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Can a Christian film use the "f" word? Well, that's one question. But it begs another: what, exactly, is a Christian film? By my lights, it has become all too fashionable for sophisticated Christians to sneer at Christian artistic efforts. And yet, just between us evangelical chickens: how have things gotten to where reasonable folks will sneer at the mere mention of the phrase "Christian art," as if the juxtaposition of the words were somehow inherently cackle-inducing?
The movie that prompts these questions is To End All Wars, a powerful film that tells the absolutely harrowing tale of a group of Allied POWs conscripted by the Japanese to build the Burma-Siam railway during World War II. Based on a true story told by Ernest Gordon in his book, In the Valley of the Kwai, this movie is bloody, violent, and profound, portraying a raw, full-throated Christianity of the sort that hasn't been much in evidence since, say, Dostoesvsky. It is emphatically not the cinematic equivalent of a Thomas Kinkade painting.
As the story goes, Gordon, played with an inner luminosity by Ciarán McMenamin, is a 24-year-old captain of the 93rd Battalion of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, a decidedly Scottish outfit. Their commander is Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Mclean, played by the extraordinary James Cosmo. In anything Cosmo does he practically bursts out of the screen into a theater near you. He is the sort of sixtysomething tough- guy who might eat Jack Palance and Sean Connery for breakfast with kippers.
When Mclean and the 93rd are captured, they quickly realize that their Japanese captors will accord the Geneva Convention the same respect they accord Marquis of Queensbury Rules. When Major Ian Campbell (Robert Carlyle) receives a brutal beating, Mclean explodes in protest and is promptly brutalized himself. Afterward, the bleeding Mclean croaks his plan to his "good boys": they will make their escape as soon as he has healed. But some weeks later, after another impolitic outburst, the great man is killed by his captors, and the futility of escape from this isolated hell becomes quite clear.
Later, Gordon himself is savagely beaten for forgetting to bow to a guard, and is sent to the prison "hospital," known as the Death House, a miserable roach motel wherefrom none return. But a Christian POW, Dusty Miller (Mark Strong), attends to Gordon, giving him his own meager rations and quite miraculously saving his life. Soon thereafter one of the other POWs, knowing Gordon had planned to become a teacher, asks him about the meaning of all their sufferings. Gordon, still smarting from his time in the Death House, isn't interested in answering philosophical questions just yet. But Miller prods him to engage the man, to try answering these questions. "When a man loses hope," says Miller, "he dies."
So Gordon decides to start what he calls a jungle university. There, amid the ghastly stench of the Death House, where the Japanese will not bother them, Gordon kindles hope and life. He begins to teach a few willing pupils, starting with Plato's idea of justice. It is at once completely absurd and quintessentially, achingly human, this handful of broken POWs stirring in their tomb, in their Platonic cave, if you will. But they will not stay here for long studying the shadows within, for Sunday is a-comin', if I may mix Platonic and Christian metaphors (it's been done before). The pathetic group of them there inevitably evoke various archetypal images, from the Fiat Lux of Genesis to the light coming into the world in John's Gospel to Jesus' resurrection. In this cradle and crucible, meaning meets meaninglessness and throttles it, and Life says to Death, be thou removed.
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