Deliver Us From Evil (MUST WATCH)

I saw Deliver Us From Evil last night with Alice. Hands down, this is the best documentary I’ve seen this year… or ever. I’m trying to remember other documentaries I’ve seen such as “An Inconvenient Truth” and some Micheal Moore documentaries and “Super Size Me”. Too bad there aren’t more documentaries, and too bad there aren’t more documentaries that aren’t so politically slanted. I admit, when I go watch a documentary, I set myself up to align my views with the filmmaker so that I can go in there watching a documentary that I won’t get angry at… I don’t know how Bush lovers could have sat through Farhenheit 911 and not have gotten angry at Michael Moore for the exaggerated depictions of “the other side”. When I went to go watch “An Inconvenient Truth”, I went in there wanting to be enlightened about global warming. What I got instead was Al Gore’s campaign film. I mean, maybe I should have studied up on the film a bit more since I went in there after only having watched the trailer (which didn’t really channel the fact that Al Gore would be in every shot of the film). Anyway, so documentaries are interesting. You learn something but you always have to question who the filmmaker is and what his/her beliefs are and the motivation behind the film. Documentaries are taken to be more “truthful” in nature and those who watch it give it more credibility because it is supposed to depict “reality” or uncover an unknown “truth”. I guess you can think of it as a longer version of the news, and obviously a bit tainted by whoever is making it.

I read up a little bit about Deliver Us From Evil. I thought, great! This film is about Catholic priests who molest children and it got 100% on rottentomatoes.com. I wasn’t really expecting an objective film. If anything, I was gearing myself up to swallow a documentary that probably set out to defame the church. I saw that it was made by a woman. How awesome is that? A woman filmmaker. Well, I wasn’t about to give her credit just yet.

Once the movie started, I was just getting situated. The victims’ families were being interviewed. In the beginning, you see the victims’ families entrusting the church, especially a priest named Oliver O’Grady. These families let this priest come and spend nights with them not knowing what was going to happen. This was an so eye-opening film and as you hear the victims’ stories, you are with them from beginning to end – from the moment they trusted this priest to come into their lives and into their homes, to the final destruction of the family unit, the never-ending grief and changed lives from what had happened and what is continuing to happen because the Catholic church is not fixing this horrible problem.

This film could have flopped in so many ways but it didn’t.

There were many things that set this documentary apart but I will talk about two things in specific detail. The first thing that makes this documentary worth watching is that the story is not based on just personal stories of the victims. Most of the narration was done by Oliver O’Grady himself, the convicted pedophile priest who was sent to prison after sexually abusing children for twenty years. Of course, his candid interviews made me question why he was so open about what he did and the film touches on his dissociative disorder a bit. He speaks openly about what he did but there is really not a trace of shame, guilt, remorse for what he did to these children. In his mind, he was just being affectionate and loving, even though sometimes this translated into raping a 9 month old baby. Oliver O’Grady’s testimony is powerful because he was a perpetrator and he’s openly admitting to this problem that he shares with some priests (10% of a specific seminary are known pedophiles). He tells of his asking for help within the church structure only to be moved from one parish to another. He gets therapy but it obviously isn’t enough because he continues molesting children for 20 years before he is convicted and sent to prison. Perhaps since it is public knowledge that he did what he did, it was easier for him to come out clean and tell his story since he had nothing to hide anymore, and no church to hide behind. After serving 7 of the 14 years in prison, he is deported back to Ireland, where he came from, where no one knows of his history. He is free to roam wherever he wants. Obviously, this man needs a lot of help – both spiritually and psychologically. Since the release of this film, he moved from Ireland to Canada. Canada has children too, by the way.

But the film isn’t entirely about O’Grady, it just uses him as a prime example of a larger problem that has existed since 4 AD in the Catholic church, ever since they made priests take a vow of celibacy. This leads to the second thing that separates this film from other documentaries, and the redeeming factor of not having it slip into the anti-church genre, Father Tom Doyle. Including someone who was part of the church system who lost his job because he spoke against the authority of the church also be the advocate for the victims’ family was a strong move on Amy Berg’s part. Instead of having anti-church or nonbelievers side with the victims to say the Catholic church is corrupt, evil, etc, Father Tom Doyle provides a lot of insight to what’s going on. Here’s a quote I found online:

Father Doyle, in one of his segments, discusses how you have to understand how being raised Catholic is different than being raised in other religions, and that having that understanding is crucial to fully grasping the extent of the damage a man like Father O’Grady could wreak. I was raised Catholic, went to Catholic schools, and have an uncle who is a retired priest, and I understand exactly what Doyle means. When you are raised Catholic, you are taught from the cradle that the Church’s authority is absolute, and that the Church is the only path to heaven. Within the hierarchy of the church, clergy are essentially the right hand of God, the bastions of faith and dispensers of hope and salvation. Being violated by your priest, therefore, is essentially like being violated by God and by the very faith that gives that person such absolute control over you. One of the victims talks about the way that priests are deified within the church, and how much power that gives them over the people — especially the children — of their parishes. O’Grady told more than one victim that their parents wouldn’t have let them come to his house if there was anything wrong with what he was doing, and pulled his victims out of class to molest them in his office in the middle of the school day.

My favorite part of the film was when Father Tom Doyle is preaching and he says (I paraphrase), “As Catholics, we’re brought up to think that a good Catholic is one who is silent and obedient. That’s not what a good Catholic is. A good Catholic is one who wants to be like Jesus.” He really nailed it. He also goes on to say, “The only time Jesus was angry was when he was at church.” Tom Doyle’s role in the film is to bring it back to the core of what it means to be a believer. It’s not about the church, it’s about that personal relationship with God. It’s so powerful to have someone who is still a believer to bring the focus back to where it should belong.

Amy Berg interviews other theologians, a clergy abuse psychologist, lawyers of victims, and uses footage of Roger Mahoney (who went from bishop to cardinal, and is the reason why O’Grady wasn’t treated or convicted sooner because he was trying to protect his own career) who ends up incriminating himself with his dodgy answers. She also uses footage of Monsignor Cain, who is pretty much Mahoney’s accomplice in this whole mess in trying to cover up the scandal. Most of the people interviewed were either Catholics, grew up Catholic, were involved in the church, or were working in or around the system. It wasn’t so much a documentary that set out to question people’s faith, but a documentary focused on showing a problem within the Catholic church that needs to be addressed immediately since it has gone ignored too long. The fact that O’Grady himself was molested by a priest when he was young, and the fact that the Catholic church already spent over a billion dollars in settlement cases against allegations of child abuse is a fact that no one can ignore.

It seems that the simple solution would be to let the priests have families and not make the vow of celibacy a requirement (They mention in the film how the vow of celibacy is not required by God but something that the Catholic church chose to enforce in order for the priests to focus on the church and if they died, the possessions/inheritance/property/etc. would remain in the church and not passed down to his own family members) but something tells me there’s something more deeply-rooted than that. There are many questions of sexual immorality around this issue. The church first ignored one of the victims’ allegations because she is a woman and they chalked it up to curiosity. Once the victim is male however, it becomes a homosexual problem, and a reason to respond. However, Oliver O’Grady didn’t care whether or not his victims were male or female, as long as they were children, he got what he wanted. The problem is… since it’s an action against his vow of celibacy, raping children to having consensual sex with women all fall under one category of “sexual immorality”. I suppose spiritually, all of these things are just considered a sin. In practice though, the problem lies in the definition between sex and rape. Oliver O’Grady had a thing for children. Children who were helpless, innocent, and inherently submissive. This was a power thing. He didn’t just fondle or “touch inappropriately”, which is what he says he did. He went as far as to rape these children, as young as 9 months old. One victim’s parents didn’t know that O’Grady had gotten to their daughter as well (the whole time, they were on O’Grady’s side when allegations arose from other places) and only found out recently when O’Grady finally was sent to prison. The reason the daughter did not tell her parents was because she was scared that her father would kill O’Grady (since the father had at one point told her that if anyone hurt her, he’d kill him) and feared that her father would be sent to jail for it. She kept it a secret because of “her love for her own father”, according to the Japanese American father who ends up breaking down in the film after finding out that O’Grady had raped his daughter from when she was 5 years old until she was 12.

Tom Doyle tries to restore the victims’ faith back into Christ. When the Japanese American father says he doesn’t believe in God anymore, you can see his daughter (now 40 years old) break down when she hears him say this (she is still Catholic). This was heart-wrenching to see. People are losing their faith because of the institutionalization of the church. People are placing themselves higher than God. They do not want to admit that there is something inherently wrong in the way some things are being done and are driven by their own greed for the next higher-up title. Some visual parallels of the priests to the pharisees in Passion of the Christ came to mind. What happens when people deify themselves to be holier than they really are?Was this film setting out to make the church look bad? Was it an objective film? Well, I think it tried to be. It tried to interview the Catholic church but they refused to be interviewed (evidently now they are trying to talk to the filmmaker). What can you do as a filmmaker who wants to get all sides of an issue but only end up with one? Not much, but the tone of the film (in my humble opinion) tried to keep it in the context of the church, almost like a believer setting out to point out a point of concern within the system (even though the filmmaker says she is a non-practicing Jew).

Anyway, this was the most emotional and well-planned out documentary I’ve ever seen (or that I remember seeing). I feel sorry for a lot of people in the film. It goes to show that no person is qualified to say he/she is perfect. This really gets to the heart of humanity, which is that we are all JACKED UP.

Go watch this film. So far, it’s only playing in three locations in S. Cali – in Beverly Center, Pasadena, and in Irvine.

Here are some links of interviews with Amy Berg.

http://www.arrivistepress.com/October06/csmithey_amy_berg_1006.shtml

http://www.christianitytoday.com/movies/interviews/amyberg.html

Alice, who saw the film with me, remembers the quotes so much better. Check it out here.

BABEL *Spoiler*

So I went to watch Babel last night with Mira. I had initially wanted to go last Saturday but the plan fell through, which actually became a blessing because I had to go home and finish my play anyway. So, after I decided to go watch it last night after my class. Mira and I did our usual supermarket shopping before hitting the theaters so that we could opt to eat good and healthy snacks instead of the fat-laden, unreasonably expensive concession stand food (beware of the hot dog). So we plopped down in our usual seats (the ones in front of the second row usually reserved for the disabled but after the first five minutes, anyone is allowed to sit there. Of course, if someone did need the seats, we’d naturally move over to the other side, which is also reserved for the disabled, but are less desirable as they are on the side and not in the center.)

Anyway, on to my review of Babel. I went in there with a predetermined mindset that I was going to love the film. I mean, come on… I love Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. I loved Amores Perros and I loved 21 grams. I still thoroughly enjoyed watching the film because it still kicked Crash’s butt (which I knew it would, and will get into it in a bit) for those who still want to compare it to that horrible movie, but I felt a bit disappointed upon my exit, which I will get into in a bit.

BABEL

Directed by: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

Genre: Drama, Hyperlink stories, race relations

Photographic Style: Differs on the storyline.

Theme: Interconnecting humanity

Babel connects four storylines set in three different continents. Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is known for his hyperlink film styles as seen in Amores Perros and 21 Grams. When asked what he was trying to communicate in Babel, he states, “I feel that the connection that I want to make is not a physical or coincidental connection, nor a plot connection. I think as human beings, what makes us happy is very different; it depends on cultures or races. What makes us sad and miserable is exactly what we share, and that thing is basically the impossibility of love, the impossibility to be touched by love, the impossibility to touch with love and express it. That is one of the most painful things that every human being has experienced, as well as feeling vulnerable to love. I think those two things are the most tragic things that bring us together. This film and the connections to the characters is about that, all of them on different levels, no matter which culture, no matter which country, religion, age, social class . . . All of these people are at an inability to express themselves, with their husbands, with their wives, with their kids. When you cannot be touched by words, and when you cannot touch people with words, then the body becomes a weapon, an invitation, and that is what is tremendous about the story. I feel that you saw a story about human beings and not about Moroccans, Mexicans, or Americans.”

To his credit, I think he did an incredible job in portraying this loss, this disconnect, this monstrous “tower of babel” that separates humans into their safe havens where they can grow within their sheltered labels without having to find that bridge to tie humanity together. There is an obvious hierarchy of human lives that is embodied in the four story lines which is central to the film and perhaps, the viewpoints that many have come to consider as part of the “norm”. Quickly, here are the four story lines that interweave and are supposed to be connected to each other through this rifle, which started out as a “gift” and ended as an international murderous weapon of a terrorist (Isn’t this symbolic of what humans are capable of? Inarritu explores the depths of the scale of humanity… our ability to take something good and kind and twist it to something sinful, evil, and miserable).

1. An American couple (played by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) chooses to go to Morocco out of all the places they could have gone to in order to rebuild their marriage after the death of a child. They have two children back at home in San Diego being taken care of Amelia (see #3). Is it an inherent American desire to want to go to these really exotic foreign lands where they won’t be able to exercise their privileged routine? Come on… haphazard sanitation, lengthy distances between civilazation, difficult modes of communication in case something abnormal, such as being shot by a rifle while riding on a tour bus happens…It’s just a bit too convenient of a set-up that it seems almost contrived. Anyway, so this couple finds themselves unhappy, distressed, and angry in Morocco when they could have been like that back at home, or anywhere else for that matter. There is one poignant scene that introduces us to the characters. They are sitting on a table outdoors, eating, when Cate’s character takes the cup of water and throws it out, showing her distrust at the country’s sanitation. The look of the shot is washed out – a bit too bright. It’s set outdoors, alluding to the importance of their setting to their story. Their presence in Morocco is arbitrary and only helps in the fact that they were there to be “victims” of…
2. Two Moroccan boys receive the rifle from their father, who buys it from his neighbor, who got the rifle as a gift from a Japanese hunter (which isn’t revealed until later as a really weak link to why we’re learning about all the crap that the Japanese girl had to go through…see #4). The two boys fool around and test the gun’s distance by shooting at a tour bus. The younger one shoots at the bus and the bus comes to a stop (making them realize that the gun indeed, could reach that far that they shot Cate Blanchett). There is an established rivalry between the two brothers because the older one is jealous that the younger one is a better marksman and suspects that his father favors the younger one because of this. Nevertheless, the older brother keeps the younger one in line by being the responsible adult. Ironically, the older one embodies the innocence that is delivered through his imperfections (in this case, through his horrible aim) and his abiding of the law or code of conduct while the younger one embodies an almost eerie form of adulthood (his professional way of handling the gun to masturbating after having watched his sister undress). This story draws parallels from the story of the Prodigal Son, but with a nasty twist at the end. Most of the scenes involving the two Moroccan brothers were shot outside. Their story is full of long shots where the characters appear to be very small in comparison to the massive landscape. They were definitely overwhelmed by their living situation. The colors used here were muted, almost camouflaged in a sense because it was hard to pick out the characters in the long shots.
3. Amelia is the white couple’s hire in San Diego. She’s the kids’ nanny and raised them since their birth. There is an established closeness between Amelia and the kids, manifested by the fact that the kids can understand her Spanish when she speaks to them, even though they answer in English (and she understands them in return). The predicament here is basically that it’s her son’s wedding. Her son is in Mexico and she has to go down to participate but she can’t because she has to take care of the kids since their parents are still stuck in Morocco (dying or whatnot). No one can take care of the kids so she decides to take the kids down to Mexico with her. That’s a pretty risky situation in and of itself and now…add white kids to the mix and a jaded/angry/drunk/violent nephew driver to the mix and what do you get? A whole lot of misunderstanding as they try to cross the border back into the U.S. Oh yeah, and this turns out to be even more deliberately contrived as the nephew decides to flee in a moment of angry rebellion, with bumping screaming white kids in the back. He decides to leave them in the desert and come back for them later. Had he just stayed in the car and parked where the border patrol told him to, it wouldn’t have ended as badly. Here’s another situation where people became victims of their society/structure/law/circumstances. Things don’t ever appear to be like it really is. Those sleeping white kids in the back could have easily looked like doped-up kids that this Mexican pair was kidnapping, and of course, that’s probably what the border patrollers were thinking. It’s pretty poignant to note again that people, depending on where they lie on the hierarchy of human worth, can become victims or victimizers of other human lives. In this case, Santiago acted defensively and paranoically because he knows how it is when people with power decide to use it against/over people with no power. It’s almost like nothing else matters but what the powerful person set out to do anyway. Is there any way to prevent it or change their minds? No, and that’s probably why he decided to flee the situation instead of fighting for something he knew was a hopeless, losing battle. The cinematography for this story was comprised of vibrant colors, energetic almost hand-held camera style (voyeuristic), quick cuts, and loud music. In the desert, Amelia’s once festively red dress becomes a stark contrast to her dry and barren environment. What once was a carefully worn dress became a disheveled, torn pieces of junk on her body, symbolizing her inner turmoil and brokenness. There is nowhere to hide but at the same time, her dress isn’t bright enough to get help faster than it arrives.
4. Anyway, on to the weakest link, Rinko Kikuchi (who played Chieko), the Japanese deaf-mute hypersexual borderline psycho schoolgirl, who is only linked to the original story (of the rifle) through her father (Koji Yakusho, who was Nobu in Memoirs of a Geisha), who gave the rifle to a Moroccan man as a thank you gift for being a good guide to him. I felt that the story here should have been concentrated on Koji’s character since he was the stronger link to Morocco. It was a little suspicious that Chieko got so much screen time, even though I was captivated by her acting. I’m a little over the whole hypersexual portrayal of Japanese girls. Could she have possibly been a deaf-mute who channels her frustrations through other means other than from offering herself to every man she sees, inevitably leading to the downward spiral of her inability to come to terms with her mother’s suicide and fueling her self-destruction? I understand that the filmmaker here was trying to show that this completely out-casted and oppressed girl just wanted someone to love her, someone to show her that she was accepted (something that only her mother used to do for her) and decided to do this through her coming of age sexuality. I mean, it’s not that it DOESN’T work. It does. I just wanted to see something different. It was just kind of cheesy to keep seeing the cliché visuals of the horny Japanese schoolgirls who all wear skirts so short you can see the outline of their butt cheeks. The gratuitous shots of them changing in the locker room, talking about (not) getting laid, of Chieko changing into her shirt, her many crotch flashes, her total nude scene is a little more than enough. It’s worse that the camera moves in a voyeuristic way every time the Japanese girls exhibit something sexual. The camera follows and lingers on their bodies, sometimes not quick enough to catch the girls’ playful flirtations with the camera. This same story could have been filmed with the same using-her-sexuality-as-a-channel-to-release-her-anger-and-frustrations -at-a-disgusting-and-violent-world intent but the visual story would have been different if made by a woman. The Japanese girls would not have been enslaved by the objectification that comes from a male perspective. Well, who knows…we’re all so messed up now that who would know unless it actually happened. Anyway, I felt sorry for Chieko and her acting really took you into her world. The editing and cinematography was also awesome, especially in the nightclub scene when the viewer is allowed to wander in and out from her perspective of the silent nightclub experience where the visual sensory becomes completely heightened to the other clubbers’ perspectives of the heart-pounding auditory/visual experience. The juxtaposition of silence with noise, the pacing of the world outside with the world inside, really showed the viewers a small glimpse of what it meant to be Chieko, constantly misunderstood, constantly standing on the periphery of life, looking in but never being able to participate. Her one chance with a willing guy goes down the drain when her friend, who is also deaf-mute, ends up in his arms. Her story is truly sad and very well-developed. Another scene that was so visually stimulating was the scene before they entered the nightclub, when they were all taking recreational drugs at the park. It wasn’t too over the top (POV shots) like in Go, or Requiem for a Dream, but more subtle and realistic. But…what does she have to do with the Moroccan boys? Nothing, really. When it is later revealed that the cops came to ask her questions about her father’s rifle, it’s so anticlimactic and out of place that I don’t care about it anymore. I’d rather just watch a whole movie about Chieko instead.

I liked each individual stories for what they were. I didn’t see the linkage between them to be as necessary as some other hyperlink stories such as Amores Perros, Traffic, Snatch, etc. There were many parts that seemed contrived but they were balanced by very honest depictions of personal stories that are universal in nature.

In terms of race relations on a global scale, the film seems to be contrasting Brad and Cate’s privilege over the other characters, mainly, the Moroccans and the Mexicans, whose lives are somehow just not as valuable. The multitude of Mexicans caught trying to cross the border sitting in a truck, for example, to the multitudes of Moroccan villagers crowding around the rich Americans. Some argue what’s the point of casting Cate Blanchett if she’s dying the whole time and not really acting? It’s like casting a superstar only to kill her in the first five min of the film. I do realize there are higher expectations from star actors from the audience. In this case, I’m kind of glad that the “stars” didn’t take over the film. Everyone’s stories were just as interesting to follow. Each story had a different cinematographically approach. When Cate is dying in Morocco, it’s a more quiet, dark scene with a lot of internal turmoil juxtaposed with the insensitivity of the tour group outside. The two Moroccan boys were almost filmed to say that they were products of their environment – innocent and small, unable to get past their lives in the mountains. Amelia’s story revolves around relationships with her family and her duty to the kids and this is symbolized by a lot of heart-warming scenes which only ends up placing her in a cold and sterile immigration office where they ultimately tell her that she will be deported. Chieko’s story is not just a visual story but an auditory story as well. We can see her world through her sometimes, though usually we have the privilege of seeing the world how we see it. The fast paced, cutting edge shots of Tokyo suggest that these inhabitants are almost moving ahead of time itself – so fast that they don’t have the time to stop and take in the things around them.