It's Only October!

Yes, Halloween is still a week away. I haven't got my leaves raked up. We haven't even gone below freezing yet. And the World Series is just starting. So the surprise is that I have already seen three (yes, 3!) excellent Academy Award-level movies. At this rate we may be in line for one of the best and deepest Oscar races in a while. I saw two of these over the weekend to add to Michael Clayton from last week.

First is Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck's directorial debut starring his brother Casey along with Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, and Michelle Monaghan. It is a dark, challenging movie. Casey underplays his character knowing there is a back-story there that we'll never know. Harris and Freeman are powerful presences on the screen in contrast to Affleck's character but the three are essential in their chemistry.

It is a movie of deep and interesting moral challenge. I love movies that present moral ambiguity and ethical dilemmas. They make you think by answering easy questions with uncertain answers and letting the tough questions lead to inevitably impossible choices. I watched the eyes of all the characters and you could see them struggling with the certainty of what they are doing- maybe. The wisdom of age pitted against the self-righteousness of youth and neither are as cut and dried as you would like them to be. You will discuss this one for a while.

The other movie was Sean Penn's directing of the Jon Krakauer book, Into the Wild. It is the tragedy (no, not a spoiler) of Chris McCandless who ends up living in a bus in Alaska and how he got there. Emile Hirsch owns this movie lock, stock, and barrel. He is magnificent in the joyful innocence of a late 20th Century Thoreau, a Castaway without need of a desert island soccer ball. He has apples, moose, and his own demons.

Penn's direction is deliberate and utilizes every inch of the screen with the scenery of Alaska (and other places on the way) capped by the full human dimensions of Hirsch/McCandless. When it is all over you know you have been touched by McCandless himself and what he offered to every one but himself. You have been enriched- but the world has lost a great deal. The loss of any one individual like McCandless is a great loss. All the people who are left behind hurt, with no opportunity for forgiveness or relationships repaired and lived out.

It will take some incredible acting to overcome Hirsch's in this movie. But then I am a sucker for this kind of movie. It is about personal pilgrimage. It reminds me of how fortunate most of us are to live these pilgrimages and survive them. And how dangerous they can be. Enter these wild places of the soul and you will not come back the same. But be prepared, wild places of the soul are like any wilderness, you must be prepared. They can catch you unaware.

It will be an incredible season ahead if this is just the beginning! Wow, I can hardly wait.