Three Movies with Real Heroes
I have chosen to review three movies that some of you may never have heard of. All of us have admired historical figures, people who were famous during our lifetimes, and even ordinary people in our own lives. We may even refer to some of those people as heroes. We may have different reasons for defining them as heroes, but they are heroes to each of us.
Each of these movies contain heroes. Each takes place in different parts of the world – Asia, Europe and America. Two movies are sub-titled – one in Japanese and one in French. But they have one thing in common. They are about ordinary people who are heroes – and for different reasons. These movies were not blockbuster hits, and they do not contain epic storylines. They are about regular people who find themselves in difficult circumstances but choose to make decisions that demonstrate the good in each of us. I think all of us need that right now – simple, but very powerful stories that leave us feeling good about humanity.
I watched Departures for the first time shortly after it won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2009. The most critically acclaimed of the three films, with 41 wins and another 12 nominations, it is set in Japan. The protagonist, Daigo, is a devoted cellist in an orchestra that has just been dissolved. Without a job and no other skill, he takes his wife and son back to his hometown to look for a job. That search takes him on a profound journey with death, that is at times both heart wrenching and comical. In the end, his odyssey brings him to an understanding of death, but more importantly, it helps him uncover the wonder and joy of living.
The first time I recommended this film was during a trip to New York with friends of ours from Houston and four of their friends. After the trip, we heard back from one of the couples who said the movie literally changed their lives. I am not saying that this film will have the same impact on your life, but it will cause you to rethink some things, including your relationship with death.
I watched Two Days, One Night for the first time five years ago. Released in 2014, the protagonist in the movie, Sandra, is a factory worker in Belgium. Married with two children, she has been off work from her job on medical leave due to depression. While on leave, her supervisor, feeling pressure from his superiors to save money, decides that he can do so by eliminating Sandra’s job and paying the other workers overtime. Sandra learns of the plan from one of her co-workers on a Saturday morning, and thus begins Sandra’s efforts over the weekend to save her job. Over two days and one night, Sandra must take actions that are totally out of her comfort zone, including confronting each of her 16 co-workers. During those conversations, we learn something about each of her co-workers, and develop empathy for them. Like Daigo in Departures, Sandra finds herself having to make decisions that not only impact her life, but the lives of others.
This film does a great job of helping the viewer get inside the head of someone suffering from depression. In dealing with such a heavy issue, it would have been easy for the film to sink into a narrative of self-pity – and preach to us the dangers of excessive capitalism. Instead, our protagonist, depicted so authentically as an emotionally fragile person, somehow comes out on the other side a different person. And in telling her story, we feel the struggles of the working class and the struggles of family in a visceral way, and how global competition impacts the lives of people all over the world, not just in America.
The third film, The Hero, was released in 2017, and casts Sam Elliott, a great character actor, as Lee Hayden, a veteran actor of Westerns, whose best years are well behind him. The movie gets its title from the protagonist’s one really good movie, “The Hero.” Estranged from his family, Lee struggles to reconcile his life, his image, but most importantly, his heart. Lee eventually meets someone who helps him take on this reckoning.
Like the other two movies, the protagonist in The Hero must evolve, and must do so to get to a place of self-respect and self-love. That journey is the hero’s journey. As the great thinker and philosopher Joseph Campbell describes in his best-known book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), every good story and every world mythology includes the archetypal hero, who’s journey includes psychological change, and that change is the hero’s journey.
Each of these movies allow us to participate in that hero’s journey in a very nuanced and profound way. I love these movies because the protagonists could be our friends and could be us. It shows that each of us can be heroes, if we choose to be. But again, THAT is why the hero’s journey is universal, and yet, so rare and so powerful.
