This has been an unusually good run for religion at the movies. Dramatizing spiritual experience is notoriously difficult, and filmmakers tend to look for easier paths — the anthropologist’s condescension, the atheist’s frank hostility, or else the treacly piety that infuses many well-intentioned attempts to bring faith to the screen. But in the last twelve months, moviegoers have enjoyed two extraordinary exceptions to this rule: the French drama Of Gods and Men, with its lyrical and liturgical portrait of monks facing death at the hands of Islamist fanatics in Algeria, and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, a soaring, yearning reimagining of Genesis and Job.
The Way, a new film about modern pilgrims walking the ancient Camino de Santiago, isn’t quite in the same league as Malick and the monks. But at its best, it belongs in the same artistic category — the cinema of epiphany, which aims at what the Jesuit James Martin, writing on The Tree of Life, called the sense of “living inside a prayer.” Directed by Emilio Estevez and starring his father, Martin Sheen, it’s also one of the more rawly personal movies you’ll see this year, since its portrayal of a bereaved father mourning the death of his estranged child cannot help evoking the Sheen family’s real-life travails, and the kind of living death that Martin’s other, more famous son has recently embraced.
Comments