Sledding in the Big City

Things are looking quite wintry around these parts this weekend.

The view from our condo is pretty magical.

Snow like this makes us want to run out and play. 

Sing it Again

Six inches of heavy wet snow has fallen this afternoon.  Chicago natives are breathing a sigh of relief that winter seems to be looking more normal. Our Christmas tree is dropping its needles at an ever increasing rate.  With my belly pushing against the buttons of my pants and leftover scraps of wrapping paper littering the condo floor, I feel that happy contentment of a holiday well spent. Snow is falling outside, the girls are playing at a friends’ houses, and I get to take a few hours to see the much anticipated Les Miserables.

I loved every 157 minutes of it.  I know critics dismiss the film as overly emotional, bombastic, amateurish, an everyman’s cinema version of an already overly dramatic musical, but what do they expect???  It is musical theater, people!  Don’t order a pizza and then complain there is cheese on it.  The genre defines the art.   Love it or hate it, musical theater is meant to pull on your heartstrings with loud, big, emotional music and plot.  Les Miserables does not disappoint.  It has all the love, the angst, the sorrow, the arm raising, chorus singing, grand-scale producing, emotionally delivered songs any good musical worth its weight in intermission snacks can deliver.

I admit my relationship with Les Miserables is not entirely neutral.  By the tenth grade I had the whole musical memorized.   I’ve seen the production on stage more than once.  Under the starry eyed cloud of adolescent love with a singing thespian in my own high school, I saw Les Miserables when it came to Atlanta.  With Cosette and Marius singing in the background I felt the first flutters of teenage love. Caught up in an idealized view of the theater at my private school and a teenage sense of self importance, I was quickly under the spell of Les Miserables and its songs.  It was only later that I realized the story of Les Miserables is much less about Cosette, Marius, or Eponine, but rather much more about the experience of redemption and grace in the life of Jean Valjean.  

Ultimately, I think this is why this story is so appealing.  We see a man “standing in his grave” receive forgiveness and mercy.  We see another man, Javert, obsessed with proving his own righteousness, with making the world ‘right’ in his own power, and unable to receive grace.  The contrast of these two men, the chase of the self righteous pursuit of justice verses the brokenness of a man whose life is changed by grace, is as stark as the way their lives end.  Seeing them sing at the same time in a melodic argument of dramatic tension gives the audience an emotional hanger on which to hang a universal struggle.  Why is it so hard to forgive?  Why is it so difficult to be forgiven?  How can forgiveness change us?  Can broken relationships ever be mended? How can our receiving God’s forgiveness free us to live for others? Is there a reason to live that is bigger than myself?  These are the questions that Les Miserables makes accessible to people of different ages and experiences.

I am glad the theater was dark, because I like to think no one saw me singing along with almost every song in the film.  I didn’t think there was a bad actor in the bunch.  Anne Hathaway has gotten a lot of attention for her performance of “I Dreamed a Dream,” but it was Eddie Redmayne’s performance of Marius and his delivery of “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” that brought tears to my eyes.  Russell Crowe does a praiseworthy job of playing Javert, but I really like Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean.  I like it when a story spans different seasons of my life, and the characters with whom I identify change as I grow older.  Like Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, which I’ve read several times in different seasons of my life, Les Miserables has spanned the decades.  With each new reading or telling of the story I find myself sympathizing in different ways with different characters.  What stories keep telling themselves to you?  How do they change?  How have you changed? How is that reflected in the way you hear the old stories?  

A White Christmas!

The first snow of winter finally fell this morning...

making a coooold but beautiful Christmas.

Merry Christmas Eve

 

Merry Christmas!

The Cross Behind the Stable

What is there to write about what happened in Connecticut yesterday?  What should we feel as we watch surreal images cross our computer or television screens.  I have vacillated today between numb emotional distance to wanting to squeeze my children tightly with tears.  Suffering happens everyday around the world to innocent children.  We read about it in magazines and papers, watch documentaries, and maybe send a check to a distant child in Africa.  But yesterday's events seem so profoundly strange and painful because of their familiar proximity. They seem like they could have happened in our own backyard.  The town, the school, and even the little children seem so eerily similar to our family's 'safe' life here in the Chicago suburbs.  My gaze has lingered on my girls today. I watch their little profiles, their giggles at the Christmas tree, and I wonder at the painful horror of this world that has robbed other parents of this joy.

One of the most helpful things I've read is an article by New York Times journalist Ross Douthat titled "Loss of the Innocents."  You can read the whole article HERE.  He leans heavily on Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Ivan's argument against God.  He invokes Ivan's argument asking,

"Why should [man] know diabolical good and evil when it costs so much?." 

Many of us have asked this very thing today.  Our eyes fill with tears as we look at our own children, love them with a love that hurts,  and struggle to feel mocked by evil in the seeming randomness of a terrible act.  Writer Douthat is helpful in reminding us that God revealed himself in story, a story of human suffering, a story in which he himself entered as a helpless child.

He writes,

"In this, the Russian novelist was being true to the spirit of the New Testament, which likewise seeks to establish God’s goodness through a narrative rather than an argument, a revelation of his solidarity with human struggle rather than a philosophical proof of his benevolence.

In the same way, the only thing that my religious tradition has to offer to the bereaved of Newtown today — besides an appropriately respectful witness to their awful sorrow — is a version of that story, and the realism about suffering that it contains.

"That realism may be hard to see at Christmastime, when the sentimental side of faith owns the cultural stage. But the Christmas story isn’t just the manger and the shepherds and the baby Jesus, meek and mild.

The rage of Herod is there as well, and the slaughtered innocents of Bethlehem, and the myrrh that prepares bodies for the grave. The cross looms behind the stable — the shadow of violence, agony and death." - Ross Douthat

My New Magazine

This is a little shout out to my Aunt Esther to say thank you for giving me a subscription to a great magazine. My first issue of Poets & Writers arrived in the mail today, and I've already put several new books on hold at the library as well as made plans for writing classes in Europe (okay, not that last part, but let a girl dream).  There is a wide range of great articles covering many different styles of writing.  From Chicago's own graphic artist Chris Ware speaking about his new graphic novel  to poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins, this magazine has a little something for everyone.   Many of you may have already browsed through an issue, but in case you haven't...check it out (HERE ).   Stocking stuffer idea for the one who doesn't mind you stealing back their present?

Movie Time

For a literature loving, history dabbling, movie going dilettante, this year’s holiday movie line up is something to make a girl downright giddy.  From  Lincoln to Anna Karenina, The Hobbit to Life of PI, the Great Gatsby to Les Miserables, history and literature are hitting the big screen.   

In my comfiest jeans and cozy wool socks I have a date with myself for the matinee (more like 11am) showing of Anna Karenina.   Settling into my seat I prepare myself to have an open mind about the film based on Tolstoy’s novel.   Knowing there is absolutely no way 900 pages of characters and plot can be squeezed into a two hour film I set my hopes low.  Maybe some good costumes and beautiful Russian scenery will entertain me for a few hours.  I promise myself I will not get frustrated if Anna is portrayed as a victim of love and her oppressive culture rather than the complex moral being Tolstoy weaves.  

Folks (insert your best Stephen Colbert imitation here), this is my English teacher plea.  Please read the book before you see the movie.  The movie will give you all the wrong ideas about the book.  Reading the book, though, might actually help you enjoy the movie more. The movie was made by people who seem to love the novel and want to highlight significant parts of the story, but there is no way this story can be translated to a two dimensional screen.

The major characters included in the film are  well cast with some great actors. Jude Law's performance as Anna's husband is excellent.  In fact, he is a much more powerful actor than Aaron Taylor-Johnson who plays Vronsky,  the object of Anna's desire. Maybe this is on purpose.  I am surprised by how many subtle nods are made to significant passages in the novel (Levin working in the fields with the peasants, Anna on the train with the paper knife, Kitty in the carriage, Karenin forgiving Anna, the peasant with the black face).  Blink and you'll miss them or, at best, they will seem like meaningless visual adornment. Meaningful allusions seem disconnected and random without the knowledge of the fuller story behind it.  Scenes such as Levin’s revelation of Kitty's character as she cares for his sick brother only become rich with the background from the novel.  But then again, this is often the case when books become movies.  

The absolute WORST part of the film is the artistic rendering of the story in an opera house.   The story is rich enough with characters and landscape without confusing the audience by setting the whole story in an opera house.  This theatrical approach is way too visually confusing. It distracts from rather than enhances the characters’ internal struggles.

One of the BEST parts of the film is the use of the train throughout the story as visual imagery and foreshadowing of Anna’s moral and mental decline.  Don't miss the black faced peasant who crosses her path right after she meets Vronsky for the first time.

Gary Morson, the Northwestern professor who regularly packs classrooms of over 300 students to hear his lectures on Anna Karenina, writes that “great works of literature are characteristically written or read as both situated in and transcending their time.” He goes on to say that “the very nature of great works is that they outgrow what they were in the epoch of their creation” (Morson, Anna Karenina in our Time).  They transcend their time by identifying human struggle and longing common to all times.  Is there a God?  Does he forgive me?  Will He ever stop?  Can others forgive me?  Can I forgive?  Is the course of my life due to my own choices or to fate?  For more thoughts from Morson on Tolstoy’s novel see some old blog posts (here or here).

And while we are on the subject of works of literature transcending their time, let’s talk a minute about Les Miserables coming out on Christmas Day (watch the trailer).  So, I’m just a wee bit excited about this one.  Just today the Huffington Post released a mixed review of the movie (HERE).  One critic called it “bombastic” saying, “As the enduring success of this property has shown, there are large, emotionally susceptible segments of the population ready to swallow this sort of thing, but that doesn't mean it's good.”  I guess I’m part of the large emotionally susceptible segments of the population because I’m ready to swallow it up.  From the minute Anne Hathaway’s voice belts out "On My Own" in today’s preview I have chills all over. Bring it on.  A crystal clear voice rings out over the cinema, "I dreamed a dream of time gone by, when hope was high and life worth living.  I dreamed that love would never die.  I dreamed that God would be forgiving.  But the tigers come at night with their voices soft as thunder..."  

I hope, my friends, you are enjoying the holiday season.    Hopefully, this little blog is not dead but merely gasping for air.  My writing joints are a bit rusty after a month away.  I need Dorothy with her tin can to loosen me up.  Maybe writing again here now and then will get the juices flowing again.  

And I wish you happy movie going in this fun season of good movies old and new.