{"id":129685,"date":"2024-06-04T17:29:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-04T21:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=129685"},"modified":"2024-06-04T18:18:24","modified_gmt":"2024-06-04T22:18:24","slug":"law-and-liberty-anthony-sacramone-reviews-the-new-book-film-and-faith-modern-cinema-and-the-struggle-to-believe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=129685","title":{"rendered":"(Law and Liberty) Anthony Sacramone reviews the new book “Film and Faith: Modern Cinema and the Struggle to Believe”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I, too, had dismissed No Country<\/em> as another affected, self-consciously \u201ccinematic\u201d Coen brothers\u2019 dead end, but Holloway\u2019s careful reading converted me. The mistake is to see No Country<\/em> as being about the bad guy. Instead, it\u2019s about a traditional Hollywood good guy, the local sheriff, Bell (Tommy Lee Jones): \u201ca kind of traditionalist conservative, \u2026 a lifetime lawman, a proud member of a line of lawmen.\u201d But when this old-fashioned guy is confronted with radical evil in the person of Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who possesses not \u201can inordinate attachment to some real good\u201d but a sadistic need to show everyone who crosses his path the utter worthlessness of their existence, Bell is lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why? The lawman is unable to contend with Chigurh\u2019s perverse brand of lawbreaking because he fears God has abandoned him and that \u201che may somehow be drawn into this evil.\u201d In the end, Bell \u201cquits\u201d the fight because a \u201clow estimate of himself arises from a vain aspiration to self-sufficiency.\u201d When you believe you\u2019re in a fight against the odds all by yourself, that you\u2019ve lost God as your backup, what else is there to do but turn tail and run? (Contrast this with Franz J\u00e4ggerst\u00e4tter\u2019s exemplary fortitude, ably explicated in Thomistic turns by Jennifer Frey in her essay on A Hidden Life<\/em>, a more-or-less true-life story of an Austrian farmer\u2019s steadfast resistance to pledging allegiance to Adolf Hitler.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I hope I\u2019ve conveyed, Film and Faith <\/em>is smart but never obtuse, entertaining but never frivolous, and thorough but never overstuffed. It will leave the reader, religious or not, with an enhanced critical vocabulary, better able to espy the spiritual depths even of those films that on first viewing appear to be thoroughly secular.<\/p>Read it all<\/a>.

Hollywood's shift from classic religious portrayals to exploring deeper, sometimes critical themes of faith reflects a changing societal engagement with spirituality in cinema.

On the harrowing of Hollywood with @amsacramone<\/a>https:\/\/t.co\/llwRGVIEb5<\/a><\/p>— Law & Liberty (@LawLiberty) May 31, 2024<\/a><\/blockquote>