1.
Ardaas
2016, Gippy Grewal

The crisis: Dealing with the fact that your wife has died because your family pressured her to abort the female foetus she was carrying.

The plot: Gurmukh Singh (Gurpreet Ghuggi) is the widower in question. Though he is grieving and heartbroken, his Sikh faith stays strong, and when he takes up a new posting as a teacher at a village school in the Punjab, he uses his beliefs and his warm personality to help the various people he encounters to deal with the problems in their lives.


The photos are all from northern India, 2011

Pluses: Ardaas means "a request, a supplication, a prayer, a petition or an address to a superior authority". The movie opens with a beautiful recitation of "Gurbani", the word of the Guru. And Gurmukh is a great example of the power of the good. The movie doesn't shy away from the problems facing rural communities in India: alcohol dependence; drugs; petty crime; unemployment; debt; single-parent families. But the film's point is that individuals can influence those around them for the better. Not every battle can be won, but the overall happiness quotient can definitely be raised.

Minuses: As this review remarks: "This movie’s context is devoid of Sikh historical context and it presents a very pop Sikh sentiment versus a deep understanding of gurbani." True, although there's always a trade-off to be negotiated between depth and accessibility.



2.
Higher Ground
2011, Vera Farmiga

The crisis: Struggling to maintain the Christian faith that has always been part of your life, while dogged by doubt and assailed by tragedy.

The plot: Corinne (Vera Farmiga), married to Ethan (Joshua Leonard), belongs to a conservative evangelical church community. Certainly, there's more peace and stability here than in the family around them (Corinne's parents' marriage has disintegrated, and her sister has a bad track record on relationships). But it's a very confining environment. Corinne gets shut down for "almost preaching", and reprimanded for dressing in a way that is regarded as too attractive. Every problem is deemed to stem from "Satan", whose "casting out" people regularly pray for. A ray of sunshine in this environment is Corinne's friend Annika (Dagmara Dominczyk). She's a joyous, relaxed, fun-loving, intensely spiritual person (how she manages to safeguard all those qualities in this context is not clear), and Corinne obviously values her highly. When Annika is diagnosed with a brain tumour, and the subsequent operation leaves her severely impaired (unable to speak or walk), Corinne is devastated, left with a thousand questions that her community is not equipped to answer or even give space to. This unhappiness affects her marriage too, but when she and Ethan try couples therapy, the counsellor is too judgemental and negative ("you are worshipping at the altar of yourself") to offer any support. Having already stopped going to church, Corinne now leaves Ethan too. At the end, we see her go back into a church service, and even talk to the community -- about what it really means, in the words of the hymn, to stand on "higher ground". Then she heads out again, and we don't know whether this is her first step back, or her final statement that this will never work for her.



Pluses: Having had some experience of religious communities a little like this one, I found this story very moving. The problem with this kind of religion is that there's no room for doubt, no room for questioning, and no real opportunity to search for answers when tragedy strikes. So when believers ARE assailed by doubt or plagued by questions, there's no safe space within the community for them to explore and articulate their doubt and rebellion. There's only one truth there; it's held by the community elders (generally male); and you're either with it or against it. Similarly, when believers are laid low by tragedy, or simply struggling with depression, there's no safe space for them to rage and grieve -- because they're supposed to keep praising God, keep trusting God, no matter what happens. It's not that people aren't kind and caring. They are. It's just that they can only imagine life within a very narrow framework, and if someone's experience doesn't fit into that framework, they have nothing with which to respond.

Minuses: A little hard to watch at times, perhaps because I was all too familiar with some of the issues.



3.
The Confirmation
2016, Bob Nelson

The crisis: Experiencing the theft of the tools that are your livelihood, at a point when you're already at a really low ebb.

The plot: Walt (Clive Owen) is struggling. His marriage is over; and his eight-year-old son, Anthony (Jaeden Martell), is living with his ex-wife, who has a new partner. He's obviously still struggling to break free from alcoholism. And he's broke, finding it difficult even to keep his old truck running, and facing eviction because he's in arrears with the loan repayments. So when he gets a carpentry job, but the valuable tools he needs to do it are stolen, he is determined, with Anthony's help, to get them back quick smart. In the process, father and son bond. We first meet Anthony when he's at confession (in preparation for the confirmation of the title). He struggles to think of anything to confess. By the time the movie is over, and he's been involved in a number of dodgy shifts in order to track down the thief and recover the loot, he has plenty to confess... And though the film is not in-your-face religious, it does ask important questions: Do you want to be pure and set apart in a religious environment, or do you want to get your hands dirty, helping people who desperately need it? Is it a sin to lie to your father, even if the lie keeps him from hitting the bottle again? Can you actually be religious while remaining totally oblivious to the physical world around you, which consists of things that people have made? (For Walt, "bad workmanship is a sin.")



Pluses: This is a really enjoyable movie. It's funny, it's tense at times, and though it portrays a genuinely desperate situation, it does so in a way that's not harrowing or poverty-porn-creating.

Minuses: Mark Dujsik sums up the main minus pretty well: "Some of the situations in which Anthony finds himself aren't particularly convincing. A handful of scenes involving the threat of (a pair of scenes with two different handguns) or actual violence (as Walt gets closer to finding his toolbox) feel over-the-top in the moment and are resolved with relative, unpersuasive ease." It's a minor minus, though, in the great scheme of things.



4.
The Savages
2007, Tamara Jenkins

The crisis: Dealing with your elderly father's descent into dementia.

The plot: Siblings Wendy and Jon Savage (Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffmann) didn't have an easy childhood. We don't have many details, but it seems that Lenny, their father (Philip Bosco), was physically and/or emotionally abusive towards them when they were young; and their mother walked out very early in their lives. As adults, they've not had much to do with their father (he has been living in an elder care facility in Arizona with his partner of 20 years), and they've not had a whole lot to do with each other either. Nor, we become aware, have they been that successful in forming strong relationships with others. When we meet Jon, his Polish girlfriend is about to return to her country because her US visa has expired, and he is simultaneously unwilling to commit to marrying her, and sad about that unwillingness. Wendy is seeing a much older married man, who is the ultimate in flaky. Then Lenny starts showing signs of dementia, and -- with his partner now dead -- needs somewhere to live. His children move him to Buffalo (where Jon teaches at a university); Wendy moves there too (giving up her uninspiring day-job in New York, but clinging to her ambitions to be a playwright). Of course, there are conflicts between the siblings about what Dad needs. Of course, there are guilt feelings, blocking tactics, resentments, replays of old-behaviour tapes between the brother and sister. It's all very believable. Dad dies (after what we have to see as a mercifully short time). But the siblings have been shocked into re-calibrating their lives somewhat. By the end, Jon is heading off to a conference in Poland, where it seems he is planning to seek out the woman he allowed to leave. Wendy is working on the production of her play (about their own grim childhood), and she has taken on her married lover's dog, which he had planned to put down, on acccount of its growing mobility problems, but which she gets moving again by means of a clever wheeled contraption -- perhaps conveying the bittersweet message that whereas she was powerless to relieve her father's suffering, she can at least give an old dog a better quality of life...



Pluses: It's terribly realistic. The sibling rivalry; the sheer difficulty of making your life work when you've started out wounded and confused; and -- the catalyst for everything -- the awful dilemma of deciding what's best for an aging, dwindling parent.

Minuses: It's terribly realistic... Which, again, makes it a bit hard to watch in places. We feel for all these people. We don't want to be in the shoes of any of them. It reminded me of things I'd prefer to forget -- except I think we should actually forget nothing, but rather look it all hard in the face, feel our pain and our impotence all over again, move on as best we can, and be prepared to repeat that experience every time we come across a harrowing film like this one...



5.
Blue Jasmine
2013, Woody Allen

The crisis: Failing to come to terms with the fact that your husband was a swindler, and now you're poor and he's dead (in a prison suicide).

The plot: Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) was married to Hal (Alec Baldwin). She led a life of ease and luxury, apparently oblivious to the fact that he was cheating on her with other women, and defrauding his clients, including Ginger, Jasmine's adopted sister (Sally Hawkins). When justice catches up with Hal, and Jasmine ends up with nothing, she goes to stay with Ginger in San Francisco. There's a clear class divide here, and Jasmine is utterly unable to cope with Chilli (Ginger's current boyfriend) and his friends. She also struggles to get on her feet financially. She has ambitions to be an interior designer, but lacks the skills and resources to train. She briefly takes on a job as a dental receptionist, but at the end of the day, what she really wants is another rich husband... She finds a potential candidate, but her lack of candour about her past catches up with her, and torpedoes the relationship. Jasmine also learns that the son who ran away after Hal's death lives not far away in Oakland. But when she goes to see him, we learn that it was Jasmine herself who shopped Hal, out of revenge for his affairs, and her son has never been able to forgive her for this. We leave her sitting on a park bench talking to herself. She has shown signs of mental illness throughout the film, and readily takes refuge in anti-depressants and alcohol. So, things are not looking good...



Pluses: Cate Blanchett's performance is brilliant, and you find yourself watching Jasmine's unravelling with a kind of horrified fascination. The really scary thing is that Jasmine is utterly incapable of change... She has become accustomed to one mode of living, and cannot adapt to or even imagine anything different. We leave her on the same tragic track where we found her.

Minuses: As Bruce Handy notes, this is perhaps "Allen's cruelest film ever". He explains: "Jasmine, you see, is not just blind and delusional -- she is also alcoholic and mentally ill, and looked at one way the film is a serial humiliation of a woman who, no matter how awful and pretentious and complicit-or-not in her husband’s crimes she may be, we come to have affection for... The performance is like watching a gorgeous vase will itself to keep from shattering as it falls floorward." I didn't feel much affection for Jasmine, actually, but I do see what he means... You wonder what's next for her life, and the feeling that it's likely to be something horrible does leave you with a cold little shudder at the end.