Bored Again
Dickinson, Daniel
Salvation on film BORED AGAIN COLSON AS CHRISTIAN MARTYR IN THEY file, middle-aged men and women mostly, with a sprinkling of the young and old. One portly man has a Jaws poster under his arm,...
...He punctuates his sentences with terrible words, like "hell" and "damn...
...The Experience apparently involves some shaking and a few tears...
...Is Amnesty International...
...No one pays the crowd to be objective, after all...
...While in prison, Colson reads a letter from his oldest son—the music swells and you see memories of Chuck and his boy throwing a football (of course) in the sunlight...
...When his wife expresses concern about how to behave at the White House, he says to her "the way you look, honey, you can break all the rules of protocol you want...
...Nevertheless, there is something about this movie, with its syrupy sentiments, its simplistic solutions, and, more important, its basic untruthfulness, which is disturbing...
...Manfully Colson rejects the offer...
...As if Colson' s role as Mr...
...There is only the Lincoln Memorial, Colson, a swelling musical score, and the Experience...
...For the moments that they are on celluloid, the saccharine is swept aside, and you feel yourself in the presence of real people...
...Nice Guy had not been underlined enough, his family and prison relations are thrown in as well...
...Then we are in the White House, where Richard Nixon (Harry Spillman) is engaging in paranoid power fantasies, to the echoing accompaniment of servile Henry Kissinger (Peter Jrasik...
...I find myself far more in sympathy with the crowd than the critics...
...Obviously the man is corrupt...
...How many of us are so low that we would accept it...
...Then we are before the Lincoln Memorial, where Charles Colson (Dean Jones) is engaged in a Religious Experience...
...Essentially, Born Again is a confession which does not confess, a penitence of the impenitent, the humble protestation of those who mask their vanity...
...During conversations with Nixon and other stars of the Watergate Follies, he accentuates the Boss's statements with phrases like, "Don't worry, we'll get them for that...
...As soon as the two are out of the camera's eye, the magic is unfortunately gone...
...It may be that Born Again is an isolated botch in an otherwise commendable movement...
...Colson is corrupt too, but in a mild sort of way...
...Gone are the butts, the coca-cola, and the emptied bottles of Richard's Wild Irish Rose...
...In prison he must endure horrible things: ripped underwear, a uniform a size too big, a troop of cockroaches, and the fact that the prison guards laugh at him when he wants his breakfast cooked to order...
...First, there are pictures of the White House, accompanied, of course, by the tune of "Hail to the Chief...
...to which Nixon patronizingly says "Good, Chuck, good!'' much as a football coach would congratulate a particularly savage tackle...
...For the same reason, the audience will love Born Again, notwithstanding what the experts have to say...
...They will hate Born Again because it caters to the hopes, beliefs and aspirations of just the people who are least likely to be sympathetic to the hopes, beliefs and aspirations of the critics, if they are even aware that they exist...
...The difference is that this particular Job is guilty as hell and reaping what he sowed...
...One portly man has a Jaws poster under his arm, which he rolls up into a giant straw, attempting, to the amusement of his companions, to suck popcorn up his siphon...
...An almost schizoid disorientation develops very early on in the film between Colson the bad boy, and Colson the Christian martyr...
...Later on, a prisoner attempts to kill him, but Colson is rescued by Raymond St...
...Is Andrew Young listening...
...To begin at the beginning...
...He could well be, for all I know, as fine a fellow as this film says he is...
...Well, for one thing, he curses...
...Colson must be baptized by fire before he can see the true light...
...Nobody cares whether Jones can act: that is not a prerequisite...
...Jacques is one of the two good things about BornAgain...
...Lewis, in The Great Divorce, put it best: "A wrong sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on...
...When Colson pleads guilty to smearing Ellsberg, his act is obviously that of a "martyr" expiating his own slightly perceptible guilt for unclear crimes...
...His "cruel" three-year jail sentence becomes the cross every Christian must bear...
...Probably the most climactic scene in the movie takes place when Colson, learning of his son's arrest on a marijuana charge, goes bonkers in the prison laundry, questioning God's love for him, throwing undershirts around, and bemoaning his fate...
...It may be that this film reflects neither the spirit nor the soul of Charles Colson...
...At home, the man who claimed that he would run over his grandmother for Nixon is a paragon of husbandly and fatherly virtue, both before and after conversion...
...Nevertheless, it must be said: Born Again is a loser...
...The implied comparison between the two is dishonest, to say the least...
...Jn addition, the Experience is nearly the only time during the film when Colson displays more than a certain petulance at the events overtaking him...
...How do we know that Nixon is a stinker...
...Ah, but the Lord works in mysterious ways...
...Born Again simply goes on—and on...
...But the point is made: God has called out to Job in the moment of his trial...
...It also brings about frequent flashbacks: this occurs throughout the film...
...When he decides, with his children, to defend his innocence rather than to cop a plea, they are shown walking outside of the Jefferson Memorial...
...Immediately, the phone rings (in Born Again, God communicates by phone) and Minnesota Congressman Al Quie is on the line, volunteering to use an obscure law to allow Quie to serve out the rest of Colson's sentence...
...Although the day appears sunny, there are no crowds of sweaty tourists to be seen, no small kids pulling at their father's arms and saying '"What's that strange man doing, Daddy...
...DANIEL DICKINSON...
...Another group of couples talk about the fact that Dean Jones is perfect to play "Chuck," because he too is "born again...
...The other is Senator Harold Hughes, who plays himself...
...or "We'll fix them...
...From the onset it is apparent that the critics will hate this film, based on Charles Colson's post-Watergate autobiography, regardless of its merits...
...The former may say nasty things on occasion, and even smoke a cigarette now and then, but it is made very clear that his brief protestations of regret to the side, Nixon's "hachetman" did nothing seriously wrong...
...Jacques, his first prison convert...
...Later on, when Colson hires an absurdly sleazy E. Howard Hunt to get the "dirt" on Daniel Ellsberg, it is made quite clear that Colson was, of course, not aware that Hunt was about to go out and break into the office of Ellsberg's psychologist...
...Why would someone want to put such a nice guy as this in jail...
Vol. 105 • December 1978 • No. 24
