These films have two things in common. They depict characters that are marginalized, living on the edge of society bearing secrets that isolate them from ordinary human relationships. And they both star the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman, an extraordinary actor who has an uncanny ability to appear understated yet riveting.

            In every other way, however, they couldn’t be more different.

            A Most Wanted Man (2014) is a film based on the novel of the same name by John le Carré. A tale of international espionage set in the world of terrorism, we watch a Chechen man, Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) tortured and fearing for his life, enter Hamburg Germany illegally only to be caught up in forces far beyond his control. And we watch Günther Bachmann, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, a German antiterrorist agent seek to unravel a web of deceit and danger only to discover that he too is caught up in forces far beyond his control.

            As in most le Carré stories, the action is not found in high speed car chases, gun battles and fisticuffs but is located in a deadly cat and mouse game that unfolds as intelligence agents manipulate events and people to try to reach some desired end. Hoffman plays his role brilliantly, a rumpled, alcoholic agent who has been burned by his German superiors and American allies, has watched carefully constructed networks unravel and informants killed, and who is willing to wait, and scheme,

            The tension is palpable as the story unfolds, and as John le Carré never tires of reminding us, in the world of international espionage there are not always clear winners and losers. Even the winners able to shut down some terrorist plot before it occurs can lose something of their souls in the process. A world where deceit, lies, and manipulation are the tools of the trade is hardly a kind place.

            The last film in which Hoffman starred before his death, A Most Wanted Man is very worth seeing. It is both good cinematic art and a compelling, deeply human story.

            Rated R, 122 minutes.

            Mary and Max (2009) is a feature length claymation film, starring two characters, Mary Daisy Dinkle (voiced by Toni Collette) and Max Jerry Horovitz (voiced by Philip Seymour Hoffman). Both are painfully lonely when they become pen pals. Mary is eight years old, lives in Melborne, Australia and has a large birthmark on her forehead that is, as she puts it, “the color of poo.” Max is a 44 year-old severely obese man with Asperger’s who lives alone in a dingy New York apartment. “People often think I am tactless and rude,” he tells Mary. “I cannot understand how being honest can be improper. Maybe this is why I don’t have any friends.”

            If your exposure to Claymation is limited to Wallace and Gromit (must viewing, by the way) or Veggie Tales (good for babysitting but badly moralistic) Mary and Max will be a revelation. The attention to detail is astounding and the humor is dry—in one scene in a cemetery a tombstone in the background reads “R.I.P. Adam Elliot,” with the epitaph “very over-rated.” The film’s director and writer is Adam Elliot. The characters, all troubled and broken, are depicted with a warm sympathy that insists they be website , “Mary and Max is innocent but not naïve, as it takes us on a journey that explores friendship, autism, taxidermy, psychiatry, alcoholism, where babies come from, obesity.” It also explores chocolate, atheism, and the delight of snail mail letter writing.

            Mary and Max is a superb example of the art of clay animation in film, and very worth seeing. Expect to have scenes from the movie lodged deeply in your imagination.

            Not rated, 92 minutes.

In “Among the Disrupted,” the cover essay for the New York Times Book Review (January 18, 2015) Leon Wieseltier laments how devices are often valued over books, technology seems ascendant over the humanities, hunger for instant information has replaced the long search for wisdom, and the meaning of humanity has been reduced to the mechanistic. All worthy concerns, I would say, even if you or I would parse things differently in places from Mr. Wieseltier.

You can read his essay here.

And to get you started pondering the ideas Wieseltier raises, here are few quotes from “Among the Disrupted”:

            “Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all thing must pass, but this is ridiculous.”

            “The distinction between knowledge and information is a thing of the past, and there is no greater disgrace than to be a thing of the past.”

            “Aside from issues of life and death, there is no more urgent task for American intellectuals and writers than to think critically about the salience, even the tyranny, of technology in individual and collective life.”

            “The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.”

            “Every technology is used before it is completely understood. There is always a lag between an innovation and the apprehension of its consequences. We are living in that lag, and it is a right time to keep our heads and reflect. We have much to gain and much to lose. In the media, for example, the general inebriation about the multiplicity of platforms has distracted many people from the scruple that questions of quality on the new platforms should be no different from questions of quality on the old platforms. Otherwise a quantitative expansion will result in a qualitative contraction. The new devices do not in themselves authorize a revision of the standards of evidence and argument and style that we championed in the old devices.”

            Philosopher Charles Taylor has spent a lifetime of careful study unpacking the meaning and development of secularism. One of the things he demonstrates in A Secular Age (2007) is that one of the most common assumptions about modern secularism is, in fact, so completely erroneous as to constitute a myth. Yet, it continues to be believed, and has assumed such mythic value that to question it can elicit surprise if not shock.

            The assumption involved is what Taylor refers to as “subtraction stories.” The idea is that previous generations, as they became more enlightened and educated, shed unfashionable and increasingly untenable beliefs about demons, miracles, virgin births and other propositions that science had revealed to be dubious. This process of subtracting traditional and unproven beliefs allowed people to get back to a view of reality that was simply natural and obvious—and entirely secular. Taylor says that’s not the way it happened.

            James K. A. Smith, in How (Not) to be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (2014), defines it this way:

Subtraction stories  Accounts that explain “the secular” as merely the subtraction of religious belief, as if the secular is what’s left over after we subtract superstition. In contrast, Taylor emphasizes that the secular is produced, not just distilled (p. 143)

Near the beginning of A Secular Age, Taylor puts the issue this way:

I will be making a continuing polemic against what I call “subtraction stories”. Concisely put, I mean by this stories of modernity in general, and secularity in particular, which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge. What emerges from this process—modernity or secularity—is to be understood in terms of underlying features of human nature which were there all along, but had been impeded by what is now set aside. Against this kind of story, I will steadily be arguing that Western modernity, including its secularity, is the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices, and can’t be explained in terms of perennial features of human life. (p. 22)

The significance of this is considerable.

            The myth involved in subtraction stories suggests that secularity is the more primordial view of things, what human beings would tend to believe if they were allowed to come to their beliefs without outside interference from parents and preachers. As Taylor demonstrates, this can be shown to be untrue in a careful reading of the history of ideas. So, the ideas and assumptions that led to modern secularism can be examined, must be examined, and must not be assumed to be more natural or obvious than religious beliefs.

            Another implication of this involves having confidence that the simple call to faithfulness for Christians—opening our lives and homes in warm welcome, giving the gift of unhurried time, sharing simple meals and conversation, listening and asking questions, probing into what our neighbors believe and why, providing safe places for people to be honest—remains radically countercultural even in our secular world. Christian faith is not contrary to humanness. The advent of advanced modernity does not mean only philosophers can bear witness to the vibrancy and relevance of the gospel.

           Every believer will not need to work through the 850 pages of dense argument presented in A Secular Age. Only a few of us need to do that. I would, however, encourage Christians to work through the 143 pages of How (Not) to be Secular, because the ideas presented here, though seemingly abstract, actually touch on what it means to live in the secular world of advanced modernity.

            Child of God (1973) is Cormac McCarthy’s most disturbing book, and the film is hard to watch. The story is of Lester Ballard (played with an uninhibited intensity by Scott Haze) who, deeply traumatized, marginalized and disturbed descends into increasingly violent depravity. We first meet Lester when an auctioneer, accompanied by a band and pickups full of eager buyers and on-lookers pull up into his family’s farm that has been repossessed by the county and now is to be sold off. “To watch these things issuing from the otherwise mute pastoral morning is a man at the barn door,” McCarthy writes. “He is small, unclean, unshaven. He moves in the dry chaff among the dust and slats of sunlight with a constrained truculence. Saxon and Celtic bloods. A child of God much like yourself perhaps” (p. 4).

            James Franco, who directed the film, co-wrote the screenplay and plays a minor role, makes certain we hear that description of Lester. That is good because it is the essence of what McCarthy is trying to say to a culture that wants so badly to be hopeful about the promise of future technological, economic and educational advances and finds that to maintain that hope it needs to explain away the evil and brutality that maddeningly will not disappear quietly into the past of human history.

            I can’t simply recommend this film, since it is far too raw and brutal for that, a story of murder, rape and necrophilia that like the novel is determined that we face human depravity in all its horror. Some will want to watch this film, and for the rest there are good reasons to decline. Though the film is unfortunately choppy (due to the editing), it contains some very strong performances—by Scott Haze as Lester Ballard and Tim Blake Nelson as the sheriff—that may garner attention if not awards. The landscapes, sets, and cinematography are also remarkable, so that the rough rural woods, small towns and hollows of East Tennessee seem to take on a darkly foreboding cast. As usually occurs when novels and made into films, a key scene in the book is skipped in the movie, a flood that becomes a metaphor for divine judgment.

            Watch the film with care. It speaks truth, though the truth it depicts is neither pleasant nor easy. I hope Child of God prompts my non-Christian neighbors will think deeply about the human dilemma and about how the stubborn existence of evil in human affairs and hearts will not be solved by reorganizing society, expanding opportunity, and providing treatment. A far more radical solution is needed. And I hope my Christian neighbors will join me in reassessing how easily we reduce evil to embarrassing sins rather than owning it as the deadly power that seeks, every moment, to devour our souls and fill us with darkness.

            The appeal of detective stories includes our need for order when crime has introduced disorder (always a dangerous state), and our yearning for justice when something has gone wrong (which threatens our humanity). We are also drawn to them because we all live moment by moment with uncertainty and so desperately want a dependable hero.

            Somehow we know it is too much to ask that we escape the uncertainty. Even if the brokenness was removed we would remain finite. The uncertainty can be endured, however, if we have a hero who can sort things out, make things right, and keep us from tumbling into a pit from which there is no recovery.

            There is a reason why detective stories center around a particular detective. In the final analysis we are attracted to the stories not because of the variable crimes but because of the dependable detective. Even if he/she fails to solve the case, we know they tried their best and left no stone unturned.

            As a Christian I would argue that this archetype is imprinted in our consciousness because we are part of a story in which the hero becomes the savior. All is lost until the hero produces the solution, and in the end sheds light into the shadows where death has tried to hide.

Longmire

            Walt Longmire (played by Robert Taylor) is the sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming. It is a sprawling place, dominated by gorgeous peaks and wide lush landscapes that give the cinematographers ample opportunity to frame lovely background shots. (The series is filmed in New Mexico, but no matter—the landscape is so stunning that it is reason alone to watch it.) Assisted admirably by Deputy Vic (played by Katee Sackhoff) and by the duplicitous Deputy Branch (Bailey Chase), Longmire wrestles with the tragic death of his wife as he tries to keep law and order in a place where the citizens prize self-sufficiency and privacy. Walt’s best friend, Henry Standing Bear (Lou Diamond Phillips) helps bridge the sad chasm of distrust and prejudice between whites and the Native Americans who live on a reservation within the county.

            Good writing, superb cinematography, and fine character development makes me wonder why this A&E television series has not garnered more attention and awards. The filming of each episode includes a Native American consultant to assure the accuracy of what is depicted. One of the things I most appreciate about Longmire is that it keeps me interested but is never frenetic, maintaining a thoughtful pace that not only suits the setting but that seems to take me as viewer seriously.

            If I lived in Absaroka County, Wyoming, I’d want someone like Walt Longmire to be wearing the sheriff’s badge. In fact, I’d like someone like Walt Longmire to be the sheriff wherever I lived.

            (A&E, 3 seasons 2012, 2013, 2014; each episode 50 minutes)

Sherlock

            One of the primary reasons why Sherlock Holmes remains a perennial favorite is that he is a dependable hero. He may be cold-hearted and rational to a fault, he may have a drug problem and treat people abominably, he may play the violin horribly and have no friends for good reason, but we always know that when he is on the case, no better detective could be imagined.

            The recent BBC series that locates the famous detective (played with superb quirkiness by Benedict Cumberbatch) in 21^st century London is a fine addition to the Holmes legacy. Along with his sidekick Dr. Watson (played by Martin Freeman), Sherlock’s brother, Mycroft (played with great comic effect by Mark Gatiss), and Sherlock’s long suffering housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson (Una Stubbs), the stage is set for solving crimes in a way that only Sherlock Holmes could accomplish it.

            For all the changes this series brings to the classic detective, it allows Holmes to remain Holmes, and that is one reason the series succeeds. It is also produced with a clear love of Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective and stories, and that love is reflected in the sharp filming, editing, and dry wit that shines in every episode.

            (BBC, 4 seasons, each episode 90 minutes).