Film Review: Columbus (2017)

Director Kogonada’s debut film Columbus is a love letter to art, architecture, nature, and the universal human quest for meaning.  It’s a very deliberately paced and careful film that may turn off a wider public audience – an audience that is currently engulfed, according to one of the film’s protagonists, not in a crisis of attention, but a crisis of interest.  The long (almost unsettling) shots of trees, buildings, and human faces communicates that this film is fundamentally a story of spiritual odyssey.  Cassandra (played masterfully by Haley Lu Richardson) is just a simple Hoosier girl who longs to leave town, but feels compelled to stay in Columbus, Indiana to care for her mentally ill mother.  She providentially meets Jin (John Cho), a Korean-American visiting town due to his father’s sudden illness, and the film centers around the unlikely friendship that forms around these two souls adrift and how their friendship sets both on a new trajectory. 

Jin, an ambitious yet broken out-of-towner with a deeply unhealthy relationship with his father, tends to drown his sorrows in alcohol.  He laments that he cannot appreciate architecture since his father was an expert on the subject and, in Jin’s words, “you grow up around something and it feels like nothing.”  Yet he sees within this young stranger Cassandra an almost mystical, spiritual love for the beauty and order of architecture.  Her mysticism intrigues him, all the more so since he is a wandering soul without any relationship to the spiritual realm.  For Cassie the seemingly mundane, ordinary places of her hometown – two different banks, a church, her elementary school – have taken on a sort of healing power in her life that she does not understand and cannot explain.  Speaking of a bank building, Cassandra attempts to explain to Jin the significance of where they are standing, “I’d probably seen it thousands times before, but one night I looked up and just saw it.”  (I cannot help but think of what John Wesley called the spiritual sensorium, which awakens within those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.)  Jin, always the skeptic, isn’t sure he even believes in the healing power of architecture or holy places so he chooses to ignore Cassie’s testimony.  It is a story of spiritual sight vs. spiritual blindness, yet neither is fully in the dark nor fully enlightened.  Both are on a very complicated journey.  The realism of this is very refreshing.

Throughout the film, Cassandra seems to be lost and yet she also catches glimpses of profound beauty, glimpses that gives her a sort of orientation to life when she doesn’t know her life’s purpose.  Though there is plenty to contrast between Jin and Cassie, they do share some important commonalities:  both wandering souls are given clarity and direction by the other.  Jin seems to begin to gain “sight” thanks to his serendipitous encounter with the odd Hoosier girl.  And Cassie received the answer to her question about where to go in life (isn’t the choice to leave one’s home and family one of the most difficult and universal choices we all have to make?) from this odd and unhappy sojourner.  

“You need to stop feeling bad,” Jin tells Cassandra near the end of the film.  She simply replies, “Yeah, so do you.”  Neither of them are able to extend such grace to themselves and so they give it to one another.  This is a healing, salvific moment for them both.

I loved this film since it wrestles with questions that consume my own mind these days:  Where should I go in life? How does one determine where to go?  And what does all the damn beauty around me mean?  As my friend Bill recently told me around a campfire in Wyoming, for Plato the beginning of all religion is in the pure appreciation of beauty because when it strikes you, there is no denying it.  Beauty becomes a sort of self-evident principle upon which many people choose to orient their lives.  When the architect builds, when the painter paints, when the hurting and lonely dance out their pain under a starry sky, when a child gets lost while looking at a flower, when two strangers become friends – all of these are acts of worship and surrender to beauty.  

The film ultimately challenges us all with a haunting question: Do you appreciate the beauty that is all around you or do you just let it all pass you by?  The answer to this question is, I believe, the difference between living in heaven or living in hell.