 November
2003
This month's review:
Luther
Not Like a Roller Coaster Ride
Once I had a conversation with a fellow who worked in the film
industry in Hollywood. He told me that most movies these days are
conceptually modeled after amusement park rides like Thunder
Mountain Express or Space Mountain at Disneyland. The rides start
off easily, speed up, put the riders through some pretty horrendous
twists and turns designed to scare them, slow down, and finally dump
them benignly out at the exit. This is the formula that sells. Well,
Luther isn’t like that. It’s not a Hollywood movie and
certainly isn’t calculated to please the MTV generation or those
with attention spans less than 20 minutes. It’s beautifully filmed
and acted, though, and it’s reverent as well.
At the film’s opening, we see the young Martin Luther slogging
through the mud during a fierce storm, lightning bolts crashing
everywhere. Martin is terrified and pledges that, if God will save
him, he will devote his life to serving Him. God does save him and,
contrary to his father’s wishes, Martin becomes a Roman Catholic
monk. In this two-hour movie that compresses 50 years into two hours
we see the major events of Luther’s life and understand well how the
Reformation came to be.
Luther is a monk par excellence. However, he has doubts about his
faith. His chief desire is to commune with a loving God, but he
feels shut off from the Almighty. An older priest who is his chief
mentor says to him, “Bind yourself to Christ, and you will know
God’s love.” This simple piece of advice transforms Luther and
starts him down the path that will change history. Soon Martin is
sent from Germany to Rome, where he is able to witness the
corruption of Roman Catholicism at first hand. Leo, the Pope, has a
number of mistresses and has fathered children. The Church needs
money to bankroll its building projects and maintain its empire.
To get enough money to do this, the Church has resorted to
selling indulgences. These are paper certificates which, depending
on how much one pays, reduce the amount of time one’s relatives have
to languish in Purgatory. If one pays enough, one’s salvation is
assured. Luther buys an indulgence but soon throws it away,
realizing the sham of the entire practice. He returns to Germany a
changed man, perceiving that the only way to salvation is through a
relationship with Jesus Christ. Angry at the way the Church has
twisted Christian belief and practice, Luther hammers his list of 95
theses on the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral. He insists that
everyone, no matter how poor or uneducated, has the right to direct
access to God and should be able to read the Bible on his own. These
ideas are anathema to Rome, of course, and the Reformation is born.
The acting is uniformly excellent, with Joseph Fiennes
(Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love) doing a terrific
job of portraying the young Martin Luther. His performance seems so
heartfelt that one wonders whether he is merely an accomplished
actor or might really know the Lord. Peter Ustinov is superb as Duke
Frederick the Wise, Luther’s benefactor. And Alfred Molina
convincingly plays John Tetzel (one of the most notorious sellers of
indulgences) as a scumbag without allowing him to become a cartoon
villain.
A lot of Christians these days bemoan the lack of decent, moral
entertainment on the screen and on television, saying that there’s
just nothing out there worth seeing. Well, that’s not the case here.
Luther is a moral, Christian movie. It’s slow at times
and requires us to pay attention. It’s devoid of special effects and
amusement-park-like twists. But it rings true. We Christians need to
support films like this if we want more of them.
Rating: 3 ½
stars
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Index of movie
reviews...
(2003 reviews through present)
Jay Maurer, a member of West Side Presbyterian Church, is
a long-term movie buff and former college teacher of The Film as
Literature. He has written movie reviews for The Good News
(West Side newsletter) since 2002.
If you have comments or questions
about the movie (or play) reviews, please contact Jay at
dramachap@msn.com.
Ratings are expressed in
increments of ¼ star.
A rating of 2 ½ stars or higher is meant to be a recommendation.
1 star: poor
2 stars: minimally satisfactory
3 stars: quite good
4 stars: superb
Criteria for determining the ratings:
- Reflection, either explicit or implicit, of Christian values,
including suitability of language and lack of gratuitous violence
- Quality of the acting
- Originality
- Unity of the entire picture
- Substance, or in the words of C.S. Lewis, weight
Other Christian movie review Web sites:
Plugged In Online
ChristianityTodayMovies.com
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