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Chariots Of Fire

This is probably my favorite movie ever, likely because I feel whisked back in time whenever I watch it. Here we catch a glimpse of Western civilization before it had collapsed, and we witness several refreshing things there: men who act like gentlemen; women who act like ladies; young people who respect their elders; literate speech; a sense of decorum; undergraduates who seek truth, not just a job; a pervasive feeling of the transcendent; and most important of all, we witness the relentless pursuit of excellence.

This pursuit is portrayed in two competing runners: Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell. Even though they are as different as night and day, I identify with them both. Abrahams feels like an outsider because he is a Jew in the midst of an Anglo-Saxon society that does not accept him, so he uses his running as a weapon to force that society to recognize his excellence and his status as a full Englishman. I identify with Abrahams' alienation because I am, after all, an anachronism who feels out of place in the society I inhabit. Like Abrahams, I cannot pretend to be like everyone around me, but I still can "run them off their feet" as he puts it. On the flipside, Eric Liddell is a devout Christian and very much a part of the society that Abrahams is at war with, and Liddell runs to please God rather than to achieve a worldly goal. Once again, I can identify with Liddell because the key aspect of his personality -- a focus on the transcendent rather than the immediate -- resonates with me as well. (Not to mention the fact that Liddell is a fellow Presbyterian Scotsman who, though soft-spoken, sticks to his guns and can pull the trigger when his righteous anger is provoked.)

Somewhere In Time

Anyone who thinks I dismiss all romantic movies out of hand is sorely mistaken, because this gem of a film is one romance that always has moved me. As with Chariots Of Fire, a major reason for this is how the viewer is whisked back in time to see Western civilization before the madness of the twentieth century had done its work. To drive the point home, scenes at the Grand Hotel from the past are starkly juxtaposed to scenes from the present -- where the grounds surrounding the hotel once featured men in suits carrying canes, women in dresses carrying parasols, and horse-drawn carriages, we find in the present a shabby landscape littered with trash.

Unlike Chariots Of Fire, the main character (Christopher Reeve) quite literally travels back in time.  A young playwright in the doldrums after having broken up with his girlfriend (i.e., he was dumped), the protagonist gets in his car and drives out of the city with no destination in mind.  He happens upon the historic Grand Hotel and, intrigued by its charm, decides to spend the evening there.  While touring the hotel's collection of historical artifacts, he suddenly becomes captivated by an image from those days of yore: a lovely woman who smiles at him across the decades from her portrait. He resolves to find her and himself even if it means breaking the laws of physics. This is, in full measure, a quest for something and someone that cannot be found in the diminished present we inhabit, and there is no more compelling message for someone like me. When the protagonist arrives in that past and finds this woman, he courts her and falls in love with her, only to lose her when he is sucked back into our era -- a fate worse than death, as the protagonist himself concludes.  The added sense of tragedy makes the film profound, and I truly wonder how the script survived Hollywood's green eyeshades.

An additional reason I admire this movie is that it gets time travel right, specifically by demonstrating how any changes in the timeline already exist prior to the time traveler's awareness of having made those changes. Too many movies and television shows chafe against this dynamic by showing the protagonist gleefully re-arrange the universe to suit his personal preferences, consistent with modern man's abhorrence of personal constraints and the concept of destiny. Not this movie -- the protagonist is destined to find his true love, just as he is destined to lose her, and despite his exercise of free will every step of the way. This dynamic reigned over Oedipus Rex and Macbeth, so it's refreshing to find that it persists.