The Way Kept: Husbands, Love Your Wives...

Rating: 8/10 (10 December 2006)

... as Christ loved the Church, and gave Himself for it. Oh that I had seen this movie before I married the woman of my dreams! Oh that I had spent more time walking with her! loving and cherishing the best thing who ever happened to me! Alas! . . . The Tree of Life is yet guarded, still safe - safe from the amateurish story of a delightful, beautiful woman with a fatal brain disease who writes it for her love. My wife, too, thought to build her fantasy world in her career; but her love for her husband was not as strong as the love of Izzy Creo (short for CREDO - "I BELIEVE"?)for Tommy. The quote from the Book of Genesis at the film's beginning is in her careful hand, and the book is never finished. Aronofsky asks us to finish our own chapters.... I actually saw this movie hot on the heels of "Apocalypto". The same night! Mel Gibson's take on the Conquistadors chimes perfectly with this one. Izzy's fictitious hero is frustrated by the Tree of Life as guarded by the Xibalban priest with the flaming sword. To me this symbolized the misguided passion to connect with non-Christian religions which falsify and pervert the original Mosaic revelation.... Izzy and Tommy represent Humanism in rebellion against Divine Providence: fiction and science make no inroads on mortality - they only help us poor dying souls cope. The hapless lab monkey represents Nature itself - manipulated for man's feeble, selfish ends. The barren tree in the ascendant bubble represents the purgatory of waiting for the transfiguration of Xibalban - which will never come. A naked tree 'sprouts' in the body of the conquering hero - myths need men to give them life. ... The lotus pose represents the atheists' religion - a contemplation of nothingness, of infinity, but no escape from the self... the Bubble? the created universe of the Tree. We are all destined to move out of it eventually and into immortality... the Conquistadors in Mel's movie, represent the Roman Catholic Church which, for all its militancy, has failed to lift any nation or people above barbaric superstition and poverty of land and resources for two thousand years... I suspect that Mr. Aronofsky felt compelled to make certain concessions (the title should have been 'The Tree') to his financial backers in order to get the movie made, but hey - that's what we all do; life is a series of compromises... but to get back to the symbolism: the RING to me was the heart-breaker. See, I still wear my wedding ring in fading hopes that She will come back to me - back from the Dead, as it were. The ring will not come off, and I have no desire to take it off. It symbolizes a promise and a vow made in deadly earnest to my God before many witnesses. Tommy tattoos rings on himself as punishment - he wants the permanence of matrimony - of monogamy - of a woman's unconditional love. So do I , Tommy; so do I... this is an evangelical film, to me Aronofsky is searching and his script shows it, but I have hope that, bringing whatever world-view one will to this movie, that the powerful performances of Hugh and Rachel will absorb you as they did me. I left the theater in tears of lament, but willing to 'bury' the last symbol of the woman I love and to move on, my world-view of Divine Providence intact... Thanks to brother DAaron for a wonderful picture.