Indiana Jones
Gareth Higgins on INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY
Fifteen years ago a massive action movie was released with a bad guy dead set on obtaining Bolivian water rights. I was stunned - it wasn’t only a refreshing change from the obsessive aspirations to total world domination usually held by blockbuster villains, but something that we could imagine actually happening. The movie was Quantum of Solace, popularly considered to be the weakest of the Daniel Craig James Bond films, but I thought it was tremendous. It was an action movie in the real world, with real pain and set pieces that didn’t depend on ridiculous gadgets or physically impossible human movements (at least some of the time). The sense that James Bond is not only an employee doing a job, but a human being grieving the death of a loved one, was palpable. The female lead (Olga Kurylenko) held overwhelming suffering too; and the movie did not reduce her to or portray her as a sex object. Most unusually, for a Bond film, the death of the villain was not played for spectacle or laughs - instead, Mathieu Amalric’s end happened off-screen, was terrifyingly lonely, and its manner so horrific as to provoke at least some of the audience to consider how much life really matters, and that no one deserves vengeance.
Of course the movie didn’t exactly spark a cultural conversation about how popular entertainment can both affirm or challenge the norms of the world in which we live, and point out something important to the audience about who and what we truly value. Despite its disappearance from the community radar, for me Quantum of Solace has been a gold standard of the rare blockbuster storytelling that entertains and provokes, and doesn’t sacrifice realism (of a kind) or meaning for thrills.
It is a delightful surprise, then, to discover that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the fifth and final chapter in the series about the academic archaeologist who moonlights as an adventurer (or vice versa), has inherited Quantum’s mantle. Given that the character of Indiana Jones was explicitly influenced by James Bond, this is only natural; and given the way movies are talked about most of the time, the fact that the public and critical response to the film has been muted is predictable too. I didn't just love the experience of watching Dial of Destiny (even more the second time), I think it really does try to say something meaningful, and succeeds both on its own terms (largely) and compared with other similar films (enormously).
We begin with a flashback to Jones and his colleague Basil Shaw (the never anything short of believable Toby Jones) seeking to liberate an artifact from Nazi looters at the end of the war. Many have commented on how the CGI de-aging of Harrison Ford’s face, technology still not yet perfected, is distracting; but the location, art direction, pacing and style of the sequence are so good that it shouldn’t matter. More than that, the sheer bleakness of the Nazi cult and the cruelty of its soldiers permeates the film; something that previous Indy installments never quite seemed to capture, too often using Hitler’s stooges as punchlines. (Although there is one absolutely fantastic joke about the Third Reich and time travel, the comprehensibility of which depends on the audience’s knowledge of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret; it adds to the verisimilitude of the whole film by being spoken by a character who probably went to see it on Broadway for all the wrong reasons. The elegant and completely un-condescending script is co-written by Mangold with Jez & John-Henry Butterworth and David Koepp. Whichever one of them came up with it deserves a prize for that joke alone.)
The flashback’s culminating action scene - a fight on top of a train - is brilliantly staged by director James Mangold, stepping into Steven Spielberg’s shoes. Mangold always shows us movement and space that feel connected to each other; this is one of the most entertaining action films partly because it doesn’t patronize the audience with things that planes, trains, and automobiles can’t actually do (apart from the time travel bit). And we really feel the deaths. The killing of good guys is horrible, whether at a college or at sea; but even the deaths of the bad guys are not intended humorously, as was the case in previous episodes. From Nazis being picked off by an out of control machine gun to a brute henchman drowning at the hands of a plucky teenage sidekick, these ends are ugly. Don’t get me wrong, Dial of Destiny doesn’t exactly advocate nonviolence or the dignity of all human beings; but it does at least not play killing for catharsis.
Death and the meaning of death shadows the entire film, and this is where it has the most to say. It’s clear from the first scene after the flashback where we find Jones in 1969, depressed and unsober in a messy apartment, that our hero is drowning. He’s separated from Marion, his feisty equal, their shared wound over the combat death of their son having broken the marriage - there is a lot of death in Indiana Jones movies, but this is the first time we’ve seen it lead to grief. That makes it the most emotionally truthful of the series - indeed it’s a bit joyless when compared to the previous installments (there’s no Ke Huy Quan/Short Round injecting the proceedings with delighted encouragement or Denholm Elliot’s Marcus Brody to stumble around like Mr Bean, no Sean Connery shooing away seabirds with an umbrella). But the joylessness here is part of the point, for wouldn’t the loss of a child inevitably be accompanied by a lack of joy, at least for a while? It’s also what makes the movie honest: humans are unbelievably complex - we can be permeated by monumental pain and still find the capacity to get out of bed in the morning and teach a class, we can feel totally self-absorbed by our trauma and yet still connect with friends. And as Mangold’s movie has it nations have a similar complexity - a ticker tape parade for the returning Apollo 11 astronauts can bump into an antiwar march while Nixon’s CIA collaborates with Nazis. “Where doesn’t it hurt?” asks one of the characters, in the movie’s most affecting scene; the answer is, effectively, almost nowhere. But that almost is a start - our hearts can feel broken, but we are still alive to feel the brokenness; our national myths and sense of certainty can be shaken, but if those myths were based on a series of events in which one group of people violently dominated another, maybe they weren’t worth saving anyway.
“We’re trying to save history,” says Indy; but history is explicitly defined later in the movie as a series of violent events; one character refers to history as “a series of losses”. The myth of a just war giving way to a just peace is nastily and truthfully pierced by Mads Mikkelsen’s villain, asking a Black room service attendant (Alton Fitzgerald White) and WWII veteran, whose job might be seen as only a couple of steps evolved beyond indentured servitude, if he is enjoying the spoils of the victory he helped achieve. America here is a land that can’t pretend to be safe or good, but only makeable; it’s a place that will welcome Sallah (the delicious John Rhys-Davies) as an exile, but then made him exchange the life of a vibrant middle class excavator in Cairo for that of a taxi driver in a too-small apartment in a New York City. Indy may have gotten Sallah and his family out of Egypt during the war, but Sallah didn’t land on his feet.
All this adds up to a movie of action, adventure, and strength in which the overwhelming theme is how vulnerability is universal, and the only antidote to loss and fear is love. I’m not kidding - Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny touched me deeply; I’d watch it a third time just for the way it portrays old men and women in need of each other, and one young woman trying to figure out her purpose. Sallah is vulnerable to racism and the impact of having to begun again on the first rung, Marion is vulnerable to the loss of her son and the collapse of her husband, Basil is vulnerable to obsession with an idea, and Basil’s daughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) is vulnerable to the temptations of money and fame that have unfittingly occupied the space left by the loss of her father.
Ford takes the role as seriously as his John Book in Witness or Richard Kimble in The Fugitive, men who need to think on their feet, and find themselves targeted by systems bigger than they imagined; the whole cast is pitch perfect, and Mangold’s facility for directing people just talking (I’ve never forgotten his 1995 debut Heavy) is as keen as his action chops . It’s as classically textured as Casablanca (a city literally name-checked here); the photography is beautiful; the chases exciting, and there’s a genuine sense of menace.
But to reiterate - it’s not just a marvelous cinematic entertainment, but a large-scale action movie that says something worth listening to. We are now, all of us, living experiences that in the future will be memories. We will reminisce about the selves we are on this very day, and we get to choose how we might feel in the future by what we do now. I look back on six year old me seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark and being thrilled, nine year old me seeing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and being scared, fourteen year old me seeing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and being delighted, thirty-three year old me seeing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and being pleasantly surprised. Now I’m forty-eight, and what matters most about my memories of those movies is how the purposes and relationships within them make me think about what kind of life I feel called to. All of those purposes and relationships find their resolution in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, where a heroic character shows his vulnerability, believing that his life is ending with tragedy overwhelming his successes; only permanent brokenness to look forward to. Something intervenes, as it always does. And he gets to choose his response. We end with the tender holding of grief, the possibility of a new normal, and a perfect visual joke. It’s so strange to find myself saying it, but the final scene of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a series in which the supernatural has been taken for granted, is both the most magical, and the most real.
Kathleen Norris’ THREE THINGS
I’ve been thinking about the spiritual practice of lectio divina or holy reading, and a delightful book, The White Cat and the Monk, by Jo Ellen Bogart. It’s a retelling of a 9th century poem, “Pangur Ban,” an Irish Benedictine’s homage to his cat. In the 20th century it was discovered in the margins of a manuscript at Germany’s Reichenau Abbey. Such “extra” writing was common in the medieval era, as vellum was expensive and scarce. In the story the monk reflects that as the cat goes about hunting mice, he is also on the hunt, searching for meaning in the scriptures. The illustrations are in shades of black and grey, with the cat prowling the monastery corridors until it sees a pale light coming from the monk’s room where he is reading by candlelight. Suddenly, in a two-page spread, we are treated to the glories of an illuminated manuscript, with images of the cat chasing mice, a rabbit blowing a trumpet, the monk riding on a letter shaped like a dragon. It’s a delightful scene, and makes me ponder what the image says to us about lectio. It can transport us back to our pre-literate minds, and awaken our appreciation not only for words but for the world around us, which includes little white cats.
I’m thinking about a remarkable book that epitomizes the fruits of lectio, Pauline Matarasso’s Clothed in Language. It’s full of pithy provocations: “All the beauty of the psalms is of God, the anger and the violence are ours. We offer both with Christ” she adds, “since the sacrifice of praise and the sin offering are now made one in him.” She admits that while “The infant Christ is forever being born in me, unheralded, unexpected, undeserved,…always there is the old Adam, refusing to give place; a creature of habit, ensconced, as heavy-shouldered as a nightclub bouncer.” As someone steeped in the language of poetry I revel in Matarasso’s take on the “in-between language” of Scripture. “Historians shy away from it,” she writes, “and the Enlightenment Zeitgeist finds it risible…Scripture scholars pick at it, professional theologians favor an abstruse dialect, which few outsiders understand, The in-between language survives, but is rarely found in the mainstream. It helps to be fluent in it if we wish to recognize the Spirit at work in our lives, surprising us at every turn.”
And I’m thinking about how lectio enhances our appreciation of the Bible. Reflecting on Luke 22, a passage in which in which Jesus tells Peter he has prayed that his faith will not fail, Matarasso writes, ““Failure, I suspect, does not even exist in the mind of God, since the word that goes out from his mouth never returns empty.” Her advice is that we “learn to love our failures, that they too may find their place in the will of God.” Amen.