This Review Reveals Minor Details About the Plot.
The Pen Is Mightier—
Plot Overview
A small town Southern belle Lowen
Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) moved to NYC once she could, to enjoy the anonymity of a
crowd. She's now a solitary unknown writer giving a reading at
Books Are Magic when her agent—her only friend
around—interrupts with a lead to a ghostwriting
gig. She's to “wear something nice” for the
interview with Hatchett Books. Her only nice outfit gets
ruined in transit, so she arrives in gauche, mannish
“fashion” but gets picked (in a field of four) by the
husband Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett) of celebrated
writer Verity (Anne Hathaway) who is mentally out of commission. By
and by he takes Lowen to a Bavarian restaurant for her birthday,
where men wear lederhosen as befits their deep roots.
These two are
out of circulation for different reasons but enjoy close proximity
as the girl goes over the wife's copious notes, the opportunity for
which she has moved in. The Vermont home is isolated in the
country, the comatose wife's personal nurse does all the
shopping, and the remaining boy-twin plays with his father,
not with the new writer; she is socially isolated. She's on a
deadline and can't manage the scattered material, much less
understand it. Are the telling memoirs even real? The bodies
sure are. The police being fans have accepted the writers' stories
at face value and do no credible investigation.
The movie winds up with
the man moving with his new wife and expanded brood to Southport,
NC, nobody being the wiser about
what happened, not the police, not the characters, not the audience, and
likely not the book reader. It ends in mystery.
Ideology
The principals seem to have embraced the distant Puritan heritage of New England. Think along the lines of writer Severna Park: “Here was an entire culture of protocol I knew nothing about—stripped from my collaborating ancestors, and forgotten by three subsequent generations” (63). The Puritans were so strongly in favor of marriage that not only were they supposed to wed a.s.a.p., but colonists insisting on remaining single were forced to live under the roof of an existing family.
The
living arrangement here gave rise to a temptation of man addressed
in the good book but from a female perspective. Paul advises the
widow, (1Cor. 7:39) “The
wife is bound by the law as long as her husband liveth; but if her
husband be dead, she is at liberty to be married to whom she will;
only in the Lord.” The Jews had a custom called levirate
marriage. If a woman's husband being an eldest brother died and
they were childless, she was obligated to marry his younger
brother, or in a pinch some other near kinsman, to continue the
former's line. She was in a sense still part of her ex's family.
The Jews in Corinth had asked the apostle Paul if any of that
carried over to Christianity, and he replied no, that the widow had
as open season on men as did a single girl. “Only in the
Lord” means having put on Christ, she was required to refrain
from fulfilling the lusts of the flesh. That might be hard to
do if she were on loving terms with her ex's brother(s) in which
case it is but a small step to sexual intimacy. Although levirate
marriage is not so common today, we get an intimation of the
temptation dynamic in this movie. Lowen told Jeremy that in his
circumstances he was allowed “selfish moments.”
This was opposite of the advice the apostle Paul gave, but more
consistent with Hollywood.
Production Values
“” is based on a novel, Verity by Colleen Hoover. It was adapted for the big screen by Nick Antosca and directed by Michael Showalter. It stars Dakota Johnson, Anne Hathaway and Josh Hartnett. Johnson kept her emotions at bay, consistent with her shrinking violet character. Hartnett played the consummate lady killer. Hathaway was a sleeper.
MPA rated it R for sexual content, some nudity, language, violence and bloody images. An early scene is of a collision off-camera of a bicycle messenger with an automobile. Streets are dangerous in the big city, be it a bike jumping a green light or a car running a red—be safe. Runtime ≈ 2 hours.
Review Conclusion w/a Christian's Recommendation
A couple sweet old ladies took in this movie and judging from their difficulty finding their assigned seats, I take it it's been a while since they've come to the moviehouse. One of them offered me her arm at the end as I was stiff rising from my seat. They seemed to have enjoyed themselves and probably came from having liked the book, be it ever so dark.
Movie Ratings
Action factor: Decent action scenes. Suitability For Children: Not Suitable for Children of Any Age. Special effects: Average special effects. Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day. Suspense: Don't watch this movie alone. Overall movie rating: Four stars out of five.
Works Cited
Scripture quoted from the King James Version. Pub. 1611, rev. 1769. Software.
Park, Severna. Hand Of Prophecy. Copyright © 1998 by Severna Park. New York: Avon Books, 1998. Print.
bibles.n7nz.org