The preferred story

Among the major films released this year, there may be none more overtly religious than Life of Pi, directed by Ang Lee and based on Yann Martel’s best-selling book, which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2002.

The book and the film, which is remarkably faithful to the book, are about storytelling and about belief. In both the book and film, the adult Pi (Irrfan Khan) tells his story to a skeptical Canadian novelist (Rafe Spall). He recounts growing up in India, where his father owned a small zoo.

We learn how Pi gets his name and follow his religious pursuits as he adopts his mother’s Hinduism, then Catholicism, then Islam. His atheistic father emphasizes the importance of science and reasoning, and Pi adopts that as well. For him, the world is a vast body to be explored with curiosity and love.

Then economic troubles arrive, and Pi’s father must sell the zoo. He books his family and the animals on a cargo ship bound for Canada. A storm sinks the ship, and the teenage Pi (Suraj Sharma) alone survives among the humans. He finds refuge on a 26-foot-long lifeboat and is soon joined by a wounded Zebra, a vicious hyena, an orangutan and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. In a short time, only Pi and the tiger remain.

Their journey together make up the greater part of the narrative, and one of the amazing accomplishments of Martel’s novel is to maintain the reader’s keen interest over such a limited scope. The miracle of the story is that the boy survives his journey across the Pacific with a Bengal tiger. The miracle of the storytelling is that the author pulls this off.

The film does, too, though not as well. There are points where it felt long, and I wanted relief from the tension. But while the book focuses on Pi’s ponderings about life and faith, Lee uses some astounding images to beguile us. At times the water’s surface is like a mirror that reflects the sky so that Pi seems to be both underwater and above the clouds. He also shows Pi’s hallucinations as he struggles with thirst, hunger and fear.

Perhaps the film’s crowning achievement is the digital magic it uses to show a tiger on a boat with a boy. It looks so real, down to the smallest detail. We even see the tiger grow thinner as the food disappears. If this film isn’t nominated for an Oscar for best special effects, something is wrong.

The novelist has come to Pi because he was told that Pi would tell him a story that would make him believe in God—a tall order that sounds anathema to skeptics.

After Pi reaches land and is recovering in a Mexican hospital, two representatives of the Korean company that owned the ship ask him why the ship sank. Pi doesn’t know but tells his story. The two men say that no one will believe that story. So Pi makes up another story that replaces the animals with people from the ship and describes how he alone came to be left.

He tells the men they can choose which story they want to use. The novelist asks him, Which story is true? Pi says, Which story do you prefer?

Life of Pi is a fable about storytelling and belief. We choose the stories we want to believe. Our faith in God is not based on fact but on belief, just as not having faith in God is based on belief, on believing a different story.

I imagine theists and non-theists will enjoy this film for different reasons. Both will enjoy the riveting story of survival and the humor that runs throughout. But non-theists may not like the lesson inherent in the story.

Either way, it’s a well-made film.

A Thanksgiving lesson

Yesterday I gave a ride to two friends from Circles of Hope, an organization I volunteer for that works to eliminate poverty one family at a time. One of the friends is my Circle leader. Both women are in poverty and working hard to get by.
Let's call them R and J. We stop in Wichita at Open Door, a ministry of the United Methodist Church. Those qualified--and they have the paperwork to prove it--receive a turkey (size based on how many are in the person's household) and a sack of groceries. Although there are many people there, it's well organized, and the process moves quickly. We're there about 20 minutes. As we drive away and head to another wonderful organization--Victory in the Valley, which offers help to poor people who have cancer (J is being treated for cancer)--J comments that because of  some good fortune, they have an extra turkey.
A few days earlier, J's daughter and R stopped at an organization in Newton, where we all live (20 miles north of Wichita), and learned they had 10 turkeys left, so the two young women took one home. This is the extra that J was referring to. The three of them, plus a few others, planned to have Thanksgiving dinner together today.
I responded to J's comment of having an extra turkey by saying, "Eat it. Leftovers are good." I'm thinking, These people are barely scraping by each month, depending on the services of churches and others who give out boxes of food each month, since their disability payments (R is also recovering from cancer) aren't nearly enough.
Then R says, without hesitation, "We'll give it (the extra turkey) to someone who doesn't have one." And she mentions someone she knows who needs one.
She said this matter-of-factly, without accusation. Still, I felt humbled, awakened to my natural tendency to just accept more for myself instead of thinking of others.
Scripture commands (or suggests, if that's more acceptable) us to be thankful at all times. This is difficult, to say the least. While I believe in this practice (and fail at it regularly), I also believe it's a good practice to have special days for offering thanks. Like today.
So let me offer these thanks:
• I'm thankful for the many organizations that give food to people in need. And the ones I witnessed yesterday do this cheerfully, without looking down on those they're serving.
• I'm thankful to be friends with people in poverty. They have so much to teach me, and they are so patient with my blindness to people's needs. They're always thankful for the help I offer, and they're always reluctant to ask for help. They are courageous and inspiring.
 • I'm thankful today for family and friends, and I pray for the many in our land who don't have people close by to share a meal with.
Happy Thanksgiving.

Women confront gender-based violence

The linked problems of sex trafficking and forced prostitution, gender-based violence and maternal mortality claim one woman every 90 seconds, according to a four-hour documentary film shown on PBS stations in October and available online at pbs.org/halfthesky. On the other hand, it is women and girls who are doing the most to change such human-rights abuses across the globe.

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide is inspired by the book of the same name by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who are New York Times reporters.

The film visits 10 countries and follows Kristof and celebrity activists America Ferrera, Diane Lane, Eva Mendes, Meg Ryan, Gabrielle Union and Olivia Wilde as it tells the stories of inspiring, courageous individuals.

Kristof and WuDunn, who lived in China and reported on events there, became aware that China aborted 39,000 female fetuses in one year, and no one was reporting this. Their focus on human-rights abuses against women grew from there and led to their book.

In the film, Kristof and Mendes visit Sierra Leone, a country recovering from a civil war that ended in 2002. However, the incidences of rape that increased during the war continued afterward, reinforced by a culture where shame falls on the survivor rather than the perpetrator and where laws fail to prosecute rapists.

Kristof and Mendes talk with the director of a rape crisis center, who says they’ve seen 9,000 survivors in eight years, and 26 percent of these were under 12 years old. She shows them a 3-year-old who had been raped.

Kristof and Mendes talk with a 14-year-old who says she was raped by her “uncle,” who is a pastor. Others have also said he attacked them. They go with the police, who arrest the man. They talk with him, and he denies the charge.

In the end, he is released, and the girl’s father expels her and her mother from his home because she brought shame on the family.

The lesson is that rape is unfortunate but forgivable, while being raped is punishable. Less than 1 percent of the rapes reported to authorities are prosecuted.

Next, Kristof and Ryan visit Cambodia and meet the amazing Somaly, who runs an organization that rescues girls from brothels. Somaly, who speaks four languages, was taken from her village at age 10 or 11 and sold to a brothel at age 12 and brutalized. Later she escaped and now helps girls in similar  circumstances.

While the problem can feel overwhelming, she says, “everyone can do something.” The most important tool in fighting sex trafficking and other gender-based violence is education.

The film next visits Vietnam, where the organization Room to Read helps girls gain access to good education. One girl bikes 17 miles to her school.

In many poor families across the world, girls are kept at home to work, while boys are more likely to receive education beyond the fifth grade. One Vietnamese father, whose wife had died, sacrifices in order for his daughter to attend school.

The film notes that schools are often a safe haven, that education is transformative. It’s also a great investment in a community because “when you educate a girl, you educate a village.”

This documentary is both hard to watch and inspiring. It presents a huge problem long ignored by most of us, yet it offers hope. The film is definitely worth seeing. 

Should students grade teachers?

Schools and teachers have been under scrutiny, pressured to produce higher test scores among their students. Besides producing higher stress among teachers and students, results haven’t been that great.

A more recent emphasis has been on evaluating teachers, since it’s often observed that good teachers help produce the best students. But how best to evaluate teachers and find ways for them to improve?

An article in the October issue of The Atlantic describes a new approach that looks promising. In “Why Kids Should Grade Teachers,” Amanda Ripley looks at a survey being tried by school officials in a handful of cities.

The idea seems so simple and obvious, it’s a wonder it hasn’t been tried earlier: Ask students to evaluate teachers. Some teachers may cringe at first at such a suggestion, but research has shown, Ripley writes, that “if you asked kids the right questions, they could identify, with uncanny accuracy, their most—and least—effective teachers.”

This approach is much better than the reliance on test scores, as in No Child Left Behind. While “test scores can reveal when kids are not learning,” Ripley writes, “they can’t reveal why. They might make teachers relax or despair—but they can’t help teachers improve.”

The origin of this approach goes back a decade to a Harvard economist named Ronald Ferguson, who went to a small school district in Ohio to figure out why black kids did worse on tests than white kids. Eventually he gave the kids a survey that wasn’t about their entire school but about their specific classrooms. “The same group of kids answered differently from one classroom to the next,” Ripley writes, “but the differences didn’t have as much to do with race as he’d expected; in fact, black students and white students largely agreed.”

The difference was in the teachers. “In one classroom, the kids said they worked hard, paid attention and corrected their mistakes; they liked being there, and they believed that the teacher cared about them,” Ripley writes. “In the next classroom, the very same kids reported that the teacher had trouble explaining things and didn’t notice when students failed to understand a lesson.”

Some years later, after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched a massive project to study 3,000 teachers in seven cities and learn what made effective or ineffective, Thomas Kane, a colleague of Ferguson’s, decided to include student perceptions.

The responses helped predict which classes would have the most test-score improvement at the end of the year. Ripley writes: “In math, for example, the teachers rated most highly by students delivered the equivalent of about six more months of learning than teachers with the lowest ratings.”

Students are better at evaluating teachers not because they’re smarter but because they’ve had months to form an opinion, as opposed to 30 minutes, as is the case with many evaluations. And there are more of them—dozens, as opposed to a single principal.

The surveys do not ask, Do you like your teacher? Instead, they ask what students saw. Teachers learned that what mattered most was having control over the classroom and making it a challenging place.

This evaluation is not only more effective, it’s less expensive. The shorter version of the survey, used in the Gates study, is available for public use and costs less than $5 per student to implement. Employing professionals to watch classes and give teachers feedback multiple times a year costs about $97 per student.

Ripley interviewed a high school student who took part in a survey. She said, “Everybody knows the good teachers from the ones who don’t really want to be in the job.” We just need to ask them.

Everything is connected

Maybe the best novel I’ve read this year was actually published in 2004. It’s Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. He also wrote one of my favorite novels from last year, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. So when I learned that Cloud Atlas was being made into a movie, I thought, I want to see this.

You may have seen articles about how this book seemed impossible to film. It is told in six stories, beginning in the 19^th century, then moving to 1931, then 1973, then the present (2004 in the book, 2012 in the movie), then 2144, then the far future, in a postapocalyptic time. The first half of the narrative moves in that order, telling half of each story, then goes in the opposite direction in the second half, ending in the 19^th century. It’s an intriguing setup that Mitchell pulls off, using different styles, even different genres, for each story. He also connects the stories in subtle ways as he develops overarching themes.

Lana and Andy Wachowski, who directed the Matrix films, and Tom Tykwer, who directed Run, Lola, Run, wrote and directed the film Cloud Atlas. Rather than tell the stories the way Mitchell did, they divided up the entire narrative into many scenes and moved back and forth among the six stories.

I’ve read some pretty negative reviews of the film, which I saw yesterday, so I went in without high expectations. But I liked it. I thought the editing throughout was excellent and at times ingenious. There were some miscues, and the Wachowskis (I’m guessing; I don’t know who directed which parts) are too in love with futuristic chase scenes, but overall I thought it was good.

A group of excellent actors play multiple roles, often in elaborate makeup (probably an Oscar nomination here): Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Susan Sarandon and Hugh Grant being the best known.

The movie makes the themes more overt than does the book. One overarching theme is that everything is connected (I realize that's a cliché), and the film shows how the actions of individuals, often against repressive systems, reverberate through time. It also plays up superficial connections, such as a birthmark that appears on a character in each story.

The book and film help us think about the sweep of human history, the constant struggle for not only survival but meaning. They ask, What does it mean to be human? Is there some life beyond death? Do our lives recur through history?

I don’t know how well a viewer of the film who has not read the book will be able to follow the story (stories). Even if it is confusing, though, the overall effect of the film is powerful. Having read the book and knowing the basic narrative, I could focus on the film’s images, the acting, the emotional impact.

It may not be my favorite film of 2012 (there are still many films to see), but it’s a contender.