Blue. - movie reviews

Christian Century, March 15, 1995 by James M. Wall

IF YOU DOUBT that modem culture has lost a sense of the sacred, consider Steve Martin's latest video release, A Simple Twist of Fate. My first viewing of the film was on an overseas flight, which meant that I paid only casual attention. But in the final reel it became apparent that something was seriously wrong. The credits clarified the problem with the revelation that the film is based on George Eliot's novel Silas Marner.

Though a favorite assignment in high school English classes, Silas Marner resonates best with adult readers who can appreciate Eliot's moral and religious worldview. In his attempt to transplant Eliot's story to the contemporary scene--and to avoid, perhaps, anything high school students might find boring--Martin winds up ignoring the religious sensibility that shapes the novel. Though in revolt against established Christianity, Eliot's writing is suffused with Christian symbolism and ideas. She is sympathetic with the emerging Methodist movement (a major character in Eliot's Adam Bede is a female Methodist preacher), and relies on John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in portraying the struggles of a believer. Moreover, the overall theme in Silas Marner is the redemptive power of love.

The novel is a carefully crafted portrayal of a lonely bachelor who raises a child after she wanders into his cabin. Local villagers agree that Silas Marner can keep his miraculous gift after he insists, "The mother's dead, and I reckon it's got no father; it's a lone thing--and I'm a lone thing. My money's gone, I don't know where--and this is come from I don't know where. I know nothing--I'm partly mazed."

Eliot presumed a religious understanding among her readers. Silas gives his daughter his mother's name, Hephzibah, which comes from the Old Testament. The name means "my delight in her," and it is the prophet Isaiah's new name for Jerusalem. Martin changes the name to Mathilda. Eliot's narrative and dialogue are filled with biblical and ecclesiastical images. Which raises the question: How can public school English teachers avoid exploying such references--or the worldview of a writer who wrote (in an earlier novel)": "There was a divine work to be done in life, a rule of goodness higher than the opinion of their neighbors; and if the notion of a heaven in reserve for themselves was a little too prominent, yet the theory of fitness for that heaven consisted in purity of heart, in Christlike compassion in the subduing of selfish desires."

Silas Marner begins when the small religious sect to which Silas belongs unjustly accuses him of stealing, the proof of which is determined by the biblical practice of casting lots. Despondent, Marner moves to another community, where people accept his presence because he is a particularly skilled weaver. At one point, a friendly parishioner of the nearby church, Dolly Winthrop, visits Marner and takes him some of her lard-cakes.

"There's letters pricked on 'em,"

said Dolly. "I can't read 'em myself,

and there's nobody, not Mr. Macey

himself, rightly knows what they

mean; but they've a good meaning,

for they're the same as is on the

pulpit cloth at church ... whatever

the letters are, they'v a good meaning;

and it's a stamp as has been in

our house, Ben says, ever since he

was a little un, and his mother used

to put it on cakes, and I've allays

put it on too; for if there's any good,

we've need of it i' this world."

"It's I.H.S.," said Silas ... [who] was

as unable to interpret the letters as

Dolly, but there was no possibility

of misunderstanding the desire to

give comfort that made itself heard

in her quiet tones.

In discussing this passage in Silas Marner: Memory and Salvation, Patrick Swinden notes: "This aspect of a more ritualistic religion than his own (the letters are a monogram representing a contraction of the Greek spelling of `Jesus') makes no impression on him." The conversation between Marner and Dolly becomes a primer on the difference between the views of a sect and that of Dolly's more "high church" practices. Silas says he has never been to "church"; he has attended a "chapel," and he knows nothing of infant baptism, since his tradition believes in immersion. But none of this exchange on religious practices makes it into Steve Martin's film.

WITH THE disappearance of the sacred from modern culture, any adaptation of religiously oriented works is inevitably truncated. I was alerted to another instance of this problem in film through a conversation at the Berlin Film Festival. We were discussing the closing section of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blue, the first part of his Three Colors trilogy. (Red, the third in the trilogy, has earned the Polish-born Kieslowski an Academy Award nomination for best director.) In Blue, Julie, the widow of a famous European composer, joins with a colleague to complete an oratorio that her husband had begun before dying in a car crash. She opens a book, points to a biblical passage and says, "In Greek the rhythm is different." A few moments later the film concludes with the oratorio played and sung on the sound track as the camera focuses on individuals Julie has met and helped earlier in the film. The oratorio is sung in Greek. The word "agape" is repeated several times.