Revival - a review

A friend, whose opinions I tend to share, put me on to the 2017 movie Revival, available on Roku. It is the story of a Southern Baptist preacher in rural Arkansas who is torn between his conviction that homosexuality is an unforgivable sin and his attraction for a drifter who comes to his church one day looking for food and shelter.

Read no further until you've seen the film.  I can't do a decent review without revealing the ending.

Because the topic matter concerns the intersection of religion and homosexuality, it was a given that I would be strongly drawn in by the story.

And right up to the ending, I assumed, as the plot unfolded, that this would be just another tale of the imbecility of homophobic evangelical bigotry and I would be writing a critical review of the film, listing predictability as its main weakness.

When the ending turned out to be anything but predictable, I was blown away. I then had to take a bit of time to consider why it left such a bad taste in my mouth.

At first I concluded that what I expected was that the gay preacher would see the light and choose love and affection over the rigidity of evangelical homophobia. And the fact that the bad guys won this one pissed me off.

But that thought gave way to the conviction that the story simply went off the track.  The preacher had displayed nothing but decency and sincerity up to this point.  Why would he act so out of character?

And that thought then gave way to the argument in my head that his self-loathing, clearly the motivation for his actions at the end, was sufficiently intense to explain the ending after all.

Add to this act of murder the actions of the minor characters, the blood lust of Trevor, the incestuous thoughts of Jimmy, the greed and duplicity of the rival pastor in the town, and you've got, if not an actual horror film, a depiction of Christian folk filled with sin and depravity.

The weakness of Roman Catholicism, Protestants are wont to say, is that the clergy have too much power: they can forgive the worst of sins in the confessional. The weakness of Judaism, by contrast, is that there is little emphasis on doctrine or belief; what counts is going through the motions. When evangelical Protestants turn the focus on themselves, their failure to live up to the impossible demands of Sermon-on-the-Mount morality means that the overwhelming majority of them are caught in an endless cycle of sin and imperfection. And a moral code in which sexual acts are right up there with murder and deceit, if not out ahead in importance.  Add to that the fact that the church is made up of a large number of emotion-junkies, people who "feel the spirit" and confuse the thrill with religious sincerity.

Watching a community of evangelicals display these sins to an almost exaggerated degree makes you question why anyone should be attracted to religion. Was this the real goal of the filmmaker?

If so, maybe I need to give the film a much higher grade than a B-minus.  And the acting is first rate.

And if in the end I still have a bone I have to pick, it is with the book, not the movie version of the story.

High on a hill it calls to me

From time to time yet another article or video calls for attention to the city of San Francisco.  A video just showed up yesterday, and I recommend it to all lovers of what Bay Area locals know simply as "the city,"  twenty minutes of historical trivia almost guaranteed to fascinate and entertain.

The city is full of flaws which reflect the woes of the country at large.  It's got a nimby problem and it's full of homeless people who shit wherever they can because we have an aversion to providing public toilets out of concern they will be used by the many drug addicts. It has been colonized by the wealthy from Silicon Valley who decided it was more fun to live where the action is rather than stay in Palo Alto/Mountain View/Menlo Park and, just like those towns, it has become too expensive for most of the kids who grow up there to inherit their parents' homes and live happily ever after.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't continue to inspire passionate love and affection for the place. We may not sing San Francisco with quite the same enthusiasm as Jeanette MacDonald once did, but if you've been to a performance at the Castro Theater and felt the thrill of hearing it on the Wurlitzer Hope-Jones organ as it is being raised and lowered from center-stage through the floor at the start and at the end of performances, you can still find it in there somewhere.

I started my independent adult life in San Francisco back when you wore a flower in your hair in the Haight/Ashbury days, and despite my twenty-four years in Japan and my embrace of the San Francisco diaspora with my purchase of a house in Berkeley, across the bridge, when people in Germany or Japan or other places around the U.S. identify me as a San Franciscan, I wouldn't dream of correcting them.

Have a look and a listen to Daniel Steiner's history of the growth of The City.  You can make a game of picking out the several factual errors and bloopers - the commenters will fill you in.  It is a great way to get a booster shot for the virus that is disillusionment with one of the world's greatest places to visit.

Or call home.

Remembering my mother on her 110th birthday

My mother was born 110 years ago today (March 25) at a Midwifery Institute in Celle, Germany. It was the middle of the First World War and her father was out of the picture. I grew up with rumors of what happened to him - we knew he was still alive and raising a.second family - but details were sparse. All we knew is that Bertha Rühmann, whom I knew as Grossmutter, was effectively a single parent of twenty who had no viable means of raising a child. 

One of Bertha's sisters, Johanne, was married to a man named Paul Gundelach and living in his home town of Braunschweig. Johanne had just had a child as well, Paul Jr., about a month before my mother was born, and took my mother in.  Living in a country which has just lost a World War was a challenge, but the Gundelachs lived on a farm and had food to eat.  Her daughter now cared for, Bertha got a job as a stewardess on the Hamburg-Amerika Steamship Line and traveled the world.

Sometime in the next eight years Paul and Johanne were able to make a deal with an uncle named Henry Aust who had emigrated to America some years before to sponsor them as indentured servants and in 1923 Paul finally fulfilled a vow he had made to himself watching soldiers being blown to bits in Russia. He and his wife, Johanne, their son Paul Jr. and their niece/adopted daughter, climbed aboard the good ship Bayern in Hamburg and sailed away to a new life in America, landing in New York on October 26, 1923 and making their way to Torrington, Connecticut, where Henry Aust called home.

Paul and Johanne Gundelach legally adopted my mother - she had come across the ocean as Klara Schultheis, her original birth name - and had two more children, Carl (written American-style, with a C) and Rose (a name which worked equally well in both German and English). That adoption notwithstanding, four years later, Grossmutter's ship docked in New York and she made her way to Torrington, where she decided she had no choice but to stay, take my mother back, and live happily ever after in America.

Carl and his wife had two children, eventually, and Rose and her husband had three, giving me a bunch of cousins to grow up with on my mother's side of the family, to match the four I had on my father's side. The families remained close and it wasn't long before Johanne and Paul Gundelach became known by everybody in the family and far beyond as Mutti and Vati - the German equivalent of mommy and daddy.

Gundelach family gathering circa 1955
back row first four heads: Uncle Paul, My father, Uncle Carl, me
next row in, from left: Aunt Rose, Vati, Mutti, Klärchen (my mother), Aunt Connie, Grossmutter, Uncle Pete (Grossmutter's third husband)
front row: three kids: cousin Nancy (Uncle Carl/Aunt Connie's daughter); my sister Karen,  cousin Jimmy, Nancy's brother

Mutti and Vati continued to refer to my mother as their daughter.  They called her Klärchen, as they had when she was a little girl.  I often reflected on the fact that I had not the normal two, but three, sets of grandparents - and with them all the extra aunts, uncles and cousins. We have not kept in close contact, but the connection among the few survivors are still there.  My sister, the tallest of the three kids in front of my mother, turns 80 this year and is a great-grandmother.

My mother died of a heart attack at the young age of 60. Today she would be 110, and I am acutely aware she has been gone for a full half century.

As the years go by, my fantasy of finding a time machine only grows stronger.  If I could go back in time, I would want to get my mother out of bed and to a doctor rather than take a pill and see how she felt in the morning - a decision which was to be her last.  I'd also enjoy getting to know her as a woman twenty-five years younger than me.

All the questions I would bug her with.

So many questions.

Happy Birthday, Mom.