"About a Boy". Viewed this with Carol, Walter, and Morgan this weekend. Its been out a few years, but I had not seen it. We see several people "get saved" in this movie. The entire Gospel is laid out here, or so it seems to me. Am I so buried in Christianity that I see it where it isn't? Is the director a stealth Christian? Is common grace at work?

The agent of salvation, the Christ figure, is a little boy, who is persecuted and then finally virtually "crucified" by his classmates during a talent show in an act of love for his mother, a sad single mom so miserable and self-involved that she attemps suicide earlier in the movie and doesn't deserve his sacrifice a bit. The little boy is very strong, single minded, and focused. You consider the aged hippie he has for a mother and the absence of an earthly father, and you have to ask just where did the boy come from?

The most interesting figure is High Grant's "Everyman". Selfish, but brutally honest with himself. The movie opens with him knowing exactly who he is, a "no one", a state in which he is apparently satisfied and whose main activity is "shagging" women. That is, until he meets "the boy", joins him in the vitual cruxifiction ("I am crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me . . .") and thereafter is able to connect with the beautiful, Madonna-like single mom with whom he had earlier started to fall in love but from whom he had turned away convinced of unworthiness.

It ends with a supper on Christmas Eve among a community full of hitherto broken people from broken relationships, people now in community, in a sort of church, enjoying one another, and bursting with promise.