Mawwige... sorry, having a Princess Bride moment there...
Ahem. Let me start again...
On Sunday evening I finally got around to watching Elizabethtown - the latest movie from writer/director Cameron Crowe, about a guy who goes to the aforementioned town after his father passes away and ends up getting involved with a pretty strange girl. I won't recommend the film to anyone who does not think Crowe is a writing genius. I think I might even like this film better than Almost Famous but not quite as much as Jerry Maguire, which had football ;)
Afterwards, as I was dissecting the film in my mind, I began to realize two things - the quintessential element that all love stories share together, and, the fact that all love stories are about God - but especially this one.
There are spoilers below, so if you haven't seen this film, stop reading now.
Elizabethtown begins with Orlando Bloom talking about failure versus fiasco. He is just about to be fired because the shoe he designed has been recalled at a cost of nearly 1 Billion Dollars to his company. In a funny moment, Alec Baldwin takes Bloom around the headquarters and shows him all the people that will be losing their jobs because of him. He is forced to give an interview with a magazine in which he takes the blame for the entire thing. Orlando returns to his apartment and prepares to kill himself, but at the last second his phone rings and his sister tells him that his father has died unexpectedly of a heart attack and that the family needs him to go and claim the body.
Right off the bat, we are introduced to a character who is a complete failure. Everything he has strived to achieve has fallen flat on its face. He is about to be ostracized and shown to the world for the fool that he is. Orlando, however, is given a second chance. He heads to Elizabethtown to get his father's body.
On the flight there, he meets Claire (Kirsten Dunst). We're immediately certain that Claire is odd. She insists on drawing Orlando a map to Elizabethtown on the back of a napkin and follows him through the airport yelling directions at him. He immediately gets lost on his way to Elizabethtown anyway.
There are rifts between different sides of the family that Orlando's father was never able to fix. The rift continues after his death. Orlando tries to fit in, but he doesn't really know anyone and he's certain they don't really know him. Orlando returns to Louisville that night and finds himself calling Claire. They end up talking all night long about this, that, and the other.
To make a long story short, Orlando gets Claire. The rift gets healed. And everyone comes out happy in the end - bittersweet, to use Ariel's terms.
Orlando is a failure who has just caused everyone a great deal of grief through his error (never identified in the movie by the way) who somehow finds someone who loves him despite the fact that he is a failure and maybe even because of it and this love of hers indirectly heals all of the other relationships in the movie. Given choice after choice after choice, Orlando always ends up choosing Claire and she is always there for him. Now, where have I heard that before?
The thing is, all love stories work on this same premise. In a normal action story, the hero's greatness is directly compared to the villian's villiany. The more serious the evil, the greater the good. We can contrast, for instance, Frodo's sacrifice to deliver the ring into the heart of a volcano vs. the utter darkness that is Mordor. The same holds true for the love story. We contrast how much we believe the love story with how unlikely it is that it would ever happen. A sea captain and a novice nun and seven children? Yeah, right. A vagabond cardshark and the engaged daughter of an heiress on board a sinking cruiseship? Who are you kidding? A rebel princess and a mercenary smuggler? Suuuuurrrrreeeeee. The greater the odds against them, the stronger the love story. Or to put it more simply; No conflict, no story.
Don't you see where I'm going with this? The Greatest love story of them all - a flawed, sinning people and the ultimate creator of everything? We are not worthy and yet we are loved all the same. The strength of our love is matched intently by all the terrible things that try to get between us - the enemy and his minions. But just like in the movies, we should know that God will never leave us, that God will never tire of us, that God will always be there for us whenever we turn to Him. He is the ultimate in love. He is love itself.
3 comments:
I believe I used the EXACT same phrase as a blog post title way back when. Great minds think alike.
Elizabethtown was a good flick. I like it better than Jerry Maguire (and that's because of the Tom Cruise thing). When I mentioned it to my class about watching it for our Christian themes in film, however, they groaned. And that was the GIRLS.
Good stuff, bro.
Elizabethtown is a great movie. They filmed it in Louisville near the actual town of Elizabethtown (beside Fort Knox where I did my Army thing).
I love to hear others compare the great love stories to the love God has for us. You are right on brother! I wrote a post once about how every movie has the same storyline: boy meets girl, tragedy, villain, happily ever after. That is the story God wrote on our hears when he created man. Also, God loves to come through. I could go on and on........Loved your post!
If you think about it, our own love lives follow this same formula. How many people sit down and objectively fall in love with the person that is just perfect for them? None. Which means that there is an element of the impossible in every single relationship. That's probably why we identify with romance stories so much, because they recreate that authentic feeling of impossibility that we feel when we love someone ourselves.
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