Blue Like Jazz: The Movie (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Steve Taylor‘s Blue Like Jazz (2012) is based on a memoir by Donald Miller.  In it, an evangelical kid—Miller—is so stunned by his Christian mother’s having an affair with a youth pastor that he flees to the Portland, Oregon liberal-arts college his pagan father has enrolled him in.  The student body there is eaten up with leftism and tends to glorify sex and drinking, with the result that young Donald happily dismisses conservative evangelical belief.  What we end up with is a basically Christian film, but one which expects Joe Christian (in this case, Don) to duly apologize to the world for the shabby conduct of the devout.  This includes everything from the Crusades to “U.S. foreign policy.”

Nice try, Steve Taylor, but no cigar.

True, the film is reasonably intelligent, but not without many flaws.  It seems to consider the Southern Baptist denomination a “strange church” (i.e., not liberal).  The action of the story is rather forced, the characters are scantily drawn and, to me, Marshall Allman (Don) is not a very likable actor.

Boy, do the people in Cafe Metropole (1937) need—and want—money!  And how careless and devious they can be in trying to acquire it!  Even Tyrone Power‘s Alexis, so young and callow-looking, is a needy louse; he just doesn’t seem like one.  The whole movie doesn’t seem to be about corruption and irresponsibility.  Frothy, it isn’t satirical or mocking, but genial—and with inoffensive Loretta Young.

Teaming up again with Power (who is miscast), this time in a droll non-farce, she is deeply palatable.  Unlike Power, she has charisma and can match the dignity of Adolphe Menjou, who is also in the film.  Congrats to the supporting cast.  CM is moderately entertaining.

Boy, do the people in Cafe Metropole (1937) need—and want—money!  And how careless and devious they can be in trying to acquire it!  Even Tyrone Power‘s Alexis, so young and callow-looking, is a needy louse; he just doesn’t seem like one.  The whole movie doesn’t seem to be about corruption and irresponsibility.  Frothy, it isn’t satirical or mocking, but genial—and with inoffensive Loretta Young.

Teaming up again with Power (who is miscast), this time in a droll non-farce, she is deeply palatable.  Unlike Power, she has charisma and can match the dignity of Adolphe Menjou, who is also in the film.  Congrats to the supporting cast.  CM is moderately entertaining.

The spiritually proud, over-rigorous follower of Christ is a figure too familiar in literature, but her appearance in the 1941 novel, A Woman of the Pharisees, by Francois Mauriac, does the book no harm whatsoever.

The Christ follower in question, Brigitte Pian, complacently butts into other people’s lives and ends up damaging them.  She is not like the gentle, prudent Father Calou, whom she also damages.  Brigitte’s stepson Louis narrates the woman’s story but, by and by, fails to do so without self-righteousness and a certain contempt for Brigitte.  So, inevitably, there is sin and folly everywhere here, but also the idea that God truly values every human being.

Even when they suffer, as the book’s characters—Brigitte among them—do; but the suffering is not senseless.  These people approach, or will approach, “the throne of the Great Compassion” (i.e. God) and, frankly, there springs up in the novel a hint about the universal salvation I believe in.

A Woman of the Pharisees (La Pharisienne in French) is a lucidly, wisely written novel which does not stint on human complexity.  It is a great Christian novel.

A teacher named Rolfe narrates his older brother’s story in the Russell Banks novel, Affliction (1989), and even if he is not likely to be a wholly reliable narrator, he can surely be trusted in pointing out his brother’s deepening affliction.  Wade Whitehouse, the 41-year-old sibling, is divorced from Lillian, the only woman he has ever genuinely loved, and painfully misses having his young daughter in his care.  He struggles against the wrath of his half-mad father and harbors unreasonable suspicions about the men around him, at the risk, it turns out, of losing his job.

Wade’s life starts going down the toilet.  For him to be is not really to live, for he is living with a “dumb helplessness.”  Or he begins to live with it.  Being is all that Wade has.  A helpless man is not free.  A Christian couple, Wade’s sister Lena and her husband Clyde bring to the family a set of traditional religious beliefs that their relatives don’t know what to do with.  Lena and Clyde can be fatuous, but that they live lives distinctly separate from those of Wade and his father is understandable.  The men’s behavior creates a maelstrom increasingly difficult to control.

Affliction is cohesive, thrilling and mature.  It is better than much of Faulkner, and although it is not as profound as the best of Faulkner, to me it is just as powerful as it.