Closer - 6

This is an interesting film about trust and distrust. About knowing, and how this brings relationships together and drives them apart. This movie is able to show that truth and love are inseparable. In the beautiful mess that we live in is often hard to do both at the same time. To truly love another is to be truthful about yourself as well as the other, and to live with a renewed kind of knowledge on a daily basis. Always easier said than done, but then pain and joy are experienced realities, not just words on the page. This film fails to see the insight that "to know is to love..." And that this means the embrace of human suffering and pain, not the numbness and stoicism that we are somehow above it all. You are not up on love for someone, you are "in" love "with" someone, until the Story is told, happiness is but a muddled utopia.

The foundational question of the film is this: Are there forms of knowledge not worth having? This is the same sort of storied living that Adam and Eve had to think about when faced with the tree of knowledge of good and evil. But Grace always makes its way into the question, and makes moral meaning all that much more confusing and intricate.

On the drive home I was listening to Coldplay's A Rush of Blood to the Head, which I found as a suitable soundtrack to the discernment of the film. In some ways they both have similar themes.