Continuing The Journey

ArthurWritten by Father Michael

Seeing a remake of a movie or play is always difficult. I always compare it to the first viewing. The danger is that only the director, writers, actors are producing it from a different viewpoint but so am I seeing it through different eyes. I am thirty years older now then the first time I saw ARTHUR and I am in a completely different place. I laughed at different things and so does the new movie ARTHUR. It is still funny and outrageous and I have to laugh at myself at why I laugh at a thirty year old drunk, rich boy, who spends money frivolously on his every whim. ARTHUR is selfish, a self-centered social and spiritual misfit, but I laughed at his antics. Russell Brand has make Dudley Moore’s role his own.

Arthur’s mother, Vivienne Bach, is portrayed as a stone-hearted business woman. She hired a nanny, who stills cares for Arthur. The nanny gave him all the love and the training that his mother did not as she was busy amassing a billion dollar fortune. The awkward moments she spends with her son shows a glimpse of why he behaves with abandonment. Vivienne has sky-rocketed to success as a businesswoman just as she bombed as a mother. Now she wishes her son to accept some responsibility and help her continue to amass more wealth. She arranges a marriage that will help secure her fortune and Arthur’s. It is a loveless arrangement that in many ways mirrors her relationship with her son. She threatens to disinherit him twice. First because he will not sober up, then because he does not want to marry the woman she avariciously chose for him. Her threats do not stop Arthur who finally has found love.

Vivienne admires with a grimace Arthur’s integrity buts sees it as being stupid. Arthur is ready to give up his nine hundred and fifty-four million dollar inheritance for love. He decides to go to work and fails miserably. His beloved nanny becomes sick and he cares for her with love. He tries AA but falls back to his old ways, but his love for Naomi, a plain unlicensed New York tour guide, is true and transforming. True loves converts him. Love also crushes Vivienne’s encapsulated granite heart, love and forgiveness is at the core of her heart and cannot remain hard. Arthur is not the businessman son she wishes but he is capable of running the family foundation. Love and forgiveness conquers her and she lavishes it on her son.

Love does transform the Bach family. It breaks the cold heart and forgives and it transforms two vacuous hearts. I have a pen engraved with “The Greatest is Love”. This irreverent comedy bears this out. The unearned act of forgiveness, that only a mother can give a child wins. The grace of a parent’s love, a gift from God, mirrors God’s love and forgiveness. Love transforms two human beings. They remain human, sinful, but better because of love.

Love does that to us. When we accept God’s we also start the process of conversion.