Movie: Guided By The Word

Summary

After an old man loses his wife, he sets off on a cross-country trip to reunite with an adopted daughter, a woman who has been bitter and angry with her parents for years.

Cringe

Not really too bad, until the last minute. Some of the dialog can cause the viewer to wince. But, overall, the movie does succeed at avoiding too much cringe, except in the last minutes.

Acting

Solid. The movie has a very small cast, and they do ok.

Interesting Aspects

This is a road trip movie, as the old man, Steven, drives from his home in the eastern part of the US (not sure where it’s located, but one bit of dialog late in the movie may indicated it was in Kentucky) to LA, a trip of several days. Along the way, he pics up a young man named Joseph and eventually drops him off in Las Vegas.

Along with the travel scenes, we’re also given scenes of the adopted daughter, Miranda, dealing with the knowledge that her adopted father is coming. She’s still angry with her parents for not telling her she was adopted until she was 18, and has not seen them in over two decades. These scenes of Miranda are, to my mind, among the weakest in the movie, as several of them just show her moping about the house. The occasional arguments between her and her husband, James, at least show the viewer why she feels the way she does.

I don’t think road trip movies are all that uncommon, but I think they are usually done for comedy. One thing I like about Guided By The Word is that it keeps a fairly even feel, it’s not overly dramatic, even when the reunion finally happens. I can respect the lack of over-acting.

Some people may not like the slow pace of the movie. I can understand that, and I’ll admit I didn’t watch this movie in one sitting, but I don’t see the slow pace as a real problem. If anything, it may be a draw to other people who are tired of action-all-the-time movies.

Problems

Not many, but there are a few.

Angel: I found the way Joseph leaves Steven in Las Vegas, then shows up again at the beach sunset scene at the end, to be awkward. And the reasons why he’s there are the end are simply silly and bad. I know it was trying to play at sentiments, pull at the old heart strings or whatever, but for a movie that’s avoided too much sentimentalism that ending was jarringly out of place.

Nature Good City Bad: I can well understand someone saying that Las Vegas is a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, and I wouldn’t disagree, but what I kick against is any notion that nature is some how superior, or that small-town country life is superior to big-city life.

I kick against it, for this reason: the people in small towns are just like the people in big cites; they are fallen, they are sinful, they are just as capable of cruelty and perversion and revenge and the worst of sins as people in the cities.

I can’t even accept the notion that small-town life is better that big-city life. Different, yes, and individuals may do better in one place or the other. Different, but not in itself better.  Small towns are really not very idyllic.

And there are reasons why we may visit nature and appreciate for a time natural beauty, but not really want live there. It’s because we enjoy civilization.

But this involved accuracy of the thing makes it very difficult to do what I now have to do, to describe this accumulation of truth. It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced. It is comparatively easy when he is only partially convinced. He is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it. But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up. Thus, if one asked an ordinary intelligent man, on the spur of the moment, "Why do you prefer civilization to savagery?" he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, "Why, there is that bookcase . . . and the coals in the coal-scuttle . . . and pianos . . . and policemen." The whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex. It has done so many things. But that very multiplicity of proof which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible.

Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith). Orthodoxy (p. 76)

The fact that Steven can drive roughly 2000 miles in a few days, that he can do so on roads that are in good shape, that he has a car that he can drive, that he can stop at hotels to rest for the night, that he has his daughter’s Bible that is itself at least 30 years old, the fact that he has a cell phone that he can use to talk with James, all of that tells us how much better civilization has made our lives as compared to some kind of life lived only in nature.

Civilization and technology aren’t evil, they aren’t the problems. I’m using the internet to share this review with the world, you can be sure I don’t see the internet or computers as problems. How people choose to use these tools can be problems, because man himself is the problem. Fallen and sinful man is the problem, and he would be the problem even if he returned to nature.

Title: Why was this movie called Guided By The Word?

Conclusion

Rewatching this one again, I’ll admit to some fondness for it. It’s by no means great, but I can respect a move that doesn’t try to be more than it sets out to be. Hardly flawless by any stretch, but it may be worth a look if you want something slow-paced. I really wish the ending had been better, though.