Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (61 page)

Forsyth has surrounded that love with some extraordinary images, which help to create the magical feeling of the film. The action takes place in a house near a lake which is crossed by a majestic, forbidding railroad bridge, and it is a local legend that one night decades ago, a passenger train slipped ever so lazily off the line and plunged down, down, into the icy waters of the frozen lake. The notion of the passengers in their warm, welllit carriages, plunging down to their final destination, is one that Forsyth somehow turns from a tragedy into a notion of doomed beauty. And the bridge becomes important at several moments in the film, especially the last one.

The natural setting of the film (in British Columbia) and the production design by Adrienne Atkinson are also evocative; it is important that the action takes place in a small, isolated community, in a place cut off from the world where whimsies flourish and private notions can survive. At the end of the film, I was quietly astonished; I had seen a film that could perhaps be described as being about a madwoman, but I had seen a character who seemed closer to a mystic, or a saint.

NOVEMBER 8, 1991

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.

-Shakespeare, King Lear

er life is a bleak and sinful void. She finds God, and is reborn. But then, after a period during which she finds peace through her new beliefs, her life becomes a void again-this time, on God's terms. Sharon, the woman played brilliantly and courageously by Mimi Rogers in The Rapture, is a character like Job, tested by God to the breaking point. Unlike job, she finally refuses to be toyed with any longer.

Her story is told in one of the most challenging and infuriating movies I've seen-a radical, uncompromising treatment of the Christian teachings about the final judgment. Almost all movies with a religious theme are made by people who are themselves religious, or who piously pretend to be. The Rapture, written and directed by Michael Tolkin, is seen from a more literal, skeptical point of view: All right, he seems to be saying, if this is what the end of creation is going to be like, then we should stare unblinking at its full and terrifying implications.

As the movie opens, Sharon and her lover Vic (Patrick Bauchau) are swingers, mate-swappers who cruise the bars together, looking for likely prospects. When they find others who want to swing, they go home for sexual games which Sharon finds increasingly unrewarding. Is this all life is-partying all night, and spending her days in a tiny cubicle, working as an operator for the telephone company?

Tolkin uses Sharon's daytime job as a metaphor for modern man, who communicates more easily than ever before, but more impersonally. Sharon's job requires her to talk to hundreds of people all day long, but in a mechanical way. Her nighttime sex life is almost a reaction to the sterile existence of her days.

Then she overhears some of her coworkers talking, during a lunch break, about "the rapture," about the imminent second coming of Christ, about "the boy," who is their prophet. She is curious, and is taken to one of their meetings, and finds that all over the world some people are sharing the same dream, of the imminent end of the world. It is a dream she has herself. Torn between her sinful existence and the hope of these believers, she attempts to commit suicide, but instead experiences an overwhelming spiritual experience, and is born again.

Ah, but the movie does not lead us where we expect it to go, after her experience. She leaves Vic, she finds a partner who is spiritually healthier, she has a daughter, she leads a blameless life, and then, when the girl is about six, Sharon becomes convinced that the Second Coming is imminent. She goes out into the wilderness with her daughter, to await the moment when she expects God to gather the two of them into heaven. And she waits. And waits. And a national park policeman takes pity on them, as they stand under the merciless sun.

Sharon is guilty, I believe, of the sin of Pride. She thinks she knows when, and how, God will call her. God does not perform according to her timetable. And yet Tolkin does not cheat us with an ending in which Sharon is simply seen as deluded. God does exist in this film, and he does make judgments about individuals such as Sharon, and the world does end, with the fearsome horsemen of the apocalypse in the sky, and the bars falling from the doors of the prison-cells.

It is simply that, by the time of the judgment, Sharon has had enough. She commits a shocking action, she tries to stand firm and unflinching in her faith, but she finally comes to believe that God has asked too much of her. Her actions in the last twenty minutes of this film send audiences boiling out of the theater, engaged in fierce discussions. After decades of "religious" films which were simply sentimentalized fables, here is a film that demands its audiences to make their own peace with the rules of an inflexible deity.

Watching the film, I began to realize that I would feel cheated if Tolkin did not give us some vision of heaven-did not take Sharon to another plane, in one way or another. He does not cheat us, and the closing passages of this film are stunning in their implications. It is true that on a limited budget The Rapture is not able to give us sensational special effects-a state-of-the-art heaven, if you will. It doesn't matter. He gives us an idea of heaven that transcends any possible special effect, and bring us face to face with the awful, and awe-full, consequences of that day when the saints go marching in.

SEPTEMBER 25, 1998

on can sense the love of a daughter for her parents in every frame of A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries. It's only brought into the foreground in a couple of scenes, but it courses beneath the whole film, an underground river of gratitude for parents who were difficult and flawed, but prepared their kids for almost anything.

The movie is told through the eyes of Channe, a young girl whose father is a famous American novelist. In the 196os, the family lives in Paris, on the Ile St. Louis in the Seine. Bill Willis (Kris Kristofferson) and his wife Marcella (Barbara Hershey) move in expatriate circles ("We're Euro-trash"), and the kids go to a school where the students come from wildly different backgrounds. At home, dad writes, but doesn't tyrannize the family with the importance of his work, which he treats as a job ("Typing is the one thing I learned in high school of any use to me"). There is a younger brother, Billy, who was adopted under quasi-legal circumstances, and a nanny, Candida, who turns down a marriage proposal to stay with the family.

All of this is somewhat inspired, I gather, by fact. The movie is based on an autobiographical novel by Kaylie Jones, whose father, James Jones, was the author of From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line, and Whistle. Many of the parallels are obvious: Jones lived in Paris, drank a lot, and had heart problems. Other embellishments are no doubt fiction, but what cannot be concealed is that Kaylie was sometimes almost stunned by the way both parents treated her with respect as an individual, instead of patronizing her as a child.

The overarching plot line is simple: the children become teenagers, the father's health causes concerns, the family eventually decides to move back home to North Carolina. The film's appeal is in the details. It recreates a childhood of wonderfully strange friends, eccentric visitors, a Paris which was more home for the children than for the parents, and a homecoming which was fraught for them all. The Willises are like a family sailing in a small boat to one comfortable but uncertain port after another.

The movie was directed by James Ivory and produced by Ismail Merchant, from a screenplay by their longtime collaborator, the novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. She also knows about living in other people's countries, and indeed many of Ivory's films have been about expatriates and exiles (most recently another American in France, in Jefferson in Paris). There is a delight in the way they introduce new characters and weave them into the family's bohemian existence. This is one of their best films.

Channe and young Billy are played as teenagers by Leelee Sobieski and Jesse Bradford. We learn some of the circumstances of Billy's adoption, and there is a journal, kept by his mother at the age of fifteen, which he eventually has to decide whether to read or not. He has some anger and resentment, which his parents deal with tactfully; apart from anything else, the film is useful in the way it deals with the challenge of adoption.

Channe, at school, becomes close friends with the irrepressible Francis Fortescue (Anthony Roth Costanzo), who is the kind of one-off original the movie makes us grateful for. He is flamboyant and uninhibited, an opera fan whose clear, high voice has not yet broken, and who exuberantly serenades the night with his favorite arias. We suspect that perhaps he might grow up to discover he is gay, but the friendship takes place at a time when such possibilities are not yet relevant, and Channe and Francis become soul mates, enjoying the kind of art-besotted existence Channe's parents no doubt sought for themselves in Paris.

The film opens with a portrait of the Willises on the Paris cocktail party circuit, but North Carolina is a different story, with a big frame house and all the moods and customs of home. The kids hate it. They're called "frogs" at school. Channe responds by starting to drink and becoming promiscuous, and Billy vegetates in front of the TV set. Two of the best scenes involve a talk between father and daughter about girls who are too loose, and another, after Channe and a classmate really do fall in love, where Bill asks them if they're having sex. When he gets his answer, he suggests, sincerely, that they use the girl's bedroom: "They're gonna do it anyway; let them do it right."

A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries is not a textbook for every family. It is a story about this one. If a parent is remembered by his children only for the work he did, then he spent too much time at work. What is better is to be valued for who you really were. If the parallels between this story and the growing up of Kaylie Jones are true ones, then James Jones was not just a good writer but a good man.