Prodigal Grandma

We moderns like our heroes cut down to size. Especially we demand that Christian faith, which is nothing if not the heroic writ large, must be portrayed warts and all. Robert Duvall did just that in The Apostle. The extremely favorable reception of Duvall’s extraordinary film tells me that something is afoot in our culture. Christian themes can actually be portrayed in a way that is neither saccharine nor demeaning—and audiences will applaud. In case you’ve been asleep during the twentieth century, this is big news.

All of which brings us to Central Station, a striking film by Brazilian director Walter Salles that took top honors at the Berlin Film Festival and won Sundance’s Cinema 100 award for its screenplay. The story focuses on two people: Josue, an orphan of nine, and Dora, a nastily cynical and bitter woman of 67—going on 167. (When in one scene on a bus her shrewish squawking prompts a wakened passenger to denounce her as a hag, I thought, “Ah, yes, that’s the word I was looking for.”)

The movie’s quirkily filmed opening is a happy presentiment of things to come. We see closeups of various people “talking” to the camera—to us—pouring out their hearts, as to a mirror, or to God. Because of the heartbreaking earnestness of their words, even the least attractive of them has a radiant inner beauty. We soon realize these people are dictating letters as they speak—to Dora, who works in the main room of Rio de Janeiro’s eponymous Central Station as a surrogate “letter writer.”

One of the people who visits Dora is Josue’s mother, whose letter is addressed to her runaway husband. She implores him to return so he can see his son. Josue squirms nervously by her side, correctly sizing up the old woman as untrustworthy. But when they finish and leave to go home, tragedy strikes: a speeding bus hits and kills Josue’s mother. The authorities spirit her away in an ambulance, and Josue is somehow left behind. The brave boy wanders the station for several days, waiting for her to return, but of course she never does.

In the meantime, we learn something ugly about Dora. It seems she doesn’t mail many of the letters she’s supposed to. She takes them home and after mockingly reading them with her neighbor, imperiously decides which ones merit mailing, tossing the others in the trash. There is something inescapably evil about this act, especially when one considers the hopeful and kind faces of those illiterates who entrusted her with their deepest thoughts and concerns, not to mention money for postage and handling.

Because Dora’s own father, an alcoholic, treated her and her mother poorly, Dora has it in for all fathers. When she reads the letter Josue’s mother dictated she is especially derisive. She assumes Josue’s father will never respond to it, and she moves to discard it. Her neighbor protests, and Dora finally consigns the letter to the cramped limbo of her “maybe” drawer, clearly never intending to mail it.

But because she alone knows the details of Josue’s circumstances, Dora begins to feel somehow responsible for him as she watches him wandering about the station, futilely waiting for the return of his mother. When a policeman moves to take Josue away from the station, Dora surprises herself and us by telling the policeman she knows the boy. More suprising still, she takes him home.

The two of them bicker immediately, though, and after a few days Dora returns to her less magnanimous ways, selling the boy to a shady adoption agency for a tidy sum. Her neighbor berates her, and Dora finally relents, returning to the agency to rescue Josue. She does so, but without refunding the money. Predictably, the authorities give chase, making it impossible to return to her apartment.

At this turning point in the story, Dora vows to reunite Josue with his father, who lives in the rural northwest of Brazil. The two get on a bus and begin their long, strange journey, a kind of Heart of Darkness in reverse—a diesel-powered flight from Mr. Kurtz’s dense cinder of horror into the free and expansive light of God’s redemption. That this journey will mark Dora’s pilgrimage home to her own heavenly Father is neither obvious nor cloying.

During their journey they argue again, and the bus leaves them behind, sans cash. But God appoints an evangelical truck driver named Cesar to give them a lift. His truck has decals that say, in Portuguese: “God is coming / Prepare yourself” and “With God I follow my destiny.” Cesar is an odd but generally likable fellow. (Think Soupy Sales meets John the Baptist.) When they stop in a restaurant for a bite to eat, Dora, whose heart is now lurching toward life, takes a shine to him. She offers him some of her beer. He initially refuses, saying he cannot, that he’s an evangelist, but suddenly he relents and gulps it down greedily. It is a measure of the film’s extraordinary maturity in dealing with faith that we don’t see this as mere hypocrisy but rather as an honest picture of a man struggling with temptation.

Now Dora’s slowly thawing heart melts into overdrive: suddenly aware of her decades-suppressed desire for love, she awkwardly puts her hand on Cesar’s and gazes at him longingly. She then excuses herself and shuttles to the bathroom to apply some lipstick. When she does this it is as though she is smearing life itself onto her face. A decade or two seem to vanish—poof!—and mirabile dictu, the old bird suddenly looks attractive again. But her newfound radiance is too late to capture Cesar, who is spooked by her clumsy grasping as much as by his own inability to resist temptation. When she returns, he has slipped into his rig and is hauling his assets toward the horizon.

Visually, parts of Central Station are beautiful. Sometimes it resembles the later films of Jacques Tati, who, three decades before Imax, filled every inch of his frame with action, nearly overwhelming the viewer. Other shots, such as the ones of swarming commuters, bring to mind the peopled segments of the Phillip Glass-scored Koyaanisqatsi. And yet, somehow Salles has managed to choose the ugliest earth tones imaginable for his pallette. Think of it as the chromatic opposite of The Truman Show or anything by Merchant-Ivory.

When Dora and Josue finally near their destination, without money or any resources, things take an almost hallucinatory turn. They stumble onto a vast Catholic revival meeting, where pilgrims are singing hymns and praying. When Josue and Dora argue yet again, he runs away through the suppliant throng and she follows him, eventually ending up in a strange tent filled with candles and loudly praying faithful. The confusing din undoes her, and she collapses, but when Josue and she are reunited it’s clear they have come through a crucial pass, geographically and spiritually.

I won’t spoil the ending, but there is one more precious scene involving letter writing, this time to various saints, that tops the first one and forms a touching counterpoint to it. Either of these alone is worth the price of admission. And of course, this batch of letters is mailed.

Eric Metaxas is associate editor of Chuck Colson’s BreakPoint radio program. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic Monthly, and Regeneration Quarterly. His most recent book for children is The Bible ABC (Tommy Nelson).