Organized or institutional
religion as the Roman Catholic Church is in the background in the 2019 European
film, Hope Gap. Even
with such names as Grace and Angela, religious connotations are present. In
fact, the film can be interpreted, at least in part, as a critique on religion in
general and Catholicism in particular. The medium of film can indeed play a
vital role in critiquing sacred cows from the vantagepoint of an oblique angle
or a safe distance.
Before turning to how religion
is portrayed and critiqued, I turn briefly to the film’s narrative, or plot,
which centers around Edward leaving Grace, his wife of 29 years, for Angela, the
parent of one of Edward’s students. Edward has had enough of Grace’s violence
and rigidity, but he is gracious enough to explain to her as he is leaving that
they are very different people. Although the early years of their marriage had
been good, he leaves her convinced that he had picked the wrong woman for him.
So, Edward moves out to live with Angela, while the product of the marriage,
Jamie, is left to care for his mother, Grace, whose hope that Edward might
someday return must inevitably fade because he is in love with another woman. Unfortunately,
Edward and Grace both use their son rather than confront each other directly to
work out differences in the marital separation. Fearing that Grace might commit
suicide, Jamie is the good son and draws her out of her hopeless shell by means
of poetry rather than his mother’s religious faith.
That faith comes across as dogmatic
and rigid, rather than as open like spirit. When Jamie first visits, Grace is
not at all tolerant of his atheism or agnosticism—that we invent God to deal
with life, which is miserable and unfair. Believing in God cannot be forced,
according to Grace; she knows she cannot tell her son to believe in God. Interestingly, she totally agrees with Edward’s
claim that you feel love; you don’t tell love, so you can’t tell God to another
person. “God is a conviction,” Edward says. He has faith, for instance, that
his love for Angela is not illusory. The core teaching of Paul and Augustine
that God itself is love is the foundation of Edward’s religious faith, and yet
he has no interest in going to Mass. Rather, his faith in love is lived out as
he moves from a woman whom he does not love to one whom he does love.
The irony is that Grace goes
to Mass regularly and yet the way she treats Edward is not out of love. For
instance, she has a history of violence against him (but not vice versa), she
orders him around, and she even explicitly rejects and forbids him his “reality”
that includes divorce. To her, marriage is a life-long sacrament. To commit a
loveless, even possibly abusive marriage to such a rigid standard fails to take
into account the human condition. Not even Angela is an angel, for she tells
Grace that she has taken Edward because then only one person, rather than the
three, would be unhappy.
Another way of viewing Grace’s
need to dominate even to the point of arbitrating between “realities” to her
own advantage is by looking at her efforts to manipulate Jamie for information
on how she might contact Edward even though he is refusing to have any contact
with Grace, as well as her decision to drive to Angela’s house and even enter
it without even knocking at the door to confront Edward (and Angela) anyway.
Her lack of basic respect for Edward belies her claim to love him, and it makes
a shame of her attempt to foist her notion of the sacrament of marriage as
applicable to their marriage. Her highhandedness even shows in her complaint
about there being too many requests for mercy in the Mass. Obviously, she doesn’t
believe that her religious faith warrants any mercy from God, even though of
all of the main characters in the film, she is arguably farthest from God as inconvenient
love even to one’s detractors and enemies.
To be sure, Edward’s notion of
religious faith in God as felt as a conviction rather than to be imposed on
other people is not perfect. Implying that Grace is weak, in that she will not
accept the fact that their marriage has been over for a long time and it is
best to split up, he voice-overs a poem that includes, “by abandoning the weak,
the strong survive. It may seem brutal, but what the point of everyone being
dead.” Abandoning Grace is what he needed to do to stay alive, whether
literally or in terms of being able to love. It is ironic that Grace complains
of too many references the need for mercy in the Catholic Mass, and yet Edward
could stand to be more merciful to people who are vulnerable. His offer of friendship
to Grace made as she is leaving Angela’s house comes off as fake or naïve.
The poem that Jamie reads to his
mother at the end of the film is better. Strength and resilience are exactly
what Grace needs to hear, and Jamie even provides her with a website by which
she can post poems for other suffering or grieving people. It is through poetry,
rather than her Catholic faith, that she finds solace. As she finds through poetry
and volunteering at a secular charity that she is not alone in struggling and
suffering, both Edward’s survival of the strong (by abandoning the weak)
philosophy and Grace’s own rigid, imposing religious faith and church
attendance recede into the background. Unless a religious organization can
provide a place for the living, such that spiritual natures can ascend rather
than being tied down by rules that should not be applied uniformly to human
complexity, parishioners will look elsewhere even for spiritual food, whether
that comes in the form of a dutiful, loving son, poetry, or something else that
provides hope out of severe loss and suffering.
Suffering as a means of spiritual progress should not be applied to people who already grievously in emotional pain. Sacraments should be applied where liberating rather than felt as painful, destructive chains. The distinctly Christian kind of love that can be applied to Grace and Edward has to do with the compassion and mercy that each of them could extend to the other while they are separating. Such love does not necessitate that Edward drop or sacrifice his personal boundaries, and it does not give Grace license to violate them even in the name of compassion. Nor would mercy justify Edward in violating Grace’s need for emotional (and physical) space at the end of the film.
