Brave

The most telling thing that came from our discussion of family media was said in an almost off-handed way. I recognized how important the statement was, but it seemed to glance off of everyone in the moment. The moment I’m referring to is when Benjamin said that the scariest eventuality in his life is the day when one of his boys says that they hate him – or even worse, the day when he realizes they no longer need him. That’s a terrifying prospect for any parent or potential parent; after class I spent a lot of time thinking about how often I call my parents (I watched Tokyo Story and THAT DIDN’T HELP EITHER) and how impossible it is for a child to get out of her own head for a second.
That’s what’s so great about Brave. First, it gives us a super-badass girl protagonist who is extremely good at the things she does. Merida’s archery skill isn’t just perfunctory (remember that this movie came out the same summer as The Hunger Games), it’s a vital part of who she is and her connection to her family’s past. Beyond her general badassery, Merida perfectly encapsulates the unintended selfishness of being a child. She certainly understands deep within her that Elinor cares about her and means well, but in the fog of adolescence she cannot comprehend why her mother would disagree with her. The argument that sets off Merida’s flight into the woods, ultimately leading to a witch and a cake and a bear and a movie, is the sort of perfunctory one that we (and every other person) have had with our parents on countless occasions – but Brave understands that in the moment, those minor arguments are cataclysmic events that shake the foundation of everything we know and understand.
Being a teenager is hard, and that difficulty comes for both kids and their parents. For the adults, it’s tough to see the people their children are becoming, and wondering how it’ll all turn out. But for kids, becoming a teenager means questioning boundaries and feeling the grown-up world out, and part of that experience involves realizing truths about parents. It’s perfectly natural for kids to feel betrayed or misjudged by their parents, because that period of life is intrinsically about both parties learning how to understand each other.
Brave works this principle in a massive way, making Elinor and Merida into different species to further establish the difference between them. For the two to come together, they have to surmount far more than just a tiff, or even just a language barrier. Even with those difficulties, the movie positions that there are primordial family bonds that transcend these differences and allow connections to be made. This movie doesn’t simply end with Merida and Elinor making up and Merida leaving the figurative nest – it concludes with the two basically being best buds! That’s an extremely cool sentiment for a movie ostensibly about growing up, especially in the fairy tale vein. The story doesn’t have to end with a cathartic moment of moving on; rather, it can turn out to be a story about how we return to those we love as parents and children (FAMILIES) having changed for the better.

Life of Pi

            At face value, the most novel aspect of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is how seriously it considers the religious yearnings and questions of a child. Pi Patel is a young boy (I guess we’d consider him a teenager), but the novel never trivializes his search for answers or reduces it to childlike wondering. Rather, the book treats his relative innocence as a virtue when he seeks to find a true church. I’m reminded of a conversation I had in a documentary class, after we viewed a piece of church missionary propaganda from the 1980s named Called to Serve. The movie was pretty sentimental and imbalanced in its discussion of religion, but what else is expected from a primary source? A fellow student mentioned that church videos ought to be sentimental and heavy-handed, because they’re meant to “string kids along until they can find a testimony of their own.”

            That notion troubles me in a profound way. First, I think that children are completely able to rationalize belief and find understanding – our church even agrees, in considering the age of accountability eight years old. Regardless of whether that’s exactly the right age for a child to make lifelong commitments, it seems prudent to assume that children are capable of great understanding. That’s maybe the primary, number one thing we’ve learned this semester, but it seems like Life of Pi is the rare text about religion that takes this idea seriously.

Pi is also a story that rejects dogma in its ideas of religious truth. In that sense, it is a far more spiritual text than a religious one. It values the traditions of Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity on an equal level. There is not a single truth, but rather many relative truths that give humans access to some kind of ultimate power. The means by which we access that higher truth matters significantly less than our willingness to accept it. Life of Pi’s idea of spirituality sort of rests upon Pascal’s Wager, implying that faith alone is worth as much as knowledge.

That premise is tested in the final pages of the novel, when Pi tells the Japanese officials the alternative to his animal story – the one full of human tragedy and nightmare stuff. When the officials say that they prefer the story with the tiger and zebra and orangutan, Pi’s line “And so it goes with God” wraps the entire universe up with a bow.

(sidenote: for all the cool things about Ang Lee’s movie adaptation, his Pi totally blows this moment. The character in the film never seems sincere in his explanation of the two stories. It almost plays as “come on, please believe the animal one, it’s nicer” rather than an actual test of faith).

Much like Babe: Pig in the City’s assumptions about the world and people, Life of Pi doesn’t operate in the realm of right and wrong dictated by doctrine and ancient dogma. Rather, the two advocate for decency, morality, and charity, all without pretense. Both acknowledge the existence of a god in their stories, but both put faith in people to rise up and meet the expectations of that higher power. In the eyes of a child, words like historicity and proof don’t mean nearly anything – these stories teach us that the true value lies in belief; in faith.

Family: I Wish

Hirokazu Koreeda's I Wish is a major motion picture with a budget and a relatively big cast, but it isn't dissimilar to the family home videos that we watched in class this week. In fact, it's startling how clearly Koreeda understands familial interactions and the bonds that shape them. There's an effortless nature to the way his actors respond to each other, and the mundane slice-of-lifeiness dominates the movie, even when it threatens to turn into an adventure.

As we watched home movies in class, the thing that stood out most was how comfortable the people behind and in front of the camera are with each other. We open up as both subjects and filmmakers when we share a close bond with whoever is on the other end. That’s exactly why our faculty so often reiterates that our home movies may be the most important work we ever produce. There’s an intimacy that is difficult to replicate in any other medium, and it’s something that we can’t fabricate — it’s part of our most basic nature.

There’s a particular shot in I Wish that erupts with this sort of intimacy. In a flashback to Koichi and Ryu’s lives before their parents’ divorce, the family sits around a dinner table when their father mentions leaving his job. Their mother responds harshly and both parents begin to yell at each other. The camera remains at a distance, and Koichi tries to intervene as his parents overturn the dinner table. But the younger Ryu runs into the foreground and covers his ears, trying to escape to no avail. He’s trapped in the frame, just as he’s trapped in the house, but the camera affords the opportunity to stare deep into his eyes as he edges towards sobbing. This scene understands the particular way we are trapped by our families, for better or worse, and represents the entire film in a microcosm.

Even in moments that aren’t as fierce as the aforementioned example, the profound connections between the characters is visible. When Koichi and Ryu call each other on the phone, there’s a casualness to the conversation that makes it seem like two kids talking over a great distance. There’s no pretense or push to have narrative tension — it’s simply them living their lives. The factor that brings it together is the implicit love on display, the same that we saw in our own home movies. It’s something difficult to quantify, which makes this a particularly abstract bit of writing, but it’s easy to make family relationships seem forced or insincere, and Koreeda’s film is so close to a natural dynamic that it seems more documentary than fictional film.