Death Takes a Starring Role in Movies-With-a-Moral

Death may have taken a holiday in the 1934 film that inspired “Meet Joe Black,” but he’s been working overtime recently, along with his old buddy Disease. From the evidence of what is currently up on movie screens, the duo never sleep.

“Stepmom” shows a fiercely protective mother played by Susan Sarandon and the effects cancer has on her reconfigured family, which includes Julia Roberts as her ex-husband’s fiance. “Theory of Flight” stars Helena Bonham Carter as a 25-year-old virgin suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease who wants to experience sex before she dies, preferably with Kenneth Branagh.

“Hilary and Jackie” has Emily Watson as real-life concert cellist Jacqueline du Pre, who contracts multiple sclerosis.

Anguish and death figure prominently in all of these movies. Why, then, do we walk away red-eyed but glowing, warmed by the fire of sacrifice and virtue? The simple answer is that while all of these films seem to be about dying, what they’re really about is life. A huge sign on a wall in one scene of “Theory of Flight” even shouts “Get a Life” at Branagh. By the end of the film, that is exactly what he does.

And if “Patch Adams,” currently the country’s most popular movie, can be said to be about anything other than rank manipulation, living life to the fullest--even in the face of death--just might be it.

Death--especially violent death--has always been a mainstay of entertainment, but dying is the new hot topic. But even when these movies deal lingeringly and graphically with dying, their purpose is to highlight the quest for meaning and quality in life.

Most of these movies, then, work as instructive moral fables, some more fabulous than others. “Flight,” “Stepmom” and “Jackie” treat human frailty more or less realistically. But death also figures prominently in a number of fantasies on movie screens recently, including “Jack Frost,” as well as the aforementioned “Joe Black.” (Fall’s “What Dreams May Come” also dealt with a fantastical view of the afterlife, as did spring’s “City of Angels.”)

And television has not been immune: One of the season’s most notable shows was the Thanksgiving-week demise of “NYPD Blue’s” Bobby Simone (Jimmy Smits).

Gary M. Laderman, an assistant professor of American religion at Emory University, would include in this movement books such as the bestseller “Tuesdays With Morrie” and “Letting Go: Morrie’s Reflections on Living While Dying,” both of which chronicle the last days and insights of a former sociology professor.

Illness and dying aren’t new to movies. “Stepmom” is a direct descendant of the morality tales that once proliferated in Hollywood, perhaps most notably in the melodramas that flourished from the 1930s to the 1950s. After television took over the role of telling stories about human relationships, there was a period in the 1980s when so many made-for-television movies dealt with illness that they were derisively labeled “disease of the week” films.

But such stories have deep roots. In Laderman’s view, they act as “cultural myths” in which a close encounter with death makes better people of the living.

“It can be identified in some form as a running theme that you find in all kinds of different cultures but that has a particularly strong presence in American history,” he said. “That’s part of America’s myth--the happy ending, the optimistic outlook . . . that people will get through the crisis and will have grown and developed.”

Network movies no longer dwell as much on sickness and dying, but Stuart Fishoff, a Los Angeles psychologist and screenwriter, said that doesn’t mean the subjects have left the air. They’ve simply moved to series like “Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman” and “Touched by an Angel” and to networks such as Lifetime, which is directed primarily at women, he believes. The popularity of medical shows such as “ER” may also owe something to this phenomenon.

The movies that are part of this inspirational death fest range in approach from “Stepmom’s” prettified and grandly romantic take on dying to the exquisite subtleties of “Hilary and Jackie,” a British film that engages the mind as well as the emotions.

“Patch Adams” works overtime at being inspirational, but it differs from the other current movies on this topic in that it isn’t really an instructional fable so much as a sermon on the mount. Its central character (Robin Williams) is a saintly prophet among heathens. Characters all around him heed his teachings, but they undergo change only in order to highlight Williams’ transformative effect--the better to glorify the real-life doctor on which the character is based. It isn’t contact with death that changes lives here, it’s touching the hem of Williams’ garment.

Of the others in this group, “Stepmom” is the most conventional. If it also turns out to be one of the most popular, it will be in large part because it taps so effectively into a wellspring of fundamental human emotion: a mother’s love for her children and our great fear and reluctance to let go. This movie has more than its share of scenes in which Sarandon bestows the gift of more abundant life on the ones who will be left behind--the most touching (or saccharine) are the series of scenes on Christmas Day that end the film. But it is a small moment nearer the middle of the movie that is key.

While watching her children play, Sarandon virtually passes the torch to the woman who will become her successor, sharing information about the children that Roberts can use after Sarandon is gone. It is the distillation of what nearly all of these movies are about: the imparting of valued wisdom to help the living.

Both “Stepmom” and the earlier Meryl Streep movie “One True Thing” deal with the necessity of letting go, of accepting that a tower of strength must be relinquished, and in each case the living are made wise and enriched by their encounter with the dying.

Unlike “Stepmom,” Streep’s wasting away is graphically, even shockingly, presented; we see her skeletal frame, her sunken eyes, the head made nearly bald from chemotherapy. In other important ways, though, the films are similar: Both deal with conflict between an older housewife and a younger woman who has rejected traditional female roles. And like Sarandon, Streep also imparts wisdom before she dies. She teaches her daughter (Renee Zellweger) a different set of values and to see the fullness of her (Streep’s) life. Zellweger grows as a human being and becomes able to see and accept the reality of who both her parents are.

The new British-made “The Theory of Flight” is a far less predictable film than “Stepmom” with far less cuddly characters. It follows the formula, though, in that Branagh is transformed by his relationship with the dying Bonham Carter. She’s in a wheelchair, but he is the emotional cripple who is healed through knowing her.

“Hilary and Jackie” is the most structurally daring of these films as well as the most emotionally complex. It employs the looping structure of a Quentin Tarantino movie to explore from different angles the lives of two real-life sisters, Hilary and Jacqueline du Pre, one a talented musician who drops her career to become a wife and mother, the other an acclaimed concert cellist whose life unravels because of her illness as well as her own personality flaws and the difficulties of the life she chose.

There is nothing formulaic here. Rather than deal in codified “truths” or recycled cultural assumptions--the better to exploit the power of myth--this is the real thing. No easy moral lessons.

The blunt depiction of Jackie’s physical deterioration is only one aspect of the film that makes the viewer wince. Even before the onset of physical symptoms, Jackie is in pain. Extraordinarily needy, she flails and flounders, grasping for a love that can’t satisfy her. Hers is the greediness of a child, and sometimes Watson’s performance calls to mind Thandie Newton’s portrayal of an equally infantile and needy character in “Beloved.”

The bond between the two sisters is so great that Hilary will give up anything for Jackie. But they each also can be blind to the other’s pain and capable of huge misunderstandings, which makes it all the more touching when they are reunited, with Hilary helping Jackie through her final, anguished suffering.

Both Fishoff and Laderman believe the aging of the baby boom generation has much to do with the growing interest in dying, spirituality and the afterlife.

Laderman has written a book about the history of attitudes toward death titled “The Sacred Remains,” and he is writing another. Dying may loom large in our entertainment because of changing attitudes generally, he said. “There is a greater willingness to reflect on death now than what existed 30 or 40 or 50 years ago,” he said. “It may be the result of the incredible proliferation of media and forms of communication which bring death to us in a more immediate way.”

But Fishoff notes that a preoccupation with death is as old as mankind.

“Humans have always been concerned about mortality,” he said. “That’s why they created heaven. That’s why they created the soul.”