It will come as no surprise that I wait with anticipation for any “God” movie that rolls out to the video store, and The Shack was another one of those. I had read the blurb: a man who was cruelly beaten by his father as a child comes to learn to live with his past in some shack in the forest where odd, magical people – perhaps divine - help him through his trials. Ah, I thought, probably saccharine and filled with clichés, but what the heck. I love miracles and the promise of salvation. So this weekend, when at last the video made it to our little backwater here, I rented it. What came out in the first minutes of the movie were surprising and not a little upsetting.
I will give it away, as the nastiness is done within the first part of the movie: the father of our hero as a child, an Irish-American drunk, did indeed beat this poor child and his mother, but there is much, much more. Frustrated with his inability to protect his mother, the young boy pours strychnine into his father’s bottles of whiskey. The father dies, but there is no trial or investigation that we know about. Instead, the movie quickly transports us to the present, where the boy has become a man with a loving wife and three children – one a loveable little girl of seven. The man, “Dad,” still suffers from nightmares, but his wife understands and comforts him. He is apparently able to live a good life otherwise.
And so we are brought to Dad and his children – sans wife, who must work – going on a camping trip. They come to a beautiful lake surrounded by mountains in a crowded campsite, and all is fine. At one point, the two older children go out in the canoe while Dad stays with the youngest. Dad calls to the children in the canoe to come in, and the older daughter stands to give him a wave. This capsizes the canoe, and the boy suffers a hit on the head and is trapped, drowning, beneath the canoe. Dad must swim out to save him and bring him back, pumping his chest on the dock to make him breath as everyone in the camp watches. The boy is saved, but what then of the little girl? She has mysteriously disappeared. Searching does no good, so the police are called. In time, the police discover that the little girl has been kidnapped by a crazed wilderness man who has struck before. The hounds trace him to a shack, where they find the torn dress and blood of the little girl. She is never found, but presumed dead – raped and killed by the crazy man. This comes as a horrible shock to the viewer, amidst all that loving-family stuff, never mind to the mom and dad and remaining children in the movie. It is the worst fear of a father made real.
Months later, we find Dad clearing the driveway in a late-winter blizzard. His life and that of his family is a mess, the remaining girl tortured by her fault in the episode, the wife alienated, the son distant. As Dad haphazardly clears the driveway, he checks the mailbox to discover a typed note from “Papa”, what his little girl had called God. Papa is inviting Dad back to the shack.
After some twists and turns, Dad goes to the shack, almost getting hit by a semi because of his distraction (this is relevant, but I will not say why). He finds the shack as before, broken and littered, the blood of his little girl still staining the floor. He sinks into despair until a young Semitic-looking man comes strolling by with an arm of fire wood. “Come with me to our cabin and we’ll have a nice fire” he says, oblivious to the Dad’s pain and weirdness of the situation. Dad follows – and walks into a summertime paradise where the cabin is beautiful and perfect. There he meets the ‘father’ of the young man – an elderly black woman – and their associate, Syria – a woman whose name means “The wind.” And there we have it: the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. We are now ready for the man’s healing.
Here the dichotomy of sweet and bitter continues. The Holy Family seems too familiar, too pedestrian and nice. Yet the issues raised are high-stakes. The man has to learn to forgive, not just his father but also the murderer of his daughter, and most importantly, God, who he blames for it all. The reasoning is fairly sophisticated and, try as I might, I could not find anything in it that ran counter to scripture. In giving free will, God does not stop horror, but he is painfully sorry for it. At one point, Dad meets “Wisdom” where she steps down from her throne of judgment and forces him to take the seat. “Since you have left yourself to judge God, you also judge everyone else. Take the seat. It is where you sit anyway.” There he is confronted with the image of his two children. Says Wisdom, “Your two children are sinners; the daughter has withdrawn her love from you, and your boy is lying and doing bad things. You who are judge must choose: one must be sent to heaven, and the other, hell.” Of course, Dad cannot do this and finally offers himself for the sins of his children. We, and he, get the point: in the theater of divine justice, someone must pay for sin, and it is God in His love who finally gave himself so that none should go to hell.
Still both saccharine and bitter, we come to the most touching point. God, now in the guise of an old Indian, leads him to the body of his daughter, where she is wrapped in linen and buried. His pain comes to a climax as does his reasoning – and his sorrowful passion, of both tears and love.
Touching, corny, harsh, superficial, deep, the movie is a mixed bag that will probably please only those into theological issues. For us, it gets the job done in a most unlikely way. It is, in its quirkiness, almost like our own lives, filled with banality and heavy duty harshness almost at once, in the maddening dance of “normal” and “real” that we all live.
As a note: the book from which this was taken was self-published and has gone on to sell 10 million copies. The movie has not been a blockbuster, but it is obvious that the work has touched a chord. FK
(note #2 - a new comment was added by Roosen for the last blog, "Ghost Stories," below)
I will give it away, as the nastiness is done within the first part of the movie: the father of our hero as a child, an Irish-American drunk, did indeed beat this poor child and his mother, but there is much, much more. Frustrated with his inability to protect his mother, the young boy pours strychnine into his father’s bottles of whiskey. The father dies, but there is no trial or investigation that we know about. Instead, the movie quickly transports us to the present, where the boy has become a man with a loving wife and three children – one a loveable little girl of seven. The man, “Dad,” still suffers from nightmares, but his wife understands and comforts him. He is apparently able to live a good life otherwise.
And so we are brought to Dad and his children – sans wife, who must work – going on a camping trip. They come to a beautiful lake surrounded by mountains in a crowded campsite, and all is fine. At one point, the two older children go out in the canoe while Dad stays with the youngest. Dad calls to the children in the canoe to come in, and the older daughter stands to give him a wave. This capsizes the canoe, and the boy suffers a hit on the head and is trapped, drowning, beneath the canoe. Dad must swim out to save him and bring him back, pumping his chest on the dock to make him breath as everyone in the camp watches. The boy is saved, but what then of the little girl? She has mysteriously disappeared. Searching does no good, so the police are called. In time, the police discover that the little girl has been kidnapped by a crazed wilderness man who has struck before. The hounds trace him to a shack, where they find the torn dress and blood of the little girl. She is never found, but presumed dead – raped and killed by the crazy man. This comes as a horrible shock to the viewer, amidst all that loving-family stuff, never mind to the mom and dad and remaining children in the movie. It is the worst fear of a father made real.
Months later, we find Dad clearing the driveway in a late-winter blizzard. His life and that of his family is a mess, the remaining girl tortured by her fault in the episode, the wife alienated, the son distant. As Dad haphazardly clears the driveway, he checks the mailbox to discover a typed note from “Papa”, what his little girl had called God. Papa is inviting Dad back to the shack.
After some twists and turns, Dad goes to the shack, almost getting hit by a semi because of his distraction (this is relevant, but I will not say why). He finds the shack as before, broken and littered, the blood of his little girl still staining the floor. He sinks into despair until a young Semitic-looking man comes strolling by with an arm of fire wood. “Come with me to our cabin and we’ll have a nice fire” he says, oblivious to the Dad’s pain and weirdness of the situation. Dad follows – and walks into a summertime paradise where the cabin is beautiful and perfect. There he meets the ‘father’ of the young man – an elderly black woman – and their associate, Syria – a woman whose name means “The wind.” And there we have it: the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. We are now ready for the man’s healing.
Here the dichotomy of sweet and bitter continues. The Holy Family seems too familiar, too pedestrian and nice. Yet the issues raised are high-stakes. The man has to learn to forgive, not just his father but also the murderer of his daughter, and most importantly, God, who he blames for it all. The reasoning is fairly sophisticated and, try as I might, I could not find anything in it that ran counter to scripture. In giving free will, God does not stop horror, but he is painfully sorry for it. At one point, Dad meets “Wisdom” where she steps down from her throne of judgment and forces him to take the seat. “Since you have left yourself to judge God, you also judge everyone else. Take the seat. It is where you sit anyway.” There he is confronted with the image of his two children. Says Wisdom, “Your two children are sinners; the daughter has withdrawn her love from you, and your boy is lying and doing bad things. You who are judge must choose: one must be sent to heaven, and the other, hell.” Of course, Dad cannot do this and finally offers himself for the sins of his children. We, and he, get the point: in the theater of divine justice, someone must pay for sin, and it is God in His love who finally gave himself so that none should go to hell.
Still both saccharine and bitter, we come to the most touching point. God, now in the guise of an old Indian, leads him to the body of his daughter, where she is wrapped in linen and buried. His pain comes to a climax as does his reasoning – and his sorrowful passion, of both tears and love.
Touching, corny, harsh, superficial, deep, the movie is a mixed bag that will probably please only those into theological issues. For us, it gets the job done in a most unlikely way. It is, in its quirkiness, almost like our own lives, filled with banality and heavy duty harshness almost at once, in the maddening dance of “normal” and “real” that we all live.
As a note: the book from which this was taken was self-published and has gone on to sell 10 million copies. The movie has not been a blockbuster, but it is obvious that the work has touched a chord. FK
(note #2 - a new comment was added by Roosen for the last blog, "Ghost Stories," below)
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