A few months back, I caught this movie called Adam's Apples. (Yes, you can click it to read about it.) And I've been mulling over the movie, for the issues it raises are quite interesting.
The movie's a dark comedy, extremly tragic yet perversely funny at the same time. We see a convict called Adam get a chance to do community work at a church, and there he meets a pastor named Ivan.
The thing is, Ivan has a very, very tragic life. We soon learn that as a child he was abused by his father, his mother ran off with another man, his first son was born a quadriplegic, and his wife killed herself in front of him after she could no longer endure caring for their son. And, that he has advanced brain cancer himself.
Yet, despite all these setbacks, Ivan seems fully unaware of his situation! He tells Adam that his wife is merely on holiday, that his son is a sportsman, that his parents are off well in the countryside together. Moreover, the full-blown cancer that the doctors diagnosed doens't even seem to be taking its toll on Ivan at all.
Oh yes, Ivan was waayy deep in denial. His core philosophy, the one thing that carried him through the days and gave him strength, happened to be his faith in God. Whenever our hero Adam points out the obvious, such as telling Ivan that his son was really a quadriplegic, Ivan merely shrugs, saying that God's plan is not to be so easily revealed. "Every day is a day with God's blessings," Ivan reminds Adam.
And so Adam, in a fit of malicious mean-spiritedness, forces Ivan to face reality. Adam not only brings together all the external indicators of Ivan's tragedy (clippings of his wife's suicide, his cancer diagonosis, etc), but also scoffs at Ivan's beliefs, mockingly telling him that the truth was that God had left him, and that God is persecuting him.
Bereft of his faith, Ivan collapses. His cancer wreaks its havoc, and Ivan is fully incapacitated.
But now it is Adam's turn to witness a miracle. Gangsters attempting to recruit Adam back into their fold run across Ivan, and in a scuffle they shoot Ivan point blank in the face. Adam rushes Ivan to the hospital, and learns that the bullet not only failed to kill Ivan, but also blew away all his cancer cells. For all intents and purposes, Ivan survived, and was recovering fast.
Thus does the movie end, with Adam choosing to believe too then that there was something greater than himself, which he could not fully comprehend.
For me, the movie both celebrated faith, and served dire warnings about it. On one hand faith is a life-preserver, helping us achieve our potential in a world that we can't understand with logic alone. Yet, the movie was a cautionary tale too, for faith if ever wrongly channelled, would just lead to a whole life of lies.
I've recently experienced the limitations of logic myself. For years it has served me well, giving me a foundation on which to chart my life. Strange as it may seem, logic can't explain all sometimes, and I'm not even talking about the big mysteries of life. I'm talking about the little things in life, the little occurrences, the little relationships between us humans.
Like Ivan experienced in the movie, it's very strengthening to know that the trials and tribulations one goes through aren't simple caprices of fate, but more of events that help us improve and become 'perfecter', in the words of one of my friends.
I want to see too how far I can go.
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