wanted to laud this in a little detail because I usually dislike gimmicks like this. In other films that are either “one shot” or simply include lots of long shots—“oners”—I find the result off-putting, especially as the “hidden” cuts are usually plainly obvious and the camera continuously glides and shifts and pivots to mimic the effect of traditional shot-reverse shot editing. Here, the camera lingers even as it and the characters move, and Deakins and Mendes often allow the characters themselves to change the composition rather than whipping the camera around. (Compare “the Spielberg oner.”) The style is always under tight control.

The greatest virtue of Mendes’s direction and Deakins’s cinematography in 1917 is their willingness to embrace stillness. Many times throughout the film the camera reaches a carefully composed point and settles, allowing important scenes to pass with our observation unbroken. It’s a painterly or theatrical effect, and is most powerfully used in a scene featuring a surprising—and agonizingly slow—death. It’s brilliantly done.

I’ve already emphasized the detailed recreation of the trenches and the sensory effect it has, but the visual splendor of 1917 shouldn’t be overlooked. Deakins’s work, especially in the austere landscapes through the middle of the film, as Blake and Schofield walk through the empty countryside behind the former German lines, reminds me not a little of Dunkirk, but employed to even better effect. The visuals throughout—from the muddy, cluttered trenches at the beginning through the wreck of no-man’s-land and the darkness of the German lines, to the vast emptiness behind, the nightmare world of flare-lit rubble in a French village, and finally the shallow new trenches dug into chalky ground facing the German lines—are striking, both in their detail and their spareness, and are perfectly calculated to support the mood of the characters as they leave the established, busy, and familiar behind for unknown danger.

Writing, cast, and characters

That points as well to the writing. 1917 is thematically rich despite being so straightforward, and everything in the film is carefully set up. It’s easy to miss because of the film’s amazing technical achievements, but the story is well crafted and brilliantly structured.

The best evidence of this care is how much Mendes and his co-writer, Krysty Wilson-Cairns, are able to make us care about two men we get to know in real time. We learn very little about them—at first. Blake is chipper, talkative, blithe. We intuit that he’s younger, or at least less experienced, than Schofield, and talks freely about home and family in a way Schofield pointedly does not. Schofield has been previously decorated—we never find out why—but is more taciturn and bitter. He says early on that it would be easier simply not to go home on leave since coming back to the trenches is so painful. He is more clearly haunted by what he’s been through, and George MacKay’s expressive, hollowed out face conveys more of the war than any dialogue could. The two men’s fear as they approach and then enter no-man’s-land is palpable, and things only get worse from there.

Other, more recognizable actors pop up in one-scene roles—Colin Firth as the general who sends Blake and Schofield on their mission, Andrew Scott as an officer who has given up on everything, Mark Strong as another, more gentlemanly sort who helps them along the way, Benedict Cumberbatch as the haughty colonel meant to receive the general’s message, Richard Madden as Blake’s brother—but Blake and Schofield are the stars and Chapman and MacKay are excellent. You can feel their camaraderie, even when they bicker, and you see it in a simple but moving image repeated several times—Blake bending wordlessly to give Schofield a hand, helping him to his feet, and the pair moving on.

Neither man—particularly Schofield—would think of themselves as heroes, but they do undeniably heroic things in the course of their mission. They do so because of the situation they’ve been thrust into, a situation they didn’t ask for—as Schofield makes plain after one near miss—but also because of their love for one another, their families, and the men like them who could be killed if they fail.

The reality of war

The two stars are also, crucially, very young looking, a good reminder than wars tend to be fought by men in their teens or early twenties. This boyish looking pair and thousands of their fellows live through conditions most of us could never imagine, and 1917’s invitation to see, to consider, and to live through those things with this pair—to feel compassion, literally “suffering with”—is one of its greatest strengths.

I’ve already talked about all the detail that went into 1917—the impeccable recreations of the trenches, the attention to clothing and gear—and how that helps us feel what it was like, but the thing that really sells the film’s vision of what it was like is the actors—both the stars and the hundreds of extras. The overwhelming impression of the soldiers of the Great War that one takes away from 1917 is one of unutterable weariness. The film begins and ends with characters stopping for some much-needed rest, Blake complains constantly of being hungry and even rifles through abandoned German supplies for food, and Schofield is so tired that at one point he drifts to sleep in a river. And any time the camera takes us through the trenches, anyone who is not actively at work—marching forward or to the rear, bringing in the wounded, shoring up the walls of the trench—is sitting, either asleep or staring blankly at the curiosity Blake and Schofield present as they pass through. We see men sleeping, smoking, eating, all haggard, all slouched into the most relaxed position available to them. The world of 1917 is a world of endless movement and exhaustion, which may make it one of the most realistic war films ever made.

The film also does not shy away from the sheer waste of World War I. The bodies in no-man’s-land—some of which have been there so long that the living have given them jocular nicknames—are the most obvious example, but the wastage accumulates in other ways. As the dreaded assault on the new German line approaches we see a communications trench lined with dozens of stretchers, ready for the inevitable, and even the civilians suffer. In the concluding scene of a nightmarish sequence beginning at night and stretching into the dawn, one of our protagonists literally swims through the bloated corpses of civilians that have washed up in an eddy in a river.

It’s harrowing, and the camera never looks away. Blake and Schofield can’t escape it and neither can we.

Conclusion

1917 is an excellent example of what cinema can do when all its component parts are worked by masters. Its writing, acting, and camerawork are all perfectly integrated, with each supporting the others. It’s a masterpiece. See it on the big screen if you can.

But more importantly, the story and experience the filmmakers have used their skill and craft to tell is unforgettable. 1917 takes us into a lost world and makes us see and feel and remember it in the way it deserves—as an unspeakably wasteful, frustrating, tragic, wearying horror, but a horror in which good, ordinary men like Blake and Schofield showed the greatest kind of love for their friends, which is also the greatest kind of heroism.

Praise for Dark Full of Enemies and Griswoldville

Back in the spring I submitted my two most recent novels, Dark Full of Enemies and Griswoldville, to competition in the 27th annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards. Neither won, but both scored very high in every category of assessment and I appreciated the brief feedback I got from the books’ judges earlier this month. I’ve quoted a few substantial excerpts below.

Praise for Griswoldville

“The close bond Georgie has with his grandfather, Fate, is endearing, and the reader is rooting for their strength and survival (as well as that of Georgie’s father) throughout the novel.”

— Judge, 27th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards

Griswoldville is an in-depth look at what a young boy fighting in a war of the past was really like. The author clearly did his research on the time period and the inner workings of the Georgia militia, and the prose is thoughtful and polished. We learn what it really took for farming families to survive during the Civil War era, particularly when men from the family were away from the farms for years at a time. The close bond Georgie has with his grandfather, Fate, is endearing, and the reader is rooting for their strength and survival (as well as that of Georgie’s father) throughout the novel.

Praise for Dark Full of Enemies

Dark Full of Enemies zeroes in on a seemingly small mission to the Arctic with laser-sharp focus and precision. The narrative structure, much like McKay himself, is clean, crisp, and precise, and reflects the bitter cold and stark darkness of the world around him.

“Dark Full of Enemies expertly captures the cold, dark dangers of Nazi-occupied Norway, and a Special operative team’s desperate race to complete their mission—and make it out of enemy territory alive.”

— Judge, 27th Annual WD Self-Published Book Awards

The characters, particularly the soldiers on the mission, each had their own personality, which was cleverly portrayed to the reader through minimal, yet colorful details. This was especially true of Stallings, whose troubled past guided his decisions in the present narrative, and was a character that readers could empathize with. . . .

The use of setting is clear and effective--never once is the reader unsure of where the story is taking place, or how brutally cold and inhospitable the environment is. And as the mission drags on, and the soldiers become weary from the lack of sunlight, the reader too can really sense how draining the mission is—and appreciate its completion that much more.

Dark Full of Enemies expertly captures the cold, dark dangers of Nazi-occupied Norway, and a Special operative team’s desperate race to complete their mission—and make it out of enemy territory alive.

Heading into the holidays

I appreciate Writer’s Digest taking the extra trouble to send some feedback to the entrants in the contest, and I’ve been gratified and heartened by what I read.

Finally, if you’re looking for something to give the reader in your life this Christmas, please consider Dark Full of Enemies and Griswoldville—or my other two books! They’re available through Amazon—where both have five stars—in both paperback and Kindle formats. If you’re still not quite sold and would like to read more feedback or some excerpts from the books, visit each book’s page on my website here (Dark Full of Enemies) or here (Griswoldville).

Thanks as always for reading! And I hope y’all have a good holiday season and a merry Christmas.

Midway

American bombers begin their dive toward the Japanese fleet in Midway

A few months ago I wrote up a few of my thoughts and worries after watching the trailer for Roland Emmerich’s Midway. That blog post was mostly worries. It also got a ton of traffic compared to my usual fare, so it seems right to follow that up with a review now that I’ve seen the film.

I’m happy to say that Midway was a very pleasant surprise. 

Midway tells, in broad but surprisingly detailed outline, the story of the US Pacific carrier fleet from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 to the titular battle in June of 1942. The film brings us into the story via a handful of major characters at various levels of and with varying perspectives on the conflict—Navy aviator Dick Best (Ed Skrein) and several other pilots and enlisted men of their carrier, the USS Enterprise; Naval Intelligence officer Edwin Layton (Patrick Wilson); Admirals Bull Halsey (Dennis Quaid) and Chester Nimitz (Woody Harrelson); and a handful of civilians on the home front, especially Best’s wife (Mandy Moore). Along the way we learn a little about intelligence gathering and the fog of war (some of the best stuff in the movie), how the United States began its recovery from Pearl Harbor, the incredible efforts to keep the ships afloat and the planes in the air long enough to hold back the Japanese, how difficult naval warfare is, and—with especially chilling detail—the dangerous life of carrier pilots, in which even minor training accidents take lives. 

The film also offers a Japanese perspective, Tora! Tora! Tora!-style, which allows us to see some of the internal tensions on that side. We get a little bit of the violent army-versus-navy conflict that divided the Japanese high command, differences of opinion about strategy in the lower echelons of the navy’s command structure, and even cameos by Hideki Tojo and Emperor Hirohito. This gives the film a laudable sense of balance and humanity—I was surprised by the sympathy I felt for Admiral Yamaguchi, who chooses to go down with his defeated fleet at the end. Fortunately, though, the film doesn’t fall into the moral equivalence trap—the Japanese are clearly the aggressors and we get mentions, and even a few glimpses, of their often forgotten brutality in China.

This pairing of American and Japanese perspectives also helps tackle one of the most difficult problems a historical film has to confront—historian’s bias, the fact that we know what happened. By showing us people living through these events and making choices between multiple options based on limited information, Midway gives us a sense of the potential for things to turn out other than they eventually did. That brings the viewer into the uncertainty of the historical experience, something I’ve seen done effectively by very few historical films. It’s an accomplishment.

The film also does an excellent job of dramatizing what to me is one of the most astonishing aspects of naval warfare—not only sailing out onto a vast, almost featureless, and implacably hostile plane but searching for, feeling out, finding, and attacking enemies. Despite its narrative omniscience, Midway makes the fog of war feel real.

A few other things I liked: 

• Following the Pearl Harbor sequence we get a few scenes that almost never make it into war films. Dick Best visits a warehouse where the Navy is collecting the bodies and parts of bodies they have retrieved from the harbor. Best is there to identify an old friend from Annapolis so he can take the news to the man’s widow. This scene makes the phrase “burned beyond recognition,” a phrase Tom Wolfe made visceral in the opening chapter of The Right Stuff, horribly real. It’s also subdued and tastefully restrained, and all the more moving as a result. We also see the ongoing military funerals in the attack’s aftermath. 

• In my trailer reaction I wondered about the inclusion of the Doolittle raid. It’s handled very quickly but doesn’t feel artificial or out of place, but rather a milemarker on the US military’s journey toward effective retaliation.

• The flight scenes, the main attraction for me and my dad (who took me to see it despite my hesitations), were very well done. We get a good sense of the vast distances involved and the difficulty of both finding and attacking targets. And the divebombing sequences make us feel the danger and the trickiness of targeting something even as huge as an aircraft carrier.

• I also appreciated the attention paid to the dangers of aviation. More than one crew is lost to accident, and equipment failure undermines even successful attacks. The dramatization of these difficulties only underlines the sheer guts it took to do what these men did.

• The mechanics of running an aircraft carrier get a little attention too, with a variety of crewmen omnipresent any time we’re on the deck and, in the aftermath of a crash, a line of them walking across to police any debris left behind. Details like this make the locations feel real despite all the green screen.

• I liked most of the performances as well, but as with any ensemble historical epic these aren’t the main draw. Patrick Wilson as Layton and a subdued Woody Harrelson as a Nimitz struggling under the weight of his new command were particularly good. The pilots were mostly good, but Ed Skrein as Best and Luke Evans as Wade McClusky were the only real standouts. Skrein in particular struggles with a hokey accent (see below) and some awkward dialogue, but you remember him and hope he survives, and that’s an accomplishment in a film with such a large cast.

The film isn’t perfect. The internet is already full of the minor details that it got wrong, that bedevil any military movie—paint schemes for the planes, breaches of military protocol, men wearing the wrong rank, enlisted men in an officers’ club, and so forth. Those are real issues but don’t sink the movie. There is a great deal of CGI, and while some of it is excellent, effectively blending the real and the special effect, there’s also a lot of dodgy green screen work and some outright cartoony explosion sequences. In a few places, Emmerich gives in to some of his disaster movie impulses and we get some lapses of the uncharacteristic restraint that he brings to most of the movie. I’m thinking particularly of the Pearl Harbor sequence and the destruction of the Arizona, which had some over-the-top moments. A few subplots, such as Best’s relationship with his wife, feel underdeveloped and at least one of them—Hollywood filmmaker John Ford, risking his life to shoot footage of the Japanese attacks on Midway Island—disappears from the movie.

More critically, the script, while it does a good job outlining the events between December 1941 and June 1942 and is stuffed with information, often has its characters talking like exposition machines. It’s to the credit of the actors that most of them sell the dialogue as well as they do. That said, there is some overacting (Nick Jonas as a sinewy tough from 1940s central casting, Dennis Quaid as a scenery chewing Halsey), and Ed Skrein’s much commented upon New Joisey accent is phony, but the film’s strengths overwhelmed all these problems—for me, anyway—and I came away appreciating it.

A few critics have dinged Midway for its perceived schmaltz—“Men like Dick Best are the reason we’re going to win this war,” McClusky intones at the end, a line I’ve seen as the object of snickering or harrumphing elsewhere—but I think that has more to do with the receptivity of those viewers than any fault in the performers or the film’s sentiments. Midway is not a subtle movie. It’s also not a cynical movie. The things that matter to these men are their families and friends and it’s these concrete goods that move them to their incredible actions and sacrifices. The film ably captures the spirit of a time defined by shock, strain, and especially loss and the struggle to survive, a time in which cynicism, with its suspicion and moral muddle, is the real naïveté, and a time in which the man who can, in the unforgiving minute, decide and act and give up a part or all of himself for his friends will win the day. 

Unknown Soldier

Lieutenant Kariluoto (Johannes holopainen) leads an attack early in Tuntematon Sotilas (Uknown Soldier)

This is a review I’ve been trying to write since March. Back in the spring I learned that Unknown Soldiers, a new film version of Väino Linna’s great war novel, which I reviewed here last year, had just become available in the US. I immediately ordered a copy. Since then I’ve watched it five or six times. The 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Winter War finally got me to finish this review.

A little background

Eighty years ago tomorrow, Soviet Russia invaded Finland, an unprovoked act of aggression meant to subjugate Russia’s northwestern neighbor as it already had other smaller, weaker countries like Estonia. That war, the Talvisota or Winter War, lasted just over one hundred days. The Finns fought the Russians to a standstill, killing over 200,000 and wounding many more, and forced Stalin to the bargaining table. In exchange for peace, Stalin forced the Finns to concede border territories that the Russians had long coveted, including the Karelian isthmus, from which thousands of civilians fled before the Soviet takeover.

The Winter War is the stuff of legend. It was also only the first of three wars the Finns would fight between 1939 and 1945.

The second and longest of these wars is known as the Continuation War, which began in June 1941, about a year and a half after the end of the Winter War. This time the Finns went on the offensive. They partnered with the Germans and, with the Wehrmacht, planned and coordinated their attack to coincide with the Germans’ Operation Barbarossa. The Finns quickly recaptured former Finnish territory and pressed onward, capturing Russian territory and holding it tenaciously for several years. But in the end the Russians turned them back and, through overwhelming numbers and vast superiority in armor, air, and logistical power (helped indirectly by the United States, our Lend-Lease program propping up an ungrateful Stalin for a long stretch of the war), the Russians forced the Finns to conclude a second peace agreement with Stalin in September 1944. They regained none of the territory lost in the Winter War, and lost yet more.

Little of this matters very much to the characters of Unknown Soldier—at least, not on the grand geopolitical scale. Their concerns are simpler, more concrete—life and death; food, warm clothing, dry shelter, and good cover in a bombardment; and, in some cases, quite literally hearth and home.

The company of soldiers

Jussi Vatanen as Lieutenant Koskela in Tuntematon Sotilas

Unknown Soldier (Finnish title: Tuntematon sotilas), based on the novel of the same name by Väino Linna, a veteran of the Continuation War, tells the story of a company of machine gunners in the Finnish army through the whole course of the war. Linna’s novel is a classic of Finnish literature and of the war genre—it’s one of the best I’ve ever read—and has been adapted for film twice previously. I haven’t had a chance to see those versions, but this new one, based on the novel’s unedited manuscript version and co-written and directed by Aku Louhimies, is excellent.

The film introduces its main characters as they muster in for the invasion of Russia. The film narrows the novel’s large cast down to a core group with whom we’ll spend the majority of the three hour story. Young Hietanen and his giggly buddy Vanhala are two major characters introduced at the start, along with some of their buddies: Lehto, a tough, ill-tempered plug of a man who embraces hard duty; Lahtinen, a stalwart leftist who doesn’t believe in the war; Rahikainen, a ne’er-do-well who always has an angle, and others. We also meet several officers who will offer widely varying examples of leadership: young, idealistic, naïve Kariluoto; the stiff disciplinarian Lammio; and Koskela, the ideal combination of guts, good sense, and endurance.

The men join the attack and days, then weeks of the endless forests of Karelia pass by. Casualties mount—first the unit’s original commander, an old White from the days of the Finnish Civil War, then men killed in attacks on the Russians or ambushed on patrol. One patrol ends particularly badly, with a good man left behind—when they find him later, he has not been killed by the Russians as first reported, but has killed himself rather than be captured.

Reinforcements in the form of reservists arrive, including young, inexperienced men, eccentrics like Honkajoki, who carries a longbow and experiments with perpetual motion machines in his spare time, and perhaps the best character in both the book and the film, Antti Rokka. Rokka is a Karelian farmer and for him the war is personal—he lost his farm in the settlement from the Winter War, and hopes to get it back for himself, his wife, and their growing family. For Hietanen too the war becomes personal, as he strikes up a romance with a Russian girl he befriends in Petroskoi, a Russian city on Lake Onega that the Finns capture as a bargaining chip.

As the first winter of this war arrives and the Russians recover from their surprise at the onslaught, the men repel repeated Russian counterattacks and settle into elaborate networks of trenches. Koskela proves himself a caring and capable leader, courageous, unfussy, and popular with his men, and Rokka proves himself a tough and uncompromising warrior, singlehandedly wiping out a Russian platoon sent to flank them in one instance and escaping capture during a trench raid only to turn the tables and wipe out his attackers in another. Nevertheless both men come in for criticism by their superiors—the injustice of it is bewildering in the face of what we’ve seen.

The war drags on. Two Christmases pass. Rokka’s family grows. The weight of the accumulated boredom and separation from family piles onto these men. If a sense of melancholy hangs over the film it is not only because of the grind of modern warfare, but because of its almost Homeric sense of dramatic irony—we all know how this war must end. The drama comes in worrying about which characters will make it.

The final hour of the film covers the Finnish retreat. It’s harrowing. The line repeatedly crumbles and acts of desperate courage and self-sacrifice are all that keep the Russians from overwhelming and completely destroying the Finnish troops. We see incredible bravery—men counterattack in ones and twos to save their retreating comrades—and not a little stupidity, and the highs of individual courage are sometimes immediately smothered by the wasting of blood by the soldier’s commanders. It’s a mess.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but a great number of characters we have come to know and love die, sometimes with cruel pointlessness. The film ends with wordless images of the war’s cost—a grieving mother, photographs of young soldiers with black ribbons across their frames, civilians fleeing the Russians, a pregnant widow.

On the attack

Eero Aho as Antti Rokka in Tuntematon Sotilas

Unknown Soldier is one of the most beautiful war films I’ve seen. Shot digitally using almost all natural light, it’s magnificent to look at and the naturalism of its imagery helps sell the combat as real. Other scenes, especially those on the homefront—a perspective missing from the book and presented in poetic, often wordless vignettes here—echo the composition and lighting of the masters of the northern renaissance. The scenes back home at Rokka’s farm are especially beautiful and moving.

The battle scenes, always excellent in Finnish movies, are intense and carefully staged, with exacting attention to period equipment and detail. I especially appreciated the care taken to put the viewer in the perspective of the troops themselves—the camera mostly stays at their level and the enemy is almost always seen from a great distance, if they’re seen at all. It almost comes as a shock when Rokka captures a Russian officer and we see that the Russians are just men, not malevolent spirits that strike pitilessly from the woods. The sense of danger the viewer gets from this presentation is intense and sometimes uncomfortable—you really can’t see what’s out there in the woods, and sometimes it gets the jump on you. While not exceptionally gory, the combat really feels violent, and the guts of the men who stand up and face death in the moment they’re needed is all the more awe-inspiring as a result.

The performances are also excellent, particularly those of Eero Aho as Rokka, Jussi Vatanen as Koskela, Aku Hirviniemi as Hietanen, and Hannes Suominen as the cheerful jokester Vanhala—who reaches the end of the film, true to his counterpart in the book, greatly sobered. Vatanen’s Koskela in particular wears a heavy foreboding in his otherwise warm and down-to-earth expression that only underlines his bravery. He knows what the war is eventually going to demand of him, and marches to meet it anyway. You can see why his men follow him, especially as he holds the disintegrating unit together in the face of the Red Army’s onslaught at the end of the war.

In conclusion

I’ve written before, in my essay on the Finnish film The Winter War, about the different perspectives a war film can take—God’s eye, worm’s eye, and so forth. For over twenty years now, since Saving Private Ryan reinvigorated the genre, the worm’s eye view has been predominant, and rightly so—that perspective, which so carefully limits knowledge and so heavily emphasizes the grit, discomfort, and terror of war, is perhaps the best for conveying what a war is like. Unknown Soldier is an outstanding example of the technique.

But the war film Unknown Soldier reminds me of most is The Thin Red Line. Both are thoughtful, poetic, and sometimes mournful in tone, both feature wide casts of characters battling both the enemy and the environment, and both give attention to the look and feel of that environment. Its beautifully moody score by Lass Enersen also reminds me tonally of Hans Zimmer’s work on that film. But Unknown Soldier never drifts into the meandering abstraction of The Thin Red Line and, while tragic, the narrative never feels aimless. Where The Thin Red Line is almost a philosophical allegory, Unknown Soldier is an invitation to reflect on what war means and what it costs, using concrete examples, soldiers who feel like living and breathing men, from a truly brutal conflict.

Again—it’s excellent, and well worth seeking out.

What I found in my glove box

A week ago today I was in a seemingly minor car accident, a fender bender in which I narrowly avoided T-boning a car that pulled out in front of me. I was found not at fault and was grateful that the other drivers’ insurance would take care of the damage, and dropped the car off at a body shop a few days ago for an estimate and repairs. The damage proved greater than it seemed. Yesterday the insurance company called to tell me they were treating the car as a total loss.

I’ve never been sentimental about cars. I can regard them only as tools, as mere machines. I’ve never thought of them as having personalities, just mechanical quirks to tolerate or have fixed, and I’ve almost never given them names—at least, no names beyond nicknames meant to transmute irritation into humor. When I was in grad school I drove a 1985 Camry that had belonged to my great-grandmother, and where my best friend and his brother named their cars Dapple and Rocinante, the perfect blend of fun and well-read names, my car, when I called it anything at all, was “the Punishment Hut,” after the place where Alec Guinness is locked up for the first half of The Bridge on the River Kwai—a tiny metal box built by the Japanese to torture people with heat. That’s about my speed.

So when the insurance company told me I should go clean out this car and hand over the keys, the pang I felt surprised me.

It was a 2011 Ford Fiesta. It technically belonged to my wife. We were dating when she bought it, but when we got married it became ours. We left on our honeymoon in it, shared it on our morning and afternoon commutes every day for over four years, and brought two of our children home in it. When I went to clean it out I felt, for the first time, that I was losing a little something in losing this hunk of steel. As I dug through the glovebox and trunk and the cupholders I realized that if time is a river, this car was a whirling eddy where flotsam gathered and, saturated, sank, gathering in sediment at the bottom. Now, having dug the sediment out, I’ve left that eddy behind, never to go back.

Near the beginning of his great essay “A Piece of Chalk,” Chesterton wrote that he “once . . . planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.” I don’t intend to shape an epic out of the things I found in the car, but I did want to catalog a few of them. (And Chesterton may not have composed his epic, but he did write an essay about the things he found in his pockets.) I have the kind of memory that fixes on and is most rapidly stirred by particular things. Take virtually any book from my library and I will remember when and where I got it and at least one of the times and places where I read it. All of that is imprinted in me with the object itself, and as I cleaned out the car I found myself reliving many years in tiny snapshot moments.

Here’s some of what I found:

• At least a hundred napkins and assorted plastic cutlery and straws gathered from probably a half-dozen different Chick-fil-As.

• Some favorite CDs, including O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which I’ve owned since high school, and a two-disc set of Seamus Heaney reading his translation of Beowulf, a set I bought in college. I remember listening through this Beowulf several times as I worked a temp job in a tiny cubicle to earn the money to buy Sarah a ring.

• Two copies of the Georgia Mountain Laurel’s annual wedding issue in which our wedding was featured.

• A fabric “eyewear retainer” in desert MARPAT, purchased on my first trip to Texas a few months after our wedding.

• Several years’ of visitor ID badges for my wife’s school, and one small staff hangtag for the year I tutored a German student there. That was the year our daughter was born, when I was working four jobs.

• The roll-up sunshades for the back windows, which we bought somewhere between Newnan, Georgia and St. Simons Island the day after my brother’s wedding. The low, sharply angled sunlight, already hot in the central Georgia morning, had been making our infant daughter cry.

• A tiny clip-on hairbow, the kind we used to put in our daughter’s hair when she didn’t have enough for real bows. She’s almost five now.

• A CD of Sunday school songs in earworm kids’ choir styles, a great favorite among younger passengers on our trips around town a few years ago.

• A small green envelope with my name written on it in my late grandfather’s handwriting. It held the money he gave me for Christmas a few days before he died.

And perhaps the greatest surprise of all:

• The keys to the Punishment Hut.

Then there were the things I couldn’t take with me—a bumper sticker for my brother’s company; the parking decal for my first teaching job, an oval sticker now bleached white by the sun; and most especially the flecks of yellow paint from where our friends decorated our car during the wedding reception, baked onto the rubber windowseals and hanging on for almost seven years.

What struck me is that none of these objects, in an of themselves, have value or really matter. Certainly not to anyone else. But taken together, as bits and pieces of life built up like silt that machine, which I so often took for granted, they mean so much more than whatever matter they are made of. They are pointers, not just showing the way but bringing us into the presence of immaterial things—memories, times and places and people. Everything I noted above came back as I fished these odds and ends out of the car, and when I was finished I found I had a hard time closing the doors and leaving the Fiesta behind for the last time.

As I have come to understand and appreciate more and more the sacramental vision of the world offered by the oldest forms of the faith, I see that God gave us his good physical world precisely to point to the things not just beyond the matter they are made of, but that are embedded, imprinted into the things we see and touch and feel every day. The whole world is an eddy silted up with meaning, a car full of the bits and pieces of everything you’ve lived. And that’s a blessing—you reach into the glovebox and touch little reminders of eternity.

“You have never talked to a mere mortal,” CS Lewis wrote. And I have never driven a mere machine.