“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
--Thoreau
S.E. Hinton’s book, The Outsiders, is a story about categories. We live our lives by category. It’s how we make sense of our world. We group things together into word categories, like “pencil” or “house” because they have common characteristics. This is a good thing. But we also group people. Usually, we group them into categories of “us” and “them.” “Them” are different: unknown and undesirable, hated, feared, and perhaps, envied. We often never truly see who “them” is, and we miss the fact that they are more like us than not.
The Outsiders was published in 1967, but the story is as up-to-date as yesterday or tomorrow because we have always had—and always will have—“us” and “them,” the in-groups and outsiders. In the book, it’s the socs (short for “socials”) vs. the greasers. When greasers look at socs, they see spoiled trouble-makers whose parents give them everything. They get all the breaks and the favor of the power-elite. They are destined for success. When Socs look at Greasers, they see hoods and losers. They don’t deserve a break. Yet the socs envy the greasers for their close families. The greasers express their feelings: they seem to feel alive.
Hinton uses the character of Ponyboy Curtis, a greaser, to tell the story. Ponyboy, fourteen, lives with his two older brothers Darry and Soda. Their parents are dead. They are part of a “gang” of greasers (but more like family) from New York’s East Side. Ponyboy is a sensitive young teen who reflects honestly and deeply on life, and vividly illustrates the angst of the young people in the greaser and soc category. He wants to read Gone With the Wind and knows poetry. Ponyboy has a chance conversation with a soc girl named Cherry, a kindred spirit who helps Ponyboy begin to truly see the socs and how alike socs and greasers are. He also learns about the soc envy of greasers. Greasers, at least, feel loved, while the socs cause trouble mostly to get attention from their parents. Hinton tantalizes her reader with the possibility of living beyond the categories. (Her insight is made more remarkable by the fact that she was only sixteen when she wrote the book).
But the plot, alas, is driven by a series of tragic events, events that ensure that most will remain locked in their categories. A fight leads to the death of a soc and Ponyboy and Johnny are forced to flee. In hiding, Pony remembers the Robert Frost poem, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” which expresses perfectly something Johnny is trying to tell him. This so impresses Johnny that, before the end of the story, Johnny, injured and close to death, writes a letter that encourages Ponyboy to realize that he is still in his “gold” age and, before his golden youth is gone, has time to get outside his category—and maybe help others to do so as well.
Imagine what that would be like?
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Book Review: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (Harper, 1943)
Burning the Ugliness: It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see
Coming of age is all about change. A young person goes through great physical change. But the path to maturity must also involve gaining the internal resources to understand and deal with life. How are we to think about other people? How do we decide what’s important and valuable? What makes right and wrong? Why is there suffering? Then there is beauty and love. Ah, love! And truth: what is truth? When I was a kid, whatever my dad said was the truth. But I learned that, as we grow, those protective walls of sureness get shaken, small cracks appear, and we realize that others don’t see things quite the same. In college and the working world, new ideas and values can bring greater cracks. In my own journey—and in the book I’m about to describe—one thing makes the difference in whether or not a young person can get beyond self-absorption, look at the brutal disillusion and ugliness of life and see its true beauty in spite of the overwhelming urge to escape or deny it. “It’s not what you look at that matters,” as Thoreau observed, “it’s what you see.” The thing that enables such sight for most is a foundation of loving relationship in the formative period of life, in the family and especially with the father.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a book about truth and beauty. It is an account of how loving relationship played out in the life of a young girl, Francie Nolan, growing up poor before World War I. Betty Smith began writing this book as her own story, but changed it into the “fictional” classic we have today. As such, her book is so much more than just an honest look at herself—it has become a book of truth. The story of Francie is “deeply and indelibly true,” writes Anna Quinlan in the foreword. “Honesty,” Quinlan explains, “is casting bright light on your own experience; truth is casting it on the experience of all.” Truth is the reason we identify with her characters even decades removed from the world that Francie Nolan inhabited. Truth draws us into the story as participants rather than mere observers. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn reflects the genuine commonality of the human experience and the beauty therein—in spite of, and highlighted by, daily hardship and suffering.
The reigning metaphor, the tree, represents Francie’s life. There is an actual tree that seems to thrive and grow strong in the areas around the Brooklyn tenements. Similarly, Francie grows and thrives in the cramped confines of the tenement districts that were a hallmark of the poverty and hard life faced by a second generation immigrant family during the era. The tree is also a metaphor for the persistent presence of the poor everywhere. “You will always have the poor among you,” so Jesus once said, and we are reminded of this, right to the close of the book, when Francie is leaving for college. She is looking out her window and sees another young girl, another “Francie,” sitting on a fire escape across the way, absorbed in a book and eating penny candy, just as an eleven-year-old Francie once sat discovering the wondrous world beyond her neighborhood. The episode, as I’m sure Betty Smith intended, leaves life “to be continued.”
Francie’s life is mostly filled with those things that the “better” sort would regard with distaste and see in shades of ugly rather than beauty. Her father (Johnny Nolan) is a dreamer who can’t hold a steady job, an alcoholic who early succumbs to illness when Francie is twelve. Her mother (Katie Nolan), is a hard-working, steely woman who has lost any sense of affection and generally prefers Francie’s one-year-younger brother Neely. Francie’s aunt, Sissy, is a woman who always had a man, (she always calls them “John”), whose husbands are left without benefit of divorce; a woman who wants children to love, but whose babies are all stillborn until she finally obtains a baby by less-than-honorable means.
Underneath the daily desperate ugliness of tenement life, a foundation of loving relationship is built into Francie’s life, particularly by her dad, by Sissy, and by her brother. (Her mother’s example adds steely self-reliance to this foundation). Her n’er-do-well father’s life is devoted to showering Francie with love and affection. He delights in her. She adores him. A vivid picture of this is provided to us when Francie is receiving inoculations for school. They get infected, and when her “papa” gets home late that night, he tears apart his only tee-shirt to provide a bandage. He tenderly washes her arm, and makes up a story to help her feel better. Francie’s memory here (she was seven or eight at the time) is of how the “cloth smelled of Johnny, warm and cigarish….it smelled of protection and love.” Sissy is the wild and crazy one of the family. To others, her life seems devoted only to sex and gaining the attention of men. In reality, she longs to pour out her love, and Francie is the beneficiary of her devotion and thoughtfulness. It is Sissy, two years after Johnny Nolan’s death, who accompanies Francie to her graduation. After the ceremonies, Francie finds a bouquet of roses on her school desk, along with a card written by her father. Johnny had anticipated this day and arranged with Sissy to buy the flowers and give her the card. In typical younger brother fashion, Neely is alternately a pain and a friend. In the end, as the one who shares much of Francie’s life, he becomes another reminder—as the spitting image and voice of his singing father—of the continuity of life.
Anna Quinlan pointed out that this book is more than honest, it is truth. But it is even more than that. Others look at the same truth—but not see it the same. Francie runs into this reality in a conversion with (read: lecture from) her teacher, Miss Garnder. Francie had been writing stories, good stories about beautiful places, trees and flowers and blue sky—but they were not true, and not representing anything that was true in Francie’s world. Francie decides, instead, to write stories about her dead papa, their life and love, the poverty they struggled with, and his drinking. But Miss Garnder looks at these new stories—however true—and sees ugliness. “Beauty is truth; truth beauty,” she intones, quoting a line out of context from a Keats poem. Miss Garnder proceeds to instruct Francie that the make-believe world she had painted in her earlier compositions is the true beauty. She tells the now fourteen-year-old Francie to burn the stories about her father. It is a moment that crystallizes for Francie what is true and right and beautiful: it is not the world (of denial) her teacher sees; it is, rather, the love that lives on no matter its less-than-pretty environment. Francie goes home and burns, instead, the made-up compositions. Watching them go up in smoke, she says simply, “I’m burning the ugliness.” Pilate’s famous query to Jesus, “What is truth?” is answered for Francie in the beauty of a papa who loves her despite his imperfections. She could never trade her life for the life of those “better off” who have it handed to them on a platter.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is non-stop amazing. It provides a picture painted in rich colors and varied detail—and in poetic prose. Betty Smith’s writing gifts included the ability to tell a story as captured by the eyes of a character at whatever age they were in that story. This takes the reader back, to see things at that same age, and provides a reminder of people, places, and discoveries that all children make. I literally thought of people and scenes that I had not remembered since my own boyhood. I grew up in Eagle Rock (a suburb of Los Angeles) during the 1950s and 60s. I was back there again, looking at shopkeepers and store owners. I was there, running my hand over items in a store, full of awe, and wondering what to buy now that I had discovered the power in those few coins in my hand. I even share an experience with Francie (and likely, Betty Smith) of seeing my father in his coffin when I was barely thirteen. I was staring intently, and I, like Francie, was sure I saw his hand move.
Then there was the introduction to the world of books. I remember, too, discovering the library, the Librarian’s desk, and, like Francie, thinking I surely must read everything on every shelf. But there was also something greatly disquieting about reliving this particular discovery with her. Francie is free to learn about life outside her poverty through books, to dream and to taste something that exists elsewhere. She is fulfilling what is understood by her grandmother—and most immigrants—to be the “American dream”: the chance to be free from those who owned “the land,” to be what a person could not be in the home country, and to provide a better opportunity for their children, limited only by ability and drive. (In the 1960s the dream morphed into the money-chasing, status-seeking version we have today). The “Granma,” Mary Rommely, though illiterate, knows that one key to discovering the possibilities of the American dream is reading. Granma Rommely tells Katie, when she is expecting Francie, to read a bit of the Bible and Shakespeare to her child each day. “You must do this that the child will grow up knowing of what is great—knowing that these tenements of Williamsburg are not the whole world.” The wisdom in this mindset—coming from a woman who would never know the joy of reading, caused me to reflect deeply and sadly upon a tragedy that I saw played out every year that I taught in a poor area—the disturbing fact that the young people there could not read the kinds of books that would give them a view of the possibilities beyond the boundaries of the hood.
One last vignette: It highlights the fate of those who perhaps miss out on life, who never get beyond their world of self safety, who never know the truth Francie knows. Katie has a third child, which Johnny never lives to see. As Katie lies screaming in pain during labor, the whole tenement is listening, among them the Tynmore spinsters. Maggie says: “‘That’s why I didn’t marry Harvey….I was afraid of that. So afraid.’ ‘I don’t know,’ Miss Lizzzie said. ‘Sometimes I think it’s better to suffer bitter unhappiness and to fight and to scream out, and even to suffer that terrible pain, than just to be…safe.’ She waited until the next scream died away. ‘At least she knows she’s living.’ Miss Maggie had no answer.”
The shadow of Johnny Nolan and his devotion to Francie hangs over the book— in a good way. That devotion enables Francie to reflect on her family and her life as a thing of beauty. That’s what is truth. The poor will always be with us, but perhaps the greatest tragedy of life is that love is not. The Scriptural injunction to “love your neighbor” is missing from too much of life. John Lennon had it right (“all you need is love”). Self still rules the earth. It has removed much of the beauty of the trees and birds and sky. It’s good that some have, and still do, look and see what is truth.
Coming of age is all about change. A young person goes through great physical change. But the path to maturity must also involve gaining the internal resources to understand and deal with life. How are we to think about other people? How do we decide what’s important and valuable? What makes right and wrong? Why is there suffering? Then there is beauty and love. Ah, love! And truth: what is truth? When I was a kid, whatever my dad said was the truth. But I learned that, as we grow, those protective walls of sureness get shaken, small cracks appear, and we realize that others don’t see things quite the same. In college and the working world, new ideas and values can bring greater cracks. In my own journey—and in the book I’m about to describe—one thing makes the difference in whether or not a young person can get beyond self-absorption, look at the brutal disillusion and ugliness of life and see its true beauty in spite of the overwhelming urge to escape or deny it. “It’s not what you look at that matters,” as Thoreau observed, “it’s what you see.” The thing that enables such sight for most is a foundation of loving relationship in the formative period of life, in the family and especially with the father.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a book about truth and beauty. It is an account of how loving relationship played out in the life of a young girl, Francie Nolan, growing up poor before World War I. Betty Smith began writing this book as her own story, but changed it into the “fictional” classic we have today. As such, her book is so much more than just an honest look at herself—it has become a book of truth. The story of Francie is “deeply and indelibly true,” writes Anna Quinlan in the foreword. “Honesty,” Quinlan explains, “is casting bright light on your own experience; truth is casting it on the experience of all.” Truth is the reason we identify with her characters even decades removed from the world that Francie Nolan inhabited. Truth draws us into the story as participants rather than mere observers. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn reflects the genuine commonality of the human experience and the beauty therein—in spite of, and highlighted by, daily hardship and suffering.
The reigning metaphor, the tree, represents Francie’s life. There is an actual tree that seems to thrive and grow strong in the areas around the Brooklyn tenements. Similarly, Francie grows and thrives in the cramped confines of the tenement districts that were a hallmark of the poverty and hard life faced by a second generation immigrant family during the era. The tree is also a metaphor for the persistent presence of the poor everywhere. “You will always have the poor among you,” so Jesus once said, and we are reminded of this, right to the close of the book, when Francie is leaving for college. She is looking out her window and sees another young girl, another “Francie,” sitting on a fire escape across the way, absorbed in a book and eating penny candy, just as an eleven-year-old Francie once sat discovering the wondrous world beyond her neighborhood. The episode, as I’m sure Betty Smith intended, leaves life “to be continued.”
Francie’s life is mostly filled with those things that the “better” sort would regard with distaste and see in shades of ugly rather than beauty. Her father (Johnny Nolan) is a dreamer who can’t hold a steady job, an alcoholic who early succumbs to illness when Francie is twelve. Her mother (Katie Nolan), is a hard-working, steely woman who has lost any sense of affection and generally prefers Francie’s one-year-younger brother Neely. Francie’s aunt, Sissy, is a woman who always had a man, (she always calls them “John”), whose husbands are left without benefit of divorce; a woman who wants children to love, but whose babies are all stillborn until she finally obtains a baby by less-than-honorable means.
Underneath the daily desperate ugliness of tenement life, a foundation of loving relationship is built into Francie’s life, particularly by her dad, by Sissy, and by her brother. (Her mother’s example adds steely self-reliance to this foundation). Her n’er-do-well father’s life is devoted to showering Francie with love and affection. He delights in her. She adores him. A vivid picture of this is provided to us when Francie is receiving inoculations for school. They get infected, and when her “papa” gets home late that night, he tears apart his only tee-shirt to provide a bandage. He tenderly washes her arm, and makes up a story to help her feel better. Francie’s memory here (she was seven or eight at the time) is of how the “cloth smelled of Johnny, warm and cigarish….it smelled of protection and love.” Sissy is the wild and crazy one of the family. To others, her life seems devoted only to sex and gaining the attention of men. In reality, she longs to pour out her love, and Francie is the beneficiary of her devotion and thoughtfulness. It is Sissy, two years after Johnny Nolan’s death, who accompanies Francie to her graduation. After the ceremonies, Francie finds a bouquet of roses on her school desk, along with a card written by her father. Johnny had anticipated this day and arranged with Sissy to buy the flowers and give her the card. In typical younger brother fashion, Neely is alternately a pain and a friend. In the end, as the one who shares much of Francie’s life, he becomes another reminder—as the spitting image and voice of his singing father—of the continuity of life.
Anna Quinlan pointed out that this book is more than honest, it is truth. But it is even more than that. Others look at the same truth—but not see it the same. Francie runs into this reality in a conversion with (read: lecture from) her teacher, Miss Garnder. Francie had been writing stories, good stories about beautiful places, trees and flowers and blue sky—but they were not true, and not representing anything that was true in Francie’s world. Francie decides, instead, to write stories about her dead papa, their life and love, the poverty they struggled with, and his drinking. But Miss Garnder looks at these new stories—however true—and sees ugliness. “Beauty is truth; truth beauty,” she intones, quoting a line out of context from a Keats poem. Miss Garnder proceeds to instruct Francie that the make-believe world she had painted in her earlier compositions is the true beauty. She tells the now fourteen-year-old Francie to burn the stories about her father. It is a moment that crystallizes for Francie what is true and right and beautiful: it is not the world (of denial) her teacher sees; it is, rather, the love that lives on no matter its less-than-pretty environment. Francie goes home and burns, instead, the made-up compositions. Watching them go up in smoke, she says simply, “I’m burning the ugliness.” Pilate’s famous query to Jesus, “What is truth?” is answered for Francie in the beauty of a papa who loves her despite his imperfections. She could never trade her life for the life of those “better off” who have it handed to them on a platter.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is non-stop amazing. It provides a picture painted in rich colors and varied detail—and in poetic prose. Betty Smith’s writing gifts included the ability to tell a story as captured by the eyes of a character at whatever age they were in that story. This takes the reader back, to see things at that same age, and provides a reminder of people, places, and discoveries that all children make. I literally thought of people and scenes that I had not remembered since my own boyhood. I grew up in Eagle Rock (a suburb of Los Angeles) during the 1950s and 60s. I was back there again, looking at shopkeepers and store owners. I was there, running my hand over items in a store, full of awe, and wondering what to buy now that I had discovered the power in those few coins in my hand. I even share an experience with Francie (and likely, Betty Smith) of seeing my father in his coffin when I was barely thirteen. I was staring intently, and I, like Francie, was sure I saw his hand move.
Then there was the introduction to the world of books. I remember, too, discovering the library, the Librarian’s desk, and, like Francie, thinking I surely must read everything on every shelf. But there was also something greatly disquieting about reliving this particular discovery with her. Francie is free to learn about life outside her poverty through books, to dream and to taste something that exists elsewhere. She is fulfilling what is understood by her grandmother—and most immigrants—to be the “American dream”: the chance to be free from those who owned “the land,” to be what a person could not be in the home country, and to provide a better opportunity for their children, limited only by ability and drive. (In the 1960s the dream morphed into the money-chasing, status-seeking version we have today). The “Granma,” Mary Rommely, though illiterate, knows that one key to discovering the possibilities of the American dream is reading. Granma Rommely tells Katie, when she is expecting Francie, to read a bit of the Bible and Shakespeare to her child each day. “You must do this that the child will grow up knowing of what is great—knowing that these tenements of Williamsburg are not the whole world.” The wisdom in this mindset—coming from a woman who would never know the joy of reading, caused me to reflect deeply and sadly upon a tragedy that I saw played out every year that I taught in a poor area—the disturbing fact that the young people there could not read the kinds of books that would give them a view of the possibilities beyond the boundaries of the hood.
One last vignette: It highlights the fate of those who perhaps miss out on life, who never get beyond their world of self safety, who never know the truth Francie knows. Katie has a third child, which Johnny never lives to see. As Katie lies screaming in pain during labor, the whole tenement is listening, among them the Tynmore spinsters. Maggie says: “‘That’s why I didn’t marry Harvey….I was afraid of that. So afraid.’ ‘I don’t know,’ Miss Lizzzie said. ‘Sometimes I think it’s better to suffer bitter unhappiness and to fight and to scream out, and even to suffer that terrible pain, than just to be…safe.’ She waited until the next scream died away. ‘At least she knows she’s living.’ Miss Maggie had no answer.”
The shadow of Johnny Nolan and his devotion to Francie hangs over the book— in a good way. That devotion enables Francie to reflect on her family and her life as a thing of beauty. That’s what is truth. The poor will always be with us, but perhaps the greatest tragedy of life is that love is not. The Scriptural injunction to “love your neighbor” is missing from too much of life. John Lennon had it right (“all you need is love”). Self still rules the earth. It has removed much of the beauty of the trees and birds and sky. It’s good that some have, and still do, look and see what is truth.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
FIREPROOF: Kirk Cameron is 38, and Christian Hollywood has left its growing pains behind
When a Christian movie is released into the mainstream theater, you can almost feel the collective prayers of the saints. You walk in, wondering how many people will be there, hoping it will be a great movie—or at least better than all those hokey, low-budget films we traveled half-way across the city to see while growing up. Christian movies have a reputation for being, well….not quite what most people would pay good money to go see (Christian or not). With the release of Fireproof, it’s plain that Christian Hollywood (albeit located in Albany, Georgia) has taken heed to Jesus’ message about being wise as serpents and harmless as doves.
Fireproof stars Kirk Cameron and a bunch of people that no one has heard of—yet. We know Kirk Cameron, who plays the lead (Caleb Holt). We knew him either as the big brother, or a young teen, who grew up on the TV show Growing Pains (1985-92). He was 14 when the show started—it’s hard to believe he’ll be 38 next month. His life is like a parable for the movie, because Christian movie making has gone through more growing pains that anyone would care to think about. When Kirk first appears in the movie, all anyone can think about, of course, is, “There’s Kirk. Boy, has he aged!” The Cameron distraction wears off at just the right spot, as the viewer is quickly immersed in the life of an all-too-familiar troubled marriage.
Kirk Cameron plays the prototypical good man, the strong, well-liked Fire Captain Caleb Holt, respected everywhere in the community. Enter his wife (Erin Bethea): bright, smiling, beautiful PR director in a community hospital. They live in a great home in a quiet, wooded suburb—a veritable Barbie and Ken. The perfect atmosphere is shattered just a few minutes in as we watch the couple’s first scene together at home. No missing the obvious hostility here, the bitterness, the pent-up anger. Caleb’s frustration explodes into an angry, yelling tirade, leaving wife Catherine (Bethea) in tears and wanting out of the marriage. Notably absent is the obligatory four-letter vocabulary: Hey, that’s Kirk Cameron still in your psyche, and he doesn’t swear….even when angry. The actor’s great talent makes the screaming minus swearing real. Kirk is magically left behind, and we are transported into the really ugly world of the good man Caleb who lives in a hell of his own making at home.
At about this point, the viewer might be expecting the typical Christian outcome: our hero comes to Christ, lots of others are saved, and all conflict is resolved. No. The savvy and spiritual men behind the production, brothers Alex and Stephen Kendrick (who wrote, produced, and directed), are too genuine for such fairy tale Christian endings. Despite great respect for his father, Caleb refuses to turn to the Lord, but he does agree to work on the marriage for 40 days, using a daily guide—the “Love Dare”—proffered by Dad. It is a frustrating road that he sets out upon, but one that takes us on a mostly authentic journey, one that also allows us to see the humor in the human condition, and one which realistically does not tie up every little loose end.
This is an exceptional, quality film that brings the viewer (Christian or not) to forget their concerns about whether this would be a “good Christian film.” It’s good by most standards. It’s filled with believable and compelling acting and story line, good cinematography, and well edited. If you didn’t know anything about the making of this film before you saw it, you would be absolutely shocked to find out that it was shot with one camera (believe it or don’t), that it had a budget of $150,000, that the cast was mostly volunteer, and most of these came from one Baptist church in the town of Albany, Georgia. Christian Hollywood just got a new zip code, and it has left its “growing pains” behind.
See the movie this week if you can. For more information, go to: fireproofthemovie.com.
(Written in September, 2008)
Fireproof stars Kirk Cameron and a bunch of people that no one has heard of—yet. We know Kirk Cameron, who plays the lead (Caleb Holt). We knew him either as the big brother, or a young teen, who grew up on the TV show Growing Pains (1985-92). He was 14 when the show started—it’s hard to believe he’ll be 38 next month. His life is like a parable for the movie, because Christian movie making has gone through more growing pains that anyone would care to think about. When Kirk first appears in the movie, all anyone can think about, of course, is, “There’s Kirk. Boy, has he aged!” The Cameron distraction wears off at just the right spot, as the viewer is quickly immersed in the life of an all-too-familiar troubled marriage.
Kirk Cameron plays the prototypical good man, the strong, well-liked Fire Captain Caleb Holt, respected everywhere in the community. Enter his wife (Erin Bethea): bright, smiling, beautiful PR director in a community hospital. They live in a great home in a quiet, wooded suburb—a veritable Barbie and Ken. The perfect atmosphere is shattered just a few minutes in as we watch the couple’s first scene together at home. No missing the obvious hostility here, the bitterness, the pent-up anger. Caleb’s frustration explodes into an angry, yelling tirade, leaving wife Catherine (Bethea) in tears and wanting out of the marriage. Notably absent is the obligatory four-letter vocabulary: Hey, that’s Kirk Cameron still in your psyche, and he doesn’t swear….even when angry. The actor’s great talent makes the screaming minus swearing real. Kirk is magically left behind, and we are transported into the really ugly world of the good man Caleb who lives in a hell of his own making at home.
At about this point, the viewer might be expecting the typical Christian outcome: our hero comes to Christ, lots of others are saved, and all conflict is resolved. No. The savvy and spiritual men behind the production, brothers Alex and Stephen Kendrick (who wrote, produced, and directed), are too genuine for such fairy tale Christian endings. Despite great respect for his father, Caleb refuses to turn to the Lord, but he does agree to work on the marriage for 40 days, using a daily guide—the “Love Dare”—proffered by Dad. It is a frustrating road that he sets out upon, but one that takes us on a mostly authentic journey, one that also allows us to see the humor in the human condition, and one which realistically does not tie up every little loose end.
This is an exceptional, quality film that brings the viewer (Christian or not) to forget their concerns about whether this would be a “good Christian film.” It’s good by most standards. It’s filled with believable and compelling acting and story line, good cinematography, and well edited. If you didn’t know anything about the making of this film before you saw it, you would be absolutely shocked to find out that it was shot with one camera (believe it or don’t), that it had a budget of $150,000, that the cast was mostly volunteer, and most of these came from one Baptist church in the town of Albany, Georgia. Christian Hollywood just got a new zip code, and it has left its “growing pains” behind.
See the movie this week if you can. For more information, go to: fireproofthemovie.com.
(Written in September, 2008)
Good Bobby: The shattered hope of ’68 can still live in us
Hope is fragile thing…unless it’s grounded in truth.
Bobby Kennedy was a speaker and finder of truth. One of the truths he eventually found liberated him to follow his own heart and become the man that we witnessed in the period 1964 to 1968. He seemed to become different in those final years. The Robert Kennedy who was running for President was a man of apparent sensitivity, sincerity, honesty, courage, and, perhaps, comfortable in expressing self-doubt. We loved the 1968 version of Bobby…but was he for real? There were those who doubted. What happened to the ruthless attack dog, the almost vicious inquisitor of Jimmy Hoffa, the manager behind JFK’s election, the bullying Attorney General who lurked in the shadows of the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis? After all, doesn’t even the Bible say a leopard can’t change its spots?
Because of such questions, I was immediately intrigued when a friend told me about Brian Lee Franklin’s play, Good Bobby. The performance (in which Franklin also plays the title role), suggests that the bold, caring, and truly intelligent man who appeared on the stage in those last years was not acting. We were seeing—if Franklin’s recounting is accurate—not a leopard who could change his spots, but the leopard’s true spots. Good Bobby helps us understand how, in the years 1958 to 1964, Bobby Kennedy came to see and live the truth that gave us hope.
The play begins with Bobby serving as counsel for the Senate committee investigating the Teamsters Union, preparing for his famous interrogation of Hoffa (played by R.D. Call). It is quickly evident that the plotline is not really about Kennedy’s role in the world events in which he took part. Rather, it is about the relationship between Bobby and his “Pop”: tough, controlling family patriarch Joe Kennedy (Steve Mendillo). The interactions portrayed between Bobby and his father, and also with Senator John McClellan (William Stone Mahoney), make it very evident that Bobby got the job as Senate counsel because that’s what his father wanted. Joe Kennedy was known as the strong, ruthless man who sought acceptance in the Boston society of the day, and who had dreams of his boys becoming President. Bobby seemed a chip off the father’s ruthless block. But the dramatic vignettes that Franklin has put together reveal that there was a sensitive, gentle core in the heart of Robert Kennedy—a gentle core that had been evident in his childhood but had since become masked and hardened as he lived out his life in an effort to get the approval of his Pop. An early scene throws into relief the father-son conflict and the internal struggle: Bobby always seems to give in even though he hates what his father expects. In the scene, the senior Kennedy insists that Bobby run John’s campaign: “Jack needs you.” The son gives in, and the father says, like a man patting his dog after a good trick: “Good Bobby.”
Confronted with what he has become by trying to please a father who would never give his approval, the Attorney General would plead in his defense: “I did my job”. But he knew things weren’t always right (like the wiretaps on Dr. King). Then we hear Bobby reflect on the boy he once was (the one whom his father always said was “disappointing”), the sensitive, gentle one who deeply cared about people, things, and animals; who cried when a bird died. In the tough jobs that he performed for others, Robert Kennedy saw his own immense talent and ability, even when bullying people. In a final scene, Bobby tells his father of his decision to run for the Senate in 1964 and his reasons for it. He is tired of self-aggrandizing lip-service to public service, the bullying attack dog exercise of power he learned from his father. He hates being the rich kid who never really had to work for what he got. He is ready to work and to serve others, and the advantage the Kennedy name gives can be used for good. The final moments of the play show us Bobby determinedly setting out on his own course, no longer caring what others think. A man has emerged—albeit of imperfect motive—who is greatly capable of growth and change. He knows who he is and what he wants. Unlike Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, Bobby Kennedy’s children could never say “the man never knew who he was.”
Brian Lee Franklin does an outstanding job of portraying Bobby Kennedy. He has an uncanny natural resemblance to his subject. He has obviously captured the mannerisms and speech (however foul) to make us forget the actor and see the life. He is strongly supported by great talent, especially R.D. Call as Hoffa and Steve Mendillo as Joe Kennedy (both in strength and in stroke). Good Bobby is well worth your time and money, whether you were there or not. (It has been extended again, January 9-February 15 at the Greenway Court Theatre).
When Robert Kennedy made his 82-day run for the Presidency, he stirred the hopes and caught the imagination of a generation in the year that changed America forever. Dr. King was taken in an instant, while Bobby lingered with us for two pain-filled days. As we watched him go, many people’s hopes and ideals went with him. Later generations may not appreciate that statement. They know only the horribleness of that era: the War, the cities and campuses that erupted in hate, the drugs—and the assassinations. But those of us who grew up then remember something often missed in the stereotyped rehash of those years: our magnificent idealism. With our young President, we were going to the moon, changing the world through the Peace Corps, launching the “Great Society”. Martin Luther King kept people’s eyes on the prize. He focused us on the dream of treating people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. There was “free speech,” social awareness, and Dylan. Bobby’s now evident gentle strength helped to calm America in the aftermath of the King assassination in April ‘68, and he reignited the flickering flame that seemed ready to die in Southeast Asian mud and burning cities. Yes, there were questions, but when he spoke his heart, you wanted to be there with him. Bobby was fond of quoting great thinkers—and he also thought deeply. One quote (from George Bernard Shaw) might sum up what Bobby was about in his last years: "Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not."
If this 60s idealism doesn’t resonate, picture this parallel, a scene from “The Return of the King,” the climactic moment in which the King (Aragorn) arrives with his ghostly hordes to overrun the enemy and save the kingdom. He jumps over the side of the ship ready to do battle. Change that: instead, he is cut down in mid-jump. That would be 1968.
Was the good Bobby for real? Ultimately, humans can’t know the leopard’s heart. But the heritage he left us was real: he decided to stop living to win approval; he followed his heart and lived out the truth—no matter what; life was not about him, not about the “let me take” mentality inherited from the father, but the “let me give” mentality that had been there from the beginning. He served those he cared about: us. Living out that truth can still provide real hope.
(Written in December, 2008)
Bobby Kennedy was a speaker and finder of truth. One of the truths he eventually found liberated him to follow his own heart and become the man that we witnessed in the period 1964 to 1968. He seemed to become different in those final years. The Robert Kennedy who was running for President was a man of apparent sensitivity, sincerity, honesty, courage, and, perhaps, comfortable in expressing self-doubt. We loved the 1968 version of Bobby…but was he for real? There were those who doubted. What happened to the ruthless attack dog, the almost vicious inquisitor of Jimmy Hoffa, the manager behind JFK’s election, the bullying Attorney General who lurked in the shadows of the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis? After all, doesn’t even the Bible say a leopard can’t change its spots?
Because of such questions, I was immediately intrigued when a friend told me about Brian Lee Franklin’s play, Good Bobby. The performance (in which Franklin also plays the title role), suggests that the bold, caring, and truly intelligent man who appeared on the stage in those last years was not acting. We were seeing—if Franklin’s recounting is accurate—not a leopard who could change his spots, but the leopard’s true spots. Good Bobby helps us understand how, in the years 1958 to 1964, Bobby Kennedy came to see and live the truth that gave us hope.
The play begins with Bobby serving as counsel for the Senate committee investigating the Teamsters Union, preparing for his famous interrogation of Hoffa (played by R.D. Call). It is quickly evident that the plotline is not really about Kennedy’s role in the world events in which he took part. Rather, it is about the relationship between Bobby and his “Pop”: tough, controlling family patriarch Joe Kennedy (Steve Mendillo). The interactions portrayed between Bobby and his father, and also with Senator John McClellan (William Stone Mahoney), make it very evident that Bobby got the job as Senate counsel because that’s what his father wanted. Joe Kennedy was known as the strong, ruthless man who sought acceptance in the Boston society of the day, and who had dreams of his boys becoming President. Bobby seemed a chip off the father’s ruthless block. But the dramatic vignettes that Franklin has put together reveal that there was a sensitive, gentle core in the heart of Robert Kennedy—a gentle core that had been evident in his childhood but had since become masked and hardened as he lived out his life in an effort to get the approval of his Pop. An early scene throws into relief the father-son conflict and the internal struggle: Bobby always seems to give in even though he hates what his father expects. In the scene, the senior Kennedy insists that Bobby run John’s campaign: “Jack needs you.” The son gives in, and the father says, like a man patting his dog after a good trick: “Good Bobby.”
Confronted with what he has become by trying to please a father who would never give his approval, the Attorney General would plead in his defense: “I did my job”. But he knew things weren’t always right (like the wiretaps on Dr. King). Then we hear Bobby reflect on the boy he once was (the one whom his father always said was “disappointing”), the sensitive, gentle one who deeply cared about people, things, and animals; who cried when a bird died. In the tough jobs that he performed for others, Robert Kennedy saw his own immense talent and ability, even when bullying people. In a final scene, Bobby tells his father of his decision to run for the Senate in 1964 and his reasons for it. He is tired of self-aggrandizing lip-service to public service, the bullying attack dog exercise of power he learned from his father. He hates being the rich kid who never really had to work for what he got. He is ready to work and to serve others, and the advantage the Kennedy name gives can be used for good. The final moments of the play show us Bobby determinedly setting out on his own course, no longer caring what others think. A man has emerged—albeit of imperfect motive—who is greatly capable of growth and change. He knows who he is and what he wants. Unlike Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, Bobby Kennedy’s children could never say “the man never knew who he was.”
Brian Lee Franklin does an outstanding job of portraying Bobby Kennedy. He has an uncanny natural resemblance to his subject. He has obviously captured the mannerisms and speech (however foul) to make us forget the actor and see the life. He is strongly supported by great talent, especially R.D. Call as Hoffa and Steve Mendillo as Joe Kennedy (both in strength and in stroke). Good Bobby is well worth your time and money, whether you were there or not. (It has been extended again, January 9-February 15 at the Greenway Court Theatre).
When Robert Kennedy made his 82-day run for the Presidency, he stirred the hopes and caught the imagination of a generation in the year that changed America forever. Dr. King was taken in an instant, while Bobby lingered with us for two pain-filled days. As we watched him go, many people’s hopes and ideals went with him. Later generations may not appreciate that statement. They know only the horribleness of that era: the War, the cities and campuses that erupted in hate, the drugs—and the assassinations. But those of us who grew up then remember something often missed in the stereotyped rehash of those years: our magnificent idealism. With our young President, we were going to the moon, changing the world through the Peace Corps, launching the “Great Society”. Martin Luther King kept people’s eyes on the prize. He focused us on the dream of treating people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. There was “free speech,” social awareness, and Dylan. Bobby’s now evident gentle strength helped to calm America in the aftermath of the King assassination in April ‘68, and he reignited the flickering flame that seemed ready to die in Southeast Asian mud and burning cities. Yes, there were questions, but when he spoke his heart, you wanted to be there with him. Bobby was fond of quoting great thinkers—and he also thought deeply. One quote (from George Bernard Shaw) might sum up what Bobby was about in his last years: "Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not."
If this 60s idealism doesn’t resonate, picture this parallel, a scene from “The Return of the King,” the climactic moment in which the King (Aragorn) arrives with his ghostly hordes to overrun the enemy and save the kingdom. He jumps over the side of the ship ready to do battle. Change that: instead, he is cut down in mid-jump. That would be 1968.
Was the good Bobby for real? Ultimately, humans can’t know the leopard’s heart. But the heritage he left us was real: he decided to stop living to win approval; he followed his heart and lived out the truth—no matter what; life was not about him, not about the “let me take” mentality inherited from the father, but the “let me give” mentality that had been there from the beginning. He served those he cared about: us. Living out that truth can still provide real hope.
(Written in December, 2008)
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