A Movie Review:  “The Mill and the Cross”

Review written by Dan McDonald

 

            If you are looking for a fast-paced suspense filled action movie, you will be sorely disappointed in this movie.  But if you are looking for something original that will enable you to broaden your movie watching horizons this may well be something that will interest you.

          The movie was filmed in 2009, but premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 23, 2011.  It was a co-produced film involving Swedish and Polish film-makers.  The film employed English speaking actors Rutger Hauer, Michael York, and Charlotte Rampling.  It sought to create a moving picture from a classic 1564 Dutch painting by Peter Bruegel the Elder entitled “The Procession to Calvary”.  The movie was the offspring of Michael Francis Gibson’s book The Mill and the Cross.  The movie brings you into a conversation between Bruegel, the artist played by Rutger Hauer, and a patron of the arts interested in purchasing Bruegel’s work, Nicholas Jonghelinck portrayed by Michael York.  On a personal note, seeing several of York’s movies in the seventies it was a bit interesting to see him as an older man.  I guess forty years will do that to a person.  Bruegel begins to explain what he is trying to do in his piece.  Bruegel is doing something rather interesting in the movie.  On the one hand the painting is based on the theme of Christ’s suffering as he proceeds towards Calvary and is placed on the cross.  But Bruegel makes no attempt to place Christ into his original setting in the ancient Roman province of Judea.  The soldiers instead of being Roman soldiers are the occupying Spanish soldiers ruling over Holland and the lowlands (“The Netherlands”) in Bruegel’s times.  I was most fascinated by Bruegel’s conscious decision to portray Christ’s death in his own times and setting rather than attempt to picture it with historical accuracy.  There is one discrepancy in this depiction.  Bruegel understands that Calvary and Christ’s death on the cross took place on a mountain just outside of Jerusalem, so you have this mountain scene in an otherwise Lowlands setting.

          As a Christian that has been involved in congregations where I had a number of ministers who sought seriously to understand the historical context of a Biblical passage they were preaching, this is a fascinating study of the difficulties of getting the original setting understood correctly.  That is why I so loved this movie.  If Bruegel did not care if he had the historical setting of Christ’s passion set accurately in the area of ancient Jerusalem; the Polish and Swedish film-makers involved in this project were extremely concerned to set forth the Reformation era backdrop to Bruegel’s painting.  The goal of the movie was to bring to life the townspeople and the culture that Bruegel painted in his work.  Bruegel’s ambitious painting had at least 500 people set forth in this single painting.

It was fascinating to see a late 16^th century way of life awaken on the movie screen.  There is one quickly passing slightly risqué but wonderfully humanly accurate scene where a family living in a common thatched roof cottage with dirt floors is waking up to begin a new day.  It is a home with an extended family living under the same roof where one of the boys hearing a mature sister or sister-in-law rising up to face the day, runs over to a knot hole he has discovered to try to catch a glimpse of her dressing.  One realizes that privacy did not come easily to the common classes.  Then you are reminded how the cottages were dwelling places not only for people but also for farm animals.  One has to smile at a mother’s patience growing thin as with a family of probably at least a half dozen little children, she is trying to do her sweeping of a dirt floor when a good sized four-legged animal in their home has to be pushed out of the way.  The movie also captures the loudness of the times.  The Mill-keeper walks up long winding creaky steps and releases the mill to start grinding the wheat – a very symbolic part of the movie where the grain has to be ground down to give life to the townspeople.  The mill, driven by the winds of the North Sea, is terribly loud and the miller’s home is not separated from the equipment of the milling business.  It is a wonderful depiction by the film-makers of a Reformation era village.  As a Protestant, and as one whose religious traditions have a Reformation era imprint on them it was fascinating to see how these people whose traditions had such an impact on how I view the Christian life actually lived.  It was also interesting how the film-makers who were Polish and Swedish sought to present in nuanced manners the life of the more Calvinistic Dutch and Reformed reformation perspective of 16^th century Holland.

The film-makers captured something that few of my friends who loved the English and Dutch Puritans, or the somewhat Calvinistic Anglican Reformation under Cranmer have emphasized, and certainly I never have recognized the emphasis these film-makers recognized.  The person presented as Bruegel’s depiction of the Blessed Virgin Mary speaks of how her son had been connected to the fates, and made us believe that we could rise above them.  That is something I have never heard from any of my contemporaries, and certainly not something I had ever thought about, even as we imagined ourselves to be “Reformed” and “Reformation Christians.”  But the statement made perfect sense when I thought about it.  The Reformation era was a transition time when Europe was moving from a caste system where everybody’s life was generally determined by their place of birth into their lives determined almost wholly by the family into which you were born, the marriage to which you were arranged, and the vocation into which you were placed as an apprentice.  But that old European world was changing.  Those participating in the Reformation were churchmen who looked at Christ’s predestination as the foundation for the Christian’s life of freedom.  These Polish and Swedish film-makers understood that the Reformation theologians were fixated on predestination as the price Christ paid to set humanity free.  He was destined to suffer and die so that we who had been enslaved to sin and death could rise above the fates and destiny as conquerors in him.  Now that is something I found that these movie producers understood of Reformation theology that I had never once considered.  But it all fell wonderfully into shape the moment Charlotte Rampling spoke of her son coming to struggle with the fates and making us believe we could be free.  There was in the Reformation articulation of the Christian faith an emphasis both on predestination and Christian freedom.  The film-makers who presented this movie captured this nuance in such a wonderful simple moment which like an individual movie frame passes by our eyes almost unnoticed.

The final thing I would like to say about this movie is that it made me see the importance of contextualizing our understanding of the Christian faith.  There would have been a time when I felt that the great duty of the Christian preaching on Biblical passage is to get the original setting correct.  But that is not the whole of the Christian duty to understand the Scriptures in their original setting.  The second important work of the Church and of ministers and of everyone who has any role in teaching the faith from priests, ministers, parish school teachers, Sunday School teachers, to parents with their children is that our “portrayal of Christ and Biblical truth” must be translated into the setting of the lives of the ones we are teaching.  St. Paul in the Book of Romans captures this when he describes his preaching of the Gospel connecting our Lord’s death for sinners to sinners living in a different time and place from where our Lord Jesus actually suffered and died.  He deals with the past and the present simultaneously saying, “But God demonstrates his own love to us in that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.”  Christ’s death is not enslaved to time.  It took place when we were sinners even if we were born some 2000 years following his death.  This is one of those misunderstood points of agreement and contention between Catholics and Protestants.  To a Catholic, Christ’s death took place before God from the foundation of the world even to the summing up of all things in Christ.  They will agree that Jesus did die specifically nearly 2000 years ago.  But the concept of the mass in which Christ is sacrificed for our sins is not being repeated every time a Roman Catholic priest does the mass, rather the sacrifice of Christ is being brought forth into time and space every time the priest breaks the bread and pours the wine which becomes the body and blood of Christ.  We who are Protestants might find some aspects of the Roman Catholic understanding different from our own, but it is not as different as we sometimes imagine.  For what every Christian, whether Protestant or Catholic seeks to do in the presentation of Christ’s death, is to demonstrate in the now that which Christ has done in the past without binding the work of Christ to some piece of ancient history; for his own suffering is once and for all time.

This movie is not one however that preaches at you, like perhaps I am guilty of doing in this review.  Someone studying art for the sake of his love of art might see almost none of what I have talked about.  Nevertheless he will appreciate how Bruegel thought about his painting, how he selected an anchor point for developing his painting, and then both revealed and concealed Christ in the very middle of his painting just as Bruegel understood this event to have worked out in real human life.  One realizes that an artist is a creator, an intellectual, picturing a view of life and symbolizing it in his painting however realistic he aims to be instead of symbolic.  A painting may not be gaudy with contrived symbols, but every time paint is applied to canvas, an artist necessarily symbolizes to those around him what he sees to be the truth of life.  For Bruegel, Christ is the one who had come to live and die for the people of his time and place.  He was the one who came to set us free, to set us free to live that one true life in that freedom which is true life and freedom.  This son of the handmaiden, of the Blessed Mary had come to the 16th century, to Bruegel, to the European Lowlands, and he had died there in accordance with the Gospel, hidden right there in plain sight in the midst of the people going about their business in everyday life.