Reviews

Film review: ‘A Great Awakening’

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On Sunday I noticed that the movie “A Great Awakening” was available on Amazon Prime, and I watched it. As an old man who remembers the Bad Old Days, I approach all Christian movies with suspicion, but I was pleasantly surprised.

In case you’re not familiar with it, the film is about the relationship between Benjamin Franklin and the evangelist George Whitefield. Generally, it avoided preachiness, despite the fact that one of the main characters was a preacher.

The film opens during the Constitutional Convention, as the assembly seems about to collapse, with federalists and states’ rights advocates unable to find common ground. Someone calls on Benjamin Franklin to share his wisdom, but he goes home without making a statement. That night he is reminded of his old friend Whitefield, and he tells his grandson the story of their friendship.

We travel back to Whitefield’s childhood as the son of a widowed innkeeper in England. A kindly patron offers to provide funds for him to attend Oxford University. However, he’ll have to attend as a servant, caring for the needs of wealthy students. Those students treat him with contempt, except for the members of the “Holy Club,” the Christian group led by the brothers John and Charles Wesley. Joining them, George becomes a zealous worker with the poor, and in time experiences his own faith breakthrough. Once ordained, he finds his fiery preaching unwelcome in the Church of England, and concludes that there will be better fields of harvest in America.

On this side of the ocean, his preaching (particularly his ability to project his voice to huge numbers at once) impresses Franklin. Whitefield, for his part, wishes to contract with Franklin as his publisher. As Whitefield’s mission prospers, the arrangement brings great profit to both of them, though Whitefield’s percentage goes to support an orphanage he establishes in the south, which proves more expensive than he hoped.

We watch Franklin’s increasing involvement in revolutionary politics, and learn that Whitefield didn’t live long. In their final meeting, Franklin continues to reject Whitefield’s invitations to believe in Christ, denouncing Whitefield’s decision (hypocritical in light of his previous condemnations of slavery) to use slave labor at his orphanage, in order to prevent bankruptcy.

But when Franklin returns to Congress, he draws on his memories of Whitefield to suggest a possible plan for bringing the representatives together.

All in all, it was a pretty effective movie. I believe it’s questionable whether Whitefield himself would have ever supported independence – he was a loyal subject to the king all his life. I was a little disappointed that they changed his appearance – he famously had one crossed eye; here the eye looks cloudy instead. The writers made an honorable choice in including his failure on the slavery issue – though it weakens the story line a little.

I think it’s questionable whether Franklin’s resolution was really offered with Whitefield in mind, and I’m pretty sure historians will question whether it was that resolution that saved the Constitution.

But movies aren’t about exact history; compared to films like “Braveheart,” “A Great Awakening” towers like a monument to verisimilitude.

The actors’ performances are extremely good. The production values are quite high, considering the production company’s available resources. The plot is generally effective and even moving.

We have in fact reached a point in history when Christian and conservative filmmaking is often palpably superior, both in content and artistry, to most of Hollywood’s output. I look forward to seeing “Young Washington” when it becomes available to me.

Movie-wise, the future looks pretty bright for our side.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Wild South’ and ‘Hell for Leather,’ by Alan Lee

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Johnny remembered a story from the Bible when the lame and the sick gathered around a pool where an angel would stir the surface and whoever reached the water first would be healed. Except it never seemed to work. The casino felt like that, desperate people huddled and hoping for a miracle, day after day.

I’ve been raving about Alan Lee’s Mackenzie August/Sinatra novels, telling you how much fun they are. But those books didn’t prepare me for his Atlanta Burning series, two books released to date. This new series raises the stakes, takes it to a whole new level. I call it genuinely epic. Think of a fusion of the classic Western story with a Mad Max postapocalyptic thriller. With a Christian element artfully woven in. The first book is The Wild South.

This is the setting: Atlanta in the present, or maybe a few years into the future. The place has become a dystopia. Police defunding has resulted in rampant crime, the authorities helpless. In response, the government has instituted radical, controversional new rules – bounties will be placed on the worst criminals at large, and licensed bounty hunters will be permitted arrest them. Licenses aren’t hard to get. Every sane person can tell the results will be horrific.

Our hero, Johnathan “Johnny Sugar” Young, is not much interested in all that. He’s a Georgia celebrity, thanks to his college football career, in which he led his team to two Sugar Bowls, even though he quit before graduation and never even tried out for professional ball. He was a cop for a while and even took FBI training – but he quit that too. Today he’s a professional gambler, playing high stakes poker at an Atlanta casino.

He lives in the upper story of a commercial building he owns. His roommate is Kunga, a former criminal who once stabbed him with a knife, but then was born again and changed his ways. He’s now Johnny’s best friend.

Because the police only respond to emergencies nowadays, Johnny has to call in a private crime scene investigator when his property is robbed. The investigator turns out to be Bella Adams, the love of Johnny’s life, whom he hasn’t seen in years. She’s still mad at him for leaving college (and her). She tells him she’s a licensed bounty hunter, and has plans to go after her chunk of the reward money when the season opens. She knows Johnny’s skills, both as a cop and a gunman (he’s a natural), and she asks him to become her partner. Learning she has lost her apartment, he invites her to move in with him and Kunga. Thus begins an awkward but increasingly affectionate partnership.

It’s quite a ride. There’s violence here, of course, but there’s also increasing personal insight, and prophecy, and acts of heroism, and a remarkable final showdown unlike anything I’ve ever read before. I couldn’t wait to download the second book, Hell For Leather

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Fiction, Reviews

‘The River Journey,’ by Robert Nathan

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“Well, then,” said Minerva at last, “what are we to believe?”

“Believe in what you do not know,” replied Mrs. Mortimer promptly. “Believe in your own ignorance.”

I wasn’t entirely happy with the last Robert Nathan book I read, but now I’ve finished The River Journey (published 1949) and it’s all right again. This novel is a sort of an allegory. I didn’t entirely understand it, but it raised the right issues.

Minerva Parkinson is a middle-aged housewife in an Iowa town on the Missouri River. When her doctor tells her she’s dying, she decides not to inform her husband Henry. Instead she intends to give him the adventure he’s always wanted but never reached out for. He’s always wanted to go down the river to St. Louis and New Orleans. So now she’ll cash in her stock certificates and buy a houseboat, and they’ll take that journey. She isn’t sure she’s made him happy all these years, but he’ll have this happy memory when she’s gone.

When they finally set out, she’s a little disappointed at first. Henry isn’t sure about this whole thing; it’s kind of frightening. He’s mostly coming along to please her. But the situation changes in Nebraska City, where they take on two passengers – a young woman named Nora and a mysterious, dark man named Mr. Mortimer. Mr. Mortimer, Minerva comes to realize, is Death. And Nora, like Minerva, is dying. When a flirtation begins between Nora and Henry, Minerva suppresses her jealousy, wanting to give them both a little happiness before she departs.

In terms of strict morality, I didn’t entirely approve of the plot of The River Journey. But I don’t think it’s intended to be taken on that level. This is a journey through the heart, a confrontation with mortality and the things we must leave behind.

The bottom line is that I enjoyed The River Journey very much. It possessed the full Robert Nathan magic.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Man with the Blue Suede Shoes,’ by David M. Baylis

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Accepting an offer on a novel by an unknown writer is always a gamble, even if you’re only risking a buck and a couple hours, but sometimes you get lucky. The Man with the Blue Suede Shoes, a novella by David M. Bayliss, was good enough to make me suspect that the author may be some established pro, writing under a pseudonym.

Cal Chance is a private eye, working for a small agency in Los Angeles. He’s not a go-getter. He does as little work as he can get away with. He pads his expense account. He’s not above blackmailing a sleazy client. Whenever his boss summons him, he expects to be fired, but somehow it hasn’t happened yet.

But his latest job is the strangest – and most ridiculous – of his career. His assignment is to find Elvis Presley.

Not the original, of course. Nor one of the countless Elvis impersonators who populate his town. This Elvis impersonator was actually named Elvis Aaron Presley at birth.

The context is a celebrity wedding. A major internet influencer is marrying a wealthy man. Their wedding is going to be a media event, and they’ve advertised the fact that a Real Elvis Aaron Presley is going to officiate. Only now he’s disappeared. Cal’s job is to find him. How many Elvis Aaron Presleys can there be in Vegas?

It’s a rule among fiction writers that (most of the time) you want to make your main character likeable. Cal doesn’t rate high on that scale at first, but he gets warmer and fuzzier as the investigation proceeds. The main reason for that is Lisa Marie Presley, the attractive daughter of the first Elvis he checks out, an elderly man who runs a shoe repair shop. The showpiece of his business is a pair of Elvis Presley’s certified blue suede shoes, displayed in a glass case. Someone is threatening this Elvis, accusing him of stealing those shoes, and Cal – though it isn’t strictly his business – feels compelled to step in. That will lead him into an entirely different investigation, which has nothing to do with the one he’s being paid for, but might impress Lisa Marie.

The Man With the Blue Suede Shoes was a fun book to read. The first-person narration was well-done, the characters were quirky and amusing, and I got drawn in by the plot. Author Bayliss doesn’t seem to have any other books published yet, but I look forward to the next one.

Authors

‘The Other Norwegian’

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Our friend Dave Lull sent me the following article from Granta, “The Other Norwegian,” by Damion Searls. It’s about Norway’s two official languages, a subject of compelling interest to almost everyone.

Nynorsk and Bokmål are both ‘Norwegian’. They are used by roughly 10–15 and 80–85 percent of Norwegian speakers, respectively. They are spelled slightly differently but are mutually intelligible, with almost identical grammar and vocabulary. The case of Norway is unlike that of multilingual countries with actually different languages: Belgium’s French and Dutch, Canada’s English and French, India’s twenty-two officially recognized languages. A good analogy to Bokmål and Nynorsk might be Northern and Southern US English, if Southlish had an official spelling system, dictionary, academy, and language activists. But it doesn’t, which is why Americans speak with Northern or Southern ‘accents’. So what is a minority language that is nearly the same as the majority language? What is Nynorsk?

Damion Searles is, of course, a person I hate, as he’s making a living as a Norwegian translator while I fade into the sunset. Still, if you’re curious about Norway’s peculiar language situation, the article’s pretty good.

Fiction, Reviews

‘American Woman,’ by Alan Lee

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Alas, this is the last Sinatra book to date. I’ll have to wait for more now. “Sinatra,” you may recall, is the code name of Manny Martinez, Puerto Rican-American super-patriot and US Marshal. Handsome enough to be a supermodel, omnicompetent and void of self-doubt, he’s a parody of the James Bond/Jason Bourne stereotype, but also a vivid character in his own right, endearing and amusing. From time to time he’s summoned for super-secret assignments by a super-secret government agency. Most of the time he brings his partner along, the sweet, innocent Mormon girl, Noelle Beck. Their relationship is fun and flirty and a little poignant. And never more so than in the book under consideration, American Woman (number 6 in the series).

The assignment this time is a spur-of-the-moment thing. The DEA has learned of a very hush-hush meeting coming up in the Florida Keys, arranged by a couple aspiring South American cocaine lords. The purpose of the meeting is to demonstrate a new form of cocaine, to raise capital for a full-scale operation. Two potential investors have been identified, and they look enough like Manny and Nicole that they can stand in for them, once the originals have been safely detained.

Manny, of course, was born to play the role of drug lord, while Beck is a little hesitant about portraying a criminal’s bimbo. Except that a sudden revelation on their arrival forces them to radically alter that scenario, with highly amusing results.

The whole Manny-Beck dynamic started out as mostly comic (as I recall), but as the series proceeds, the characters deepen and the stories acquire depth and tragedy. Manny suffered a great loss in the last book, and in American Woman it’s Beck’s turn.

American Woman was both highly entertaining and touching (though author Lee’s ear for grammar sometimes fails). Cautions are in order for rough language and sexual (though not explicit) situations.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Stonecliff,’ by Robert Nathan

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He sighed, and shook his head. “The world has always been full of magicians,” he said; “they crowd the bookstore shelves, they fill the theaters . . . but they do not do anything with the heart, the way Benét did. They do tricks with cards, with a chicken in a hat . . . It is all sleight of hand, one can buy such tricks anywhere; even in a brothel. The true sorcerer deals with illusion; he does things with the heart.”

Another novel by Robert Nathan, the unjustly nearly-forgotten 20th Century urban fantasist. (He wrote Portrait of Jennie, which I recently reviewed, but he also wrote The Bishop’s Wife, which was made into a movie with Cary Grant and David Niven once upon a time, and more recently re-made with Denzel Washington.)

I’ve decided I’ll try to boost Robert Nathan on this blog. I picked up a later book, the 1967 novel Stonecliff. I wouldn’t say it’s his best work, though.

The narrator is a young writer named Michael Robb, who has gotten a coveted assignment, to write a biography of Edward Granville, a celebrated novelist, now old and beginning to be forgotten. To interview him, Michael drives to Granville’s remote home, Stonecliff, a cliffside dwelling on the California coast.

He finds Granville welcoming enough, but he’s surprised to find that the man’s wife is not present. Instead there is Nina, a lovely young woman who seems to occupy some undefined position in the household. Is she Granville’s mistress? Michael wonders about that increasingly, as he finds himself romantically drawn to Nina, who is distant and seems rather unhappy.

In between interviews, Michael roams the grounds, from the hills above to the beach below. He wonders about a treehouse he finds, where he’s sure he saw a serpent. He also believes he saw a cougar, perhaps – he’s not sure – walking in Nina’s company. His growing frustration and fascination with Nina leads to an inevitable confrontation and a shocking revelation.

I found Stonecliff less delightful than other Nathan books I’ve read. I wasn’t sure what to take away from the story, except that it’s about an artist growing old (a subject generally of keen interest to me). The specter of Merlin haunts this book, with echoes of the legend of Nimue, but Nathan uses that fantasy for his own purposes.

I also found the prose less lapidary than in Portrait of Jennie. There was not as much precise description of nature – though fog is described in a hundred ways.

Stonecliff wasn’t a bad book, but it may be that Nathan was losing some of his magic by that point.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Desert Eagle,’ by Alan Lee

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I’ll be sad when I finally catch up on the Manny Martinez (code name “Sinatra”) books. I’m sure there’ll be another entry in the Mackenzie August constellation of series soon, but I always miss them when there isn’t one waiting for me.

Manny Martinez, you may recall, is a Puerto Rican-born US Marshal. He is ridiculously handsome, has excellent taste in clothes, cars, and drinks, and loves America excessively. From time to time he is summoned for extra duty by a secretive government agency, and he and his innocent Mormon partner Noelle Beck fly off to have James Bond-style adventures.

In Desert Eagle, the job is supposed to be simple, though far from their usual stomping grounds. They’re supposed to fly to Abu Dhabi and pick up an American academic who, according to intelligence, has been targeted by Houthi terrorists for kidnap and execution.

Needless to say, it wouldn’t be an adventure if everything went to plan. The academic is snatched from under their noses, and soon Manny and Noelle are headed across the desert, assisted only begrudgingly by the Abu Dhabi government. Fortunately, they are able to join forces with an old pair of allies/rivals – independent agents Bronwen and Junior (Manny and Bronwen have major sexual chemistry, which is always a hoot).

Heroics ensue.

Desert Eagle, like all its predecessors, was lots of fun. The ending was bittersweet, though.

I recommend it, of course, with cautions for language and mature situations.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Portrait of Jennie,’ by Robert Nathan

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From then on, the sky seemed made of another blue, and the clouds, too, were a different white, with tones of yellow in them. Yellow is the true color of spring, not green, the new grass, the clouds, the misty, sunny air, the sticky buds like little feathers on the trees, are mixed with yellow tone, with the haze of sun and earth and water. Green is for summer, blue for fall.

***

I smiled at him across the table. “I’m only beginning to think about things like that,” I said.

“Well,” he said unhappily, “I wish you wouldn’t. The artist ought not to think so much. It’s bad for his color sense.”

Having watched and reviewed the old movie, “Portrait of Jennie,” a few days ago, I went and got the original novella. It’s better than the movie, even better than I remembered.

The film veers off from the book toward the end, but it starts pretty much the same. On a winter’s day in Manhattan in the 1930s, Eben Adams, a struggling artist, meets a strange little girl dressed in oddly antique clothing. The sketch he draws of her the next day becomes the first work of his that a particular art dealer finds interesting. On the basis of this sale, he begins an increasingly successful period of his career. Occasionally through that winter he meets the little girl again, and each time she is visibly a few years older. Gradually he realizes (as she seems to know from the start) that they are living in different timelines, which cross occasionally. She is “hurrying,” she tells him, to grow up in time to catch up with him.

In the movie, Eben goes to visit the convent school she attended, where he learns from a sympathetic old nun that Jennie studied there decades before, but died in a hurricane on Cape Cod. That is a departure from the book, where Eben goes to Cape Cod for artistic inspiration, and has his final encounter with Jenny there unexpectedly. In my opinion, the book’s ending worked better. (Another change the film made is changing Eben’s friend Gus from a Jew to an Irishman. Thus we lose Gus’s ruminations on the “tough break” God handed his people.)

Aside from the entrancing, fantasy love story, the great pleasure of Portrait of Jennie is the prose. Robert Nathan was a superb literary craftsman. His descriptions reminded me of Sigrid Undset – he revels in detail, in texture and scent, but especially in color – as is entirely appropriate for a story narrated by a painter.

I highly recommend Portrait of Jennie. Robert Nathan was Jewish, but there was almost nothing in his meditations on God and eternity that I disagreed with.

Fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘His Eyes,’ by Mark Charles Powers

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Sometimes you read a book that’s so well-meaning that you just want to root for it. Especially if it’s a Christian book. I wish I could say that Mark Charles Powers’ His Eyes was a successful work of art, but I’m afraid I can’t.

As the book opens (the opening is quite well-written), Michael Judson, a teenager in a suburb in an unnamed southern state, is in shock. His younger brother Lucas has just died in a freak gun accident, and Michael doesn’t know whether he, his (single) mother, or Lucas himself pulled the trigger.

This is the most successful part of the book, as the horror and finality sink in and he and his mother deal with it, each in their own ways. Michael finds some comfort in the friendship of an old neighbor, who lends him a cassette tape (this story is set in 1997) featuring a Christian song that’s brought him comfort. He also makes friends with a neighbor boy who has unspoken problems of his own. Meanwhile his mother sinks into depression and guilt, becoming increasingly dependent on prescription tranquilizers. Their grief is only aggravated by her ex-husband’s accusations that she’s responsible for Lucas’s death.

I think it’s a general truth that in fiction it’s easier to portray grief and pain than to portray comfort and healing. That problem is only aggravated when a Christian message is being proclaimed. One tends (and I know this from experience) to fall into preachiness. One’s words sound like platitudes, even when the truths expressed have been hard-learned through suffering and tears. Such scenes require a deft handling of dialogue – and I regret to say that author Powers hasn’t quite mastered that skill. Michael, in particular, tends to fall into verbiage that sounds nothing like a teenager talking.

I wish Mark Charles Powers well. I think he has talent, and is capable of very good things. But he’s not ready for prime time. I fear that His Eyes, well-intentioned though it is, will not do the good he intended (though it certainly may in some cases, with readers less picky than I).