c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. He lives in Durham, N.C.)

UNDATED _”Is that what you expected?”my wife asked as the theater lights came on and stunned viewers filed silently to the exits.”I don’t know,”I replied.

I knew the story of”American Beauty”from reading reviews proclaiming it the film of the decade. But the power of its subtle shifts in images took me by surprise.

The smile on the father’s face moves in almost imperceptible stages from manic to assertive to serene. I can’t recall the daughter smiling once, but her face softens by small degrees from angry pout to confused stare to quiet courage. The lips of the military man next door never stop curling, but the curl shifts from disdain to confusion to collapse.

The least sympathetic character, the mother, shows a dozen shades of distress. The unflinching stare of the boy next door is ambiguous from beginning to end, but with a slight tilt of the head at the very end, he no longer seems dangerous. The 16-year-old temptress never ceases to be an ordinary girl who is trying too hard, but by subtle shifts in her mouth, she becomes a rose.

We’re way beyond the stony stares, smoldering rages and coy leers that constitute most movies. We’re also beyond the self-conscious cleverness of European films, which try for depth by clouding motivation and outcome.

The story of”American Beauty”can be told in three or four sentences. But the plot line isn’t central. The characters are archetypes who strike close to home. At one point, as the mother moves to a new level of distress, the woman next to us laughed nervously and mocked her. My guess is the turning lens got her own life into uncomfortable focus.

I can’t remember this bizarre decade well enough to agree or disagree with critics’ assessment of”American Beauty”as an epochal film. I do know that it is an actors’ film. The cinematography seems washed out, the music unmemorable, and the settings incidental. It seems as if the director said to some of the decade’s finest actors,”Do your best. Dig as deeply as you can. I’ll keep the camera rolling.” We tend to want our stories writ large. We want grand stories told in dramatic images, whether cataclysmic flood or decisive battle or tragic loss. We want heroes and villains who are larger than life.

In religion, we emulate this grand telling with images of triumph, dramatic mood swings, royal processions, expansive music led by the”king of instruments,”large spaces, vaulted ceilings, thrones set on high, thundering pronouncements and vast promises.

I wonder if Jesus was at all like that. His countrymen expected high drama _ a warrior, a king like David, a stark dividing of time and a dividing of people. But I wonder if Messiah was more a subtle shift, a tilt of the head, a slight but persistent transition, a slow journey of discovery, not a sudden cry of”Eureka!”but a quiet,”Oh, I see.” We want to make faith a high-drama event, too, as if naming the moment of stunning conversion would align us with a God who strides extravagantly across a vast stage.

But what if God is himself a subtly changing force, gradually letting go of dreams he shared with Abraham, walking slowly home from Babylon at the head of a broken people, and now moving among the ordinary and himself becoming ordinary _ not insignificant, not dull, not bland or flat, but ordinary, of a size that fits into life, with a voice sounding so much like ours we flinch when we hear it, because we recognize the sadness and the yearning?

What if God’s movement in history isn’t like royal warfare, but is like the father in”American Beauty,”who glimpses freedom and steps shyly into it with a subtle refusal to be shackled _ a liberation that transforms a temptress into a rose and invites another’s act of violent rage?

What if they killed Jesus, not because he was a king like David, but because he was ordinary? What if Jesus saves, not by being larger than life, a character suitable for framing on a wall, but by being small like us?

DEA END EHRICH