Bella

Bella is a film about living. This is a beautiful and moving film which touched so many emotions deep within me. It is difficult to know how I would’ve viewed this film if I wasn’t a father of two young girls, but I think this film can touch everybody on some level. The themes in this film circle around love, embracing life, and family.

It baffles me how some in our culture cannot embrace life in all its forms simply because the inconvenience it might cause, or because of the potential inconvenience it could be to an unwanted child. This issue also surprises me greatly because I cannot understand how modern liberal humanism can excuse this away. I know that Francis Schaeffer would argue that the modern humanist stance on abortion is a natural cause of modern cosmology, but it seems so logically inconsistent to say that a person’s right to not have someone else living is more important than the life of that individual. I know it all basically comes down to the belief that there’s something non-spiritual about life, and where life begins, from a humanistic standpoint, is simply where particular electrochemical processes happen in the brain. Naturally this is a very slippery slope in one which I shudder to think of the implications of.

I’m only reminded of the philosophy of Peter Singer, who advocates that it is not morally wrong to kill an infant within minutes after its birth. I simply cannot understand how someone can see a fetus’s presence in the birth canal as causing biological change, and I’m sure that no one does, even though several arguments with abortion proponents of claimed that this is the case and the true meaning of “life begins at birth, not conception”.

At this point I’m no longer writing about the film but on a particular topic which I spend a good bit of time considering. In the Senate youth program, there was a young lady who, as a Quaker, did not believe that it was consistent to be a pacifist unless she was also pro-life. This person was not from a conservative Christian right, but I do think they had a very consistent world-view. I also remember a very politically liberal friend at MIT who believed that it was also morally wrong to legalise abortion. In the context of these experiences I find myself asking how Christians can support the left side or political spectrum in light of their embracing this particular issue. A friend of mine who’s a congressional staffer shed some light on this. He explained a good friend of his who while a conservative Christian has decided to vote for Barak Obama. His justification was that abortion is pretty much a non-issue, in the sense that neither party is ready to change the status quo. If this is the case then the greater moral wrong from this person’s eyes was the war in Iraq are many more lives, in his view, has been lost then in abortion. While I find several huge flaws in his reasoning, it is least is a consistent argument that I can disagree with. In any case, this is a serious issue with which I think all Christians must seriously wrestle.
Oh well, back to the movie. The acting was absolutely excellent, the score fantastic, and the storyline thought-provoking. I see so many movies searching for a movie just like this one, which encourages me to embrace life and be a better person. So many movies are either nihilistic, or simply inane. They lack the depth and tenor of this movie. The family interactions were so healthy, so clean, and so beautifully realistic. I would give this movie my highest recommendation to everyone, and consider this to be the best movie I’ve seen this year.