Whether we like it or not, college is an existential odyssey landing us in more uncertain territory than we began. I attended liberal Georgetown University as an already well-trained Catholic boy. I left an agnostic happy in his dilemmas, uncertain as hell about God but ready to spend a life searching for truth and beauty, both of which I found thanks to that Jesuit education.
Ratchet up that liberalism to arguably the most liberal college in the US, Reed College in Portland, Oregon, set the movie Blue Like Jazz square in the middle of that progressive world, and you have fertile ground for a young Baptist, Don (Marshall Allman), from conservative East Texas learn about ambiguity and find God in strange places. It's a gentle, counter culture film about secular extremism that actually leads Don to an understanding of religion transcending Christian moms and hypocritical pastors.
Blue Like Jazz is successful showing the liberating nature of a college where the average student IQ is 138, classroom discussions pit cultures against each other to find common ground, and one is free to express to the delight and challenge of others. The film fails, however, to provide a coherent point of view because of its passion for discursive episodes not always linked by motif or theme. Just too many eccentrics and not enough time.
The defining event of the search for godlessness leading to God is Renn Fayre, the annual selection of a "Pope," meant to be a mockery of exalted Catholicism that turns out to be a growth point in the intellectual journey of freshman Don. He turns out to be not unlike the Graduate's Benjamin, naïve but on his glacial way to enlightenment.
Blue Like Jazz is a charming, incoherent coming-of-age film that made me nostalgic for the low-key anarchy of Georgetown, where I may have grown away from the orthodoxy of the Sisters of Saint Joseph in favor of the secular humanism of the Jesuits, but where even I have to admit uncertainty about the existence of God is a pleasant antidote to the uncompromising certainty of the Baltimore Catechism.
Ratchet up that liberalism to arguably the most liberal college in the US, Reed College in Portland, Oregon, set the movie Blue Like Jazz square in the middle of that progressive world, and you have fertile ground for a young Baptist, Don (Marshall Allman), from conservative East Texas learn about ambiguity and find God in strange places. It's a gentle, counter culture film about secular extremism that actually leads Don to an understanding of religion transcending Christian moms and hypocritical pastors.
Blue Like Jazz is successful showing the liberating nature of a college where the average student IQ is 138, classroom discussions pit cultures against each other to find common ground, and one is free to express to the delight and challenge of others. The film fails, however, to provide a coherent point of view because of its passion for discursive episodes not always linked by motif or theme. Just too many eccentrics and not enough time.
The defining event of the search for godlessness leading to God is Renn Fayre, the annual selection of a "Pope," meant to be a mockery of exalted Catholicism that turns out to be a growth point in the intellectual journey of freshman Don. He turns out to be not unlike the Graduate's Benjamin, naïve but on his glacial way to enlightenment.
Blue Like Jazz is a charming, incoherent coming-of-age film that made me nostalgic for the low-key anarchy of Georgetown, where I may have grown away from the orthodoxy of the Sisters of Saint Joseph in favor of the secular humanism of the Jesuits, but where even I have to admit uncertainty about the existence of God is a pleasant antidote to the uncompromising certainty of the Baltimore Catechism.