Ted Kluck on the Laura Linney Film

From Why We Love the Church: In Praise of Institutions and Organized Religion:

I just watched a film called The Savages (with Laura Linney and Phil Seymour Hoffman), which is a depressing emotional beating in the vein of Running with Scissors, The Squid and the Whale, and to a lesser extent, Little Miss Sunshine. It's the Laura Linney Film, which is now, I've discovered, its own genre. That's not to say it's bad; it's just its own depressing, unresolved thing that's more like watching a random neighbor's slightly more stylized life than watching a movie. It's a "thing" just like a Quentin Tarantino film is a thing. Hoffman and Linney, though, were amazing.

The reason I mention this film, now, in this book, is that the Laura Linney Film is often a very accurate and sad representation of what life looks like for American intellectuals without Christ and without the church. The films all follow a similar story arc, which is that hard things happen to intellectuals (a divorce in Squid, or a parent dying in Savages), those intellectuals have their lives turned upside down by that event, and in the end they get on with their lives, but we don't know for sure if they've learned anything or grown in any significant way. The films always make me sad, though it should be said that I love the performances, and they always make me thankful for pastors and my church body, imperfect though it is. In a way that might very well be cowardly, I know that my church will be there for me when I have to go through awful life events, and it's a comfort.

Kevin DeYoung & Ted Kluck, Why We Love the Church (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2009) pp. 103-104