Juno

Seen any good movies lately?

Susan and I don’t go out to see a lot of movies. There’s always something else that needs to be done, or so it seems. We’ve been known to be picky about what we see. Movies can cost a lot. But every once in a while, we get a sense about a certain movie, a sense that there’s something there worth taking in.

Like Juno, for instance.

Don’t get me wrong, Juno’s not a safe haven for Christian sensibilities. It’s laced with profanity and adult themes. It’s about a high school girl (Juno) who gets pregnant, decides she’s too immature to raise the baby, and seeks a couple who would adopt the child. There’s barely a hint of the Judeo-Christian worldview at most turns. Everything seems to be playing out in a postmodern, post-Christian setting. The Church is treated as irrelevant.

But there’s something there nonetheless. The characters, easily boxed and labeled early in the movie, become real as the movie progresses. As the drama unfolds and the conflict builds, it’s as if their true selves are revealed. Indeed, in some notable cases, they mature and develop. Juno’s dad comes off as a brusque, distant, judgmental type when Juno tells him she’s pregnant; later, he embraces Juno with something akin to what you and I might call hesed, that covenant love in the Old Testament that makes promises that bind us to others unconditionally. Juno’s stepmother is sensible and cold towards Juno in the beginning; later, she blooms in courage and protectiveness for her. Vanessa, the woman who is seeking to be the baby’s adopting mother, is revealed at first to be anxious, controlling, and fearful; but in one of the most tender scenes in the movie, she melts, pressing her hands and face up to Juno’s belly, to feel the baby moving. Vanessa becomes increasingly transformed into a woman of centeredness and strength.
But Juno herself goes through the most significant transformation. She grows from child to young woman. She discovers and affirms that the fetus has feet, is a live human being, and must not be aborted. She sorts out who is authentic and trustworthy because of their honesty, compassion, faithfulness, and courage. Juno faces the rejection and marginalization from many of her peers with her own courage.

Through it all these characters manifest something like what C.S.Lewis highlights in The Great Divorce. In this thin volume, surely one of the most brilliant works he ever wrote, Lewis shows people arriving in heaven from hell as ghosts. “Now that they were in the light, they were transparent. . . man-shaped stains in the brightness of that air.” But the longer beings remained in heaven, the more solid they became. They were transformed. They became who they were meant to be, real, in their glory.

That’s what God is up to in this life. God is making us real. We’re meant to be solid selves, not whispy images. We are meant to be in all our glory, which is borrowed, of course, from Jesus Himself. Juno has the right idea. Jesus has the right stuff to make it happen.

I am thinking that watching movies, like reading books, is the exactly right setting to call us into prayer. To prompt us to pray for God to work what is good and right in what we are seeing and hearing in our lives as well. Seen any good movies lately?