Divining Joy

In Brit director, Stephen Daldry's much praised The Reader, an 18-year-old law student in post-WWII Germany falls in love with a woman twice his age who turns out to be Nazi war criminal. According to star Kate Winslet, it's "a love story"; according to the director it's about the struggle between two generations of Germans, one that participated in horrific genocide and the next generation that had to deal with its vicarious guilt.

For me, the movie is about an intriguing story concept: a young man with an older woman who is illiterate. Literature is part of the chemistry of their intimacy, words treated like love objects. The movie was scripted by British playwright David Hare from a novel by German real-life lawyer, Bernhart Schlink, who in an interview with Charlie Rose sidestepped the question of how much of the story was autobiographical by saying "all novels are autobiographical."

In David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Brad Pitt plays a man who was born old and ages backwards. The movie explores a fantasy many of us have: what if we start out with a young body and a mature mind that has already benefited from years of experience? The story is based on a 1920s story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Kate Winslet  also starred in another current release, Revolutionary Road, by another British-born director Sam Mendes. Based on a novel by Richard Yates, the movie is about a Connecticut couple in the 1950s, April and Frank Wheeler (played by Leonardo di Caprio) who sell their house and take their savings to live in Paris for six months to allow Frank to find out what artistic road he really wants to take instead of working a well-paying but boring job.

In my all-time favorite novel, André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name, a seventeen-year-old Italian boy falls in love for the first time with a twenty-something American literature professor and writer who spends the summer with his family on a seaside Italian village. Both are Jewish.

What are the features common to these works of fiction and/or cinema that appeal to me? Are these the directions I need to take to realize my own nascent dreams to become a writer, a tooler in words, ideas and images?

The movies are based on novels or short stories so all these works begin as prose. The concept is something many of us dream about but doesn't usually happen. The works explore what if scenarios with which we can identify. The characters are about people who are in love or falling in love. They are couples usually different or opposite to each other to make describing their relationship bring out features common to most relationships but in a more remarkable, shining, if your will, way. The couple share something deeply similar but have to struggle against their differences to make the connection or achieve a common purpose.