Culture Watch

The Big One is a biting, funny, and sometimes odd combination of road film, populist rant, stand-up comedy, and the away-from-home video your quirky, know-it-all uncle might make if someone gave him the equipment and enough frequent flyer miles.

The premise is simple enough: Filmmaker Michael Moore (of Roger and Me fame) takes a video crew along on the promotional tour for his book Downsize This! (Crown Publishing, 1996). See Moore eat bad fast food. (Yuck.) See Moore commiserate with laid-off workers. (Poignant.) See Moore sing Bob Dylan and encounter an ex-convict who used to take reservations for TWA from in prison. (Scary!) See Moore visit various corporate headquarters in search of a CEO who will talk on camera about exactly why record profits seem to lead to employee lay-offs. (Can you say "No comment"?)

While Moore is not troubled by giving himself lots of camera time, the important thing is that he puts his ego (and money, and skill) in the service of what he believes. With profits from Roger and Me (the all-time highest grossing non-concert documentary), he set up the Center for Alternative Media, a foundation that has given funding to more than 40 independent filmmakers as well as social action and service groups. Miramax, distributor of The Big One, is giving half of all profits from this film to groups and scholarship funds that Moore supports in Flint, Michigan.

The day Joseph Cardinal Bernardin was buried, I was representing the U.S. Bishops Conference in South Africa. I deeply regretted missing the funeral of a bishop who had become a mentor and friend. As we met with leaders of church and government in South Africa, it sometimes seemed like Chicago. So many shared their remembrances of Cardinal Bernardin and their sense of loss. How could someone touch so many so far away?

Bernardin, the PBS documentary produced by Frank Frost and Martin Doblmeier, helps answer that question. In an age when ecclesial leaders face so many doubts and challenges, Cardinal Bernardin opened hearts and minds by the way he lived and died, served and led. Most people know him for his dignified response to false charges of sexual misconduct and for the faithful way he lived with and died from cancer. This production places both these struggles in a broader and deeper context of personal faith and public ministry.

This is not an easy task. The producers had no special access or final interview. But they have pulled together from photos, news clips, and interviews an hourlong biography that is admiring and accurate, rich in detail, and sweeping in its coverage of Cardinal Bernardin’s life and ministry.

The program initially focuses on his roots—he was raised in the American South by a hard-working Italian immigrant widow. It follows the young priest as he was shaped by Vatican II and in turn helped shape the U.S. Bishops Conference into a new instrument of collegiality and public witness. It documents how his leadership was shaken and formed by the racial traumas of the ’60s and the abortion debate of the ’70s. It reports how Bernardin led the American bishops to challenge U.S. policy on nuclear arms. The producers address, but do not dwell on, the difficulties he faced when his actions in the 1976 presidential campaign led to accusations of political partisanship and the pain resulting from closing Chicago parishes and schools.

Rough hands gripped mine. I stared down, uncomfortable, at the yellow and silver Formica table. "Tat nupal," the voices began, "tey tinemi tic ne ylhuicatl." In a run-down tract house in the weedy suburbs of Washington, D.C., five Salvadoran refugees began their evening blessing over our meal. "Our Creator in heaven," they pray in Nahuat, one of the indigenous languages of El Salvador. As a poet in a time when languages are being lost at a rate equivalent to the rain forest, I clung to the edges of the words, the narrowness of their sound, their rhythm like wind in high trees, never expecting to hear them again.

John Sayles’ newest film, Men With Guns, not only includes dialogue in Nahuat, but in Tzotzil, Maya, and Kuna, as well as Spanish and English. "Language is one of the main gaps between people," Sayles says about his characters. "If everyone was speaking English, the story wouldn’t make as much sense." (The subtitles, by the way, are clear and excellent.)

In his understated way, Sayles’ movie mission is about making sense. He does so not in a rational, superficial, or always socially recognizable way, but on a very human and spiritual level, digging at the question of how to shore up faith and uncover meaning in daily life.

Sayles characteristically uses a guide, an outsider, someone who leads the viewer through self-discovery in the story. In The Brother From Another Planet (1984), the guide is a black mute extraterrestrial who beams down in Harlem; in Matewan (1987), a union organizer; in The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), a young girl. In Men With Guns, our "escort" is Humberto Fuentes (Argentinean actor Federico Luppi), a wealthy doctor approaching retirement who has never paid any attention to the political realities of his unspecified country. He considers his greatest achievement to be his participation in an international health program in which he trained students to work as doctors in the poorest villages.