To See and Be Seen

This article appears in the February 2018 issue of Sojourners. To subscribe, click here .

2017 WAS A YEAR of vulnerability at the movies, beginning with the Best Picture Oscar going to Moonlight, a film about the potential to heal broken masculinity through male tenderness, and ending with real life stories of how some men abuse power and all men need to take responsibility for changing masculine cultures of domination. Here are some of the films that meant the most to me this year and help to illuminate that onscreen journey.

First there was Endless Poetry, the 88-year-old Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s biographical wonder, about a mother’s love, a father’s distance, an artist’s emergence, and the wisdom of looking back and letting go.

Then, Patti Cake$, where the future of America is bright, embodied by a white working-class woman who makes hip-hop out of her struggles, an Indian immigrant so selfless that Patti Cake$’s success is what makes him happy, and an African-American street prophet raging against the machine, each falling into a community where flaws are loved.

Mother! was the most controversial film of the year: Before truth sets us free, it sometimes hurts. A lament for mistreating the Earth, which by dramatizing the burden of being the target of misogyny seeks to honor all women.

Just such a target is beautifully unfolded in my favorite performance of the year, Sally Hawkins as Maudie, a Canadian artist of great soul and rigor, whose primitivist work allied itself to a wounded marriage.

The obstacles to getting by, and the absurd lives of those who face none, are keenly felt in Beatriz at Dinner, a film in which Salma Hayek’s working-class massage therapist and John Lithgow’s money monster spar, making the point that killing is easy, but healing is hard. Why not try healing?

Healing is indeed hard, or at least takes time. The journey is no more beautifully expressed than in A Ghost Story, in which a lost spirit takes centuries to make peace with himself.

At least another 20 movies elevated or challenged me to live better this past year—among them

Dunkirk, Okja, War for the Planet of the Apes, The Lost City of Z, Brigsby Bear, and The Big Sick. But I’ll end with the film I most want you to see. It’s a piece of crafted nonfiction about an elderly artist-activist and her young friend embarked on a similar path, called Faces Places. It invites everyone to do just one thing: Slow down when we are looking—at each other, at the world, at ourselves. Behind our vulnerability, there are divine secrets.