NOT LIKE A ROLLER COASTER RIDE
Once I had a conversation with a fellow who worked in the film industry in Hollywood. He told me that most movies these days are conceptually modeled after amusement park rides like Thunder Mountain Express or Space Mountain at Disneyland. The rides start off easily, speed up, put the riders through some pretty horrendous twists and turns designed to scare them, slow down, and finally dump them benignly out at the exit. This is the formula that sells. Well, Luther isn’t like that. It’s not a Hollywood movie and certainly isn’t calculated to please the MTV generation or those with attention spans less than 20 minutes. It’s beautifully filmed and acted, though, and it’s reverent as well.
At the film’s opening, we see the young Martin Luther slogging through the mud during a fierce storm, with lightning bolts crashing everywhere. Martin is terrified and pledges that, if God will save him, he will devote his life to serving Him. God does save him and, contrary to his father’s wishes, Martin becomes a Roman Catholic monk. In this two-hour movie that compresses 50 years into two hours we see the major events of Luther’s life and understand well how the Reformation came to be.
Luther is a monk par excellence. However, he has doubts about his faith. His chief desire is to commune with a loving God, but he feels shut off from the Almighty. An older priest who is his chief mentor says to him, “Bind yourself to Christ, and you will know God’s love.” This simple piece of advice transforms Luther and starts him down the path that will change history. Soon Martin is sent from Germany to Rome, where he is able to witness the corruption of Roman Catholicism at first hand. Leo, the Pope, has a number of mistresses and has fathered children. The Church needs money to bankroll its building projects and maintain its empire.
To get enough money to do this, the Church has resorted to selling indulgences. These are paper certificates which, depending on how much one pays, supposedly reduce the amount of time one’s relatives have to spend languishing in Purgatory. If one pays enough, one’s salvation is assured. Luther buys an indulgence but soon throws it away, realizing the sham of the entire practice. He returns to Germany a changed man, perceiving that the only way to salvation is through a relationship with Jesus Christ. In the year 1517, angry at the way the Church has twisted Christian belief and practice, Luther hammers his list of 95 theses on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral. He insists that everyone, no matter how poor or uneducated, has the right to direct access to God and should be able to read the Bible on his own. These ideas are anathema to Rome, of course, and the Reformation is born.
The acting is uniformly excellent, with Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love) doing a terrific job of portraying the young Martin Luther. His performance seems so heartfelt that one wonders whether he is merely an accomplished actor or might actually know the Lord. Peter Ustinov is superb as Duke Frederick the Wise, Luther’s benefactor. And Alfred Molina convincingly plays John Tetzel (one of the most notorious sellers of indulgences) as a scumbag without allowing him to become a cartoonish villain.
A lot of Christians these days bemoan the lack of decent, moral entertainment on the screen and on television, saying that there’s just nothing out there worth seeing. Well, that’s not the case here. Luther is a moral, Christian movie. It’s slow at times and requires us to pay attention. It’s devoid of special effects and amusement-park-like twists. But it rings true. We Christians need to support films like this if we want more of them.
Film Rating: PG-13
My Rating: 3 ½ stars
Highly Recommended
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