With only Jake Gyllenhaal’s disturbing Nightcrawler new in theaters this past weekend, I want to revisit Begin Again, a little indie flick just released on video Oct. 28.
Begin Again, starring Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo, opened in theaters June 27, the same day that Transformers 4 plowed into multiplexes with all the subtlety we’ve come to expect from the series. While Transformers thundered to a $138 million weekend, Begin Again earned just a little over $500,000. And yet, this rare R-rated (mostly for language) confection is pretty sweet and (dare I say it) wholesome in a way that, frankly, Transformers can’t match. They call it a romance, but the love is all about the music and family and second chances. And if you look closely, you may even see an unexpected tip o’ the hat to faith.
Dan (Ruffalo) is a down-on-his-luck music producer—a one-time Grammy-winning dynamo who’s about two bars away from his coda. His marriage has crumbled. He barely knows his teenage daughter. He spends his time and cash on booze, and he’s rapidly running out of all three. And one dark night, after losing his job in the record company he helped create, he’s ready to get drunk and die.
On what might be his last subway ride, snockered beyond recognition, he sees and hears an annoying evangelist handing out pamphlets and encouraging wary riders to seek God. “God may not be on our time,” he says in that sincere, clueless way you’d expect from an evangelist in this sort of movie, “but He’s always on time.” Dan takes a pamphlet and grins a drunken grin, mostly in mockery.
“I’m gonna have a little talk with God, tonight, all right,” Dan says, sloshing off the train. He turns back to the closing doors. “But what if He doesn’t answer? What if He doesn’t answer?”
The train speeds away, not acknowledging Dan’s question.
Dan staggers into a bar and slumps down, just as a woman named Gretta (Knightley) begins to sing. She’s suffered her own miserable day: She just learned her long-time boyfriend has been cheating on her. She’s ready to go home to England and put her life back together, but a friend of hers dragged her to the bar. Now, he calls her up on stage to sing—the last thing she wants to do. But sing she does. And her song—bitter and lonely and hopeless—includes the words, “Don’t pray to God ‘cause He won’t talk back.”
Interesting, isn’t it, how these two apparent rejections of faith sound so similar? God not answering. Here, in the lowest of lows, the two bemoan how God has forsaken them. How He won’t even listen—the worst sort of rejection, I’d imagine, for musicians, whose lives are so wrapped up in sound. It reminds me of one of the most famous angry laments in all the Bible, Psalm 22, verses 1 and 2:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me,
so far from my cries of anguish?
My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
by night, but I find no rest.
It’s another echo of silence—of a God who does not or will not listen. It’s probably unnecessary to mention that the Psalm like Gretta’s song, was originally set to music.
Those who know the Psalm, of course, know that it turns around. It talks about how those who cried out to him were rescued, how in their anguish they were delivered. God heard the heartbreak and answered.
And in Begin Again, there’s a hint that He answers here, too—on time, as the evangelist said. For in that moment of anguish, these two lost souls find each other. Dan hears Gretta’s song. And he walks over to introduce himself.
“I was ready to kill myself until I heard your song,” Dan says. He admits to her he’s washed up … but he still wants her to work with him to make something special. And Gretta, perhaps even more miraculously, decides that she wants to give it a shot. It’s a new beginning for both of them. They each, in that moment, are born again.
We don’t hear about God for the rest of the movie. Both Dan and Greta do some things that aren’t all that pious. (And, of course, this R-rated movie has lots and lots of foul language.) And yet, I don’t think this nod to faith was an accident. Two lost souls are found again through, you might say, some amazing grace.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In