Eve Tushnet on the movie that The Last Station could have been:
Jesus himself said that following Him would mean putting aside family ties: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” A movie exploring the radical nature of this demand, the way in which God-above-all might mean the disruption of families and friendships, marriages and patriotic loyalties, and all the ordinary ways in which we bind ourselves to one another, could be fascinating. It could challenge our strange belief that Christianity is coterminous with “family values,” with the bourgeois social order. If that movie starred Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren, well, we’d have a classic on our hands.
I’ll be seeing The Last Station this weekend, so my own review will be forthcoming.
Carissa Turner Smith is a compulsive reader, writer, and Irish dancer. She earned her Ph.D. in English at Penn State and currently teaches writing and American literature at Charleston Southern University. At age three, she announced that all she wanted to do was “sit at a desk and read and write,” and she has been trying to make good on that promise ever since. Fortunately, she is occasionally distracted from this mission by her husband Stephen and their cheese-obsessed cat. A loyal native of Arkansas, she has always loved the fact that Jesus dwelt in an underappreciated corner of Galilee (see John 1:46). 
