So here we are, at the turn of the tide: one vote from winning the court; two-to-three good years from winning the largest stage of the war; the pressures of the Oval Office at their dramatic peak. A critical moment in our nation’s history, time for an individual with the strength and courage to do what the moment demands.

In 2008, I support John McCain.

“But…but…” my friends say incredulously, “But John McCain is crazy!”

“Perhaps,” I answer. “But you say this as if it’s a bad thing?”

It’s true: stubborn and irascible, John McCain’s living rendition of Don Quixote has been infuriating to watch. He always had a bit of the mad saint of the valley to him—a quality that has only increased with age. His breaks from conservative doctrine are manifold, but fewer in number than those of several of his fellow Senators. Yet McCain’s breaks seem so much greater than those of, say, John Warner—why? Because when he goes on his separate path, he damn well wants you to know it, and know that he thinks you and his other conservative opponents to be inches from Lucifer for your damnable orthodoxy.

Or as Lileks put it: “I like John McCain. He seems like the sort of guy you could have a beer with, right up to the moment where he smashes the bottle on the table and jams it in your face over something you said six years ago.”

It all used to have an endearing Abe Simpson quality to it—“Dear Mr. President: There are too many states. Please eliminate three.”—but there is a ferocity that has emerged in recent years that has led to countless run-ins, of the sort staffers share in loud whispers after too many drinks. They tend to remind me less of the befuddled Abe than of Richard Burton as Henry VIII responding to Woolsey in defiance of Rome—“How far would I go, you ask? I would cleave the earth in two like an apple, and fling the halves into the VOID!”

Yet this is also what I’ve always admired about McCain, even if conservatives curse him in the course of legislative battle: he is the same man, whichever side he is on. He brings that same infuriating passion to our cause when his inner compass has led him to alliance. His support of the surge confounded the glitterati of the MSM, who gave him every opportunity to break with the president in a fashion that would’ve led to countless more cover appearances for the late-night self-pleasuring of pimply interns of the New Republic. And yet he could not be agreeable to them, as tempting as the doyennes and the cameras were: he rambled through, grousing yet triumphant, middle fingers raised to Rumsfeld on the right and the New York Times on the left. Even if you dislike McCain, you have to admit: It was a glorious moment for him.

Of course, there is another candidate who shared many of these admirable traits: Rudy Giuliani. It might surprise a few of you to know that hizzoner was my first choice, and first choice by a mile, in this election. No, Rudy’s not a full-bore conservative, but we thought George W. Bush was, and we’ve all seen how that has turned out. The rationale for me was simple: the next four years will be very, very rough for the Republican Party as a whole. The next President will likely be working opposite large Democrat majorities in the House and the Senate. In such a scenario, having a President who does not fear telling Nancy Pelosi to shove it—in fact, ENJOYS the very act and revels in the consequences—is enormously advantageous. In New York City, he survived by keeping his head on a swivel, which is what you gotta do when you find yourself in a vicious cockfight. We could use that in Washington.

Nearly two years ago, I started working in a voluntary capacity alongside others to share the perspective of a dedicated social conservative with the nascent Giuliani campaign, arguing that—with a few internally consistent moves rightward on matters of judicial policy—Rudy could establish himself as the consensus second choice for many social conservatives. He could issue a sterling call for a New Federalism, as Dan McLaughlin has eloquently offered—that while personally pro-choice, he believed Roe to be bad law, wrongly decided, and that every American should have the right to have their voices heard on such an issue by voting in their state. He could argue that it was high time the federal government got back to the business of defending the country, not squabbling over marriage and stem cell funding. With such a position, I still believe that after Brownback, Huckabee, and others inevitably faded, Rudy could have been the consensus pick.

Of course, Rudy’s campaign could easily ignore me or any of the other dirty web folks saying this, but it was advice echoed publicly by genuinely smart people: Patrick Ruffini, Michael Barone and Fred Barnes among others. His campaign chose to ignore all this advice. Instead, they started believing their own name-ID-elevated tracking polls about their frontrunner status. I sat and watched in Houston as Rudy unequivocally passed on the opportunity to become a consensus candidate. They ran the most short-sighted, parochial, and—frankly—flat-out wimpy campaign I’ve ever seen at the national level without the inclusion of Dick Lugar. And that’s saying something.

It’s not like Rudy was the only disappointment, of course. This cycle has been full of them. The only candidate to overperform, as you look over the field, has been Huckabee. As a naturally gifted communicator with good instincts and an evangelistic temperament, I think that people need to recognize that Huckabee represents the views of a significant number of people in the Republican Party, whether they like it or not. If he isn’t chosen for Veep this time, I have no doubt he’ll run again for POTUS in the future, and probably with the Tom Joad impression tempered a bit. A McCain-Huckabee ticket would make Rush Limbaugh’s head explode, as it would for many of our readers, but it’s a ticket that would fully satisfy a good 75% of Republicans, if not more. That’s the reality, folks, and if you don’t like it, then get to changing it.

With Rudy’s ship sinking, Fred a non-factor, and Huckabee hampered by lack of foreign policy chops and a shoestring budget, the opportunity was there for McCain—once the establishment pick, imploded and then reborn, to once again don the armor and save the unseen Dulcinea and her doubtless properly filed FEC paperwork.

We are left with two realistically possible nominees, with hopes for a brokered convention dashed. In 2008, the question has become: do you support the calculating unprincipled friend, or the passionate principled foe?

For me, it came down to three choices, made on three critical fronts: McCain’s decision to side with President Bush on the surge, with President Bush on Alito and Roberts, and against President Bush on the largest entitlement in the history of America. In each of these areas, we were and are agreed—and in each, McCain displayed the courage and patriotism he has always possessed—the strength of character to do what he believed was right, regardless of whether it was popular.

There are other areas, yes. It’s true that when history calls out for a strong choice, I often say “No!” as McCain, onscreen, declared “Yes!” And in response to that same demand, Mitt Romney has answered loud and clear in his four years in elected office: “Present!”

We may rightly ask: what would John McCain’s first 100 days look like? I’m sure any of us could sit down and outline them in rough but accurate fashion—the good and the bad are well known to us by now, and we can anticipate them with all the regular rhythms and sound effects of a 1980s sitcom. We would have to balance against him on some things and cheer him on in others. We know him as a foe and a friend, and know him well.

On the other hand, what would Mitt Romney’s first 100 days look like? I cannot begin to answer that question, because it’s ludicrous to conceive of this as even a possibility. It simply will not happen, ever. The man has the highest negative ratings of any candidate in the field not named Hillary, and she still beats him by an easy margin—one that will only increase as the Oprah-fueled excitement gap widens.

After two-plus years of having Candidate Mitt before us, conservatives have barely scratched the surface of this candidate’s remarkable political liabilities. His weaknesses are not just small or needling—they are epic. More troubling for those who value winning, though, is the fact that Romney campaign’s reactions to assaults are easily foreseen and more easily outmaneuvered; the predictability of out-populisting Huckabee in Michigan followed by blasting John McCain’s conservative position on Medicare in Florida is the hallmark of this movable feast of a campaign (corn dogs here, caviar there, and be sure to peel the skin off that fried chicken).

As general election strategy goes, Barack Obama would have Romney twisted in all directions, with strong words and an easy smile; the Clinton machine would dismantle him piece by piece with a singsong sledgehammer, leaving bits of bone and blood as bleak warnings to future would-be CEO-politicians. The end result is the same: when he’s been chewed by the machine, Mitt Romney will come to symbolize every worst cliche of corporate greed and offense, be reviled as out of touch and inconsistent, and be mocked at length as the whitest white man in America.

Allow me a moment to be blunt: The Democrats will hand Mitt Romney his ass on a silver platter, and force him to wear it as a hat. His sunny demeanor unchanged, he will give a strong farewell speech thanking his supporters, and give the experience a solid B+.

In 2000 I wrote that Joe Lieberman was a man forever at war with his conscience—Mitt Romney battles his very self on what seems like a daily basis. At least Lieberman’s struggle was interesting and soulful—with Romney, one might as well watch varying shades of astroturf compete for territory. Find me the one issue that Mitt Romney will fall on his sword for, and it would be the first. He is not just untested and unmeasured by adversity or serious political firefights (people speak about him “saving the Olympics” as if it was something that mattered; guess what? I’ve been to the Olympics; the Olympics are the United Nations of sport, where everybody gets together to hate on America; nobody actually likes the Olympics, not even Costas), he has the CEO’s strong aversity to the very concept of things falling apart. Equipped with the flat, even optimism that only the gift of a silver spoon and prep school makeout sessions in the bushes near the quad at Cranbrook-Kingswood or Phillips-Exeter can bring to a man’s life, he comes before us as one who has never risked his all for any cause without having a fallback, who has never overcome a vice, who has never wanted for anything.

American voters are fickle creatures, but with great consistency, they recognize such poll-tested waffle-patterned on-demand candidates as being either naïve, otherworldly, or false. With Mitt Romney, would-be heir to the “once adamantly pro-choice” Ronald Reagan (“I was an Independent during Reagan-Bush, I don’t want to take us back to Reagan-Bush”), they may well judge him as all three combined. In another political day, candidates of his ilk won with regularity; they still develop a train of guppy fish lackies in some circles—yet that was before people’s inauthentic comments were fodder for the internet grind, and Romney talking about “seeing the Patriots win the World Series” would get repeated on CNN, Comedy Central, and ESPN News for the next 48 hours, and sent via YouTube to 100,000 people in mere moments. “Conservatives are such rich white idiots,” they will say, and move on.

The Reagan coalition has and will survive many things. But can it survive the total loss of one of its strongest remaining assets—the authentic, consistent, principled leadership it represents? Make no mistake: Clinton or Obama know Mitt Romney’s weaknesses, and they know those of the Republican base as well. They know the opportunity he represents to slice the Reagan legacy away from the Republican Party—a well-manicured pretender to the mantle who gets by on pancake makeup, eyebrow waxing, and hair gel.

So here we are, at the turn of the tide—and you go to the polls with the candidates you have, not the candidates you want. Saint John McCain of the Campaign-Finance Cross versus Willard of the North, well-mannered Ken Doll? The choice is an easy one for me. Let’s help old Don Quixote into the saddle one more time, and set him on his merry way, to win or lose with him.

The Reagan coalition survived Read my lips. It survived Bob Dole’s peanut butter. It survived compassionate conservatism and its kid stepbrother national greatness. And it will survive John McCain and everything he will do as our nominee and as president. In fact—in a twisted version of the ancient Vulcan proverb “Only Nixon could go to China”—only McCain can save it.

They will say the coalition is dead—but we will know better. We know it only sleeps. We will cast our votes knowing that the day will come, four years from now, when a new leader, one who knows what the shining city truly means, stands in front of the fresh-dug tomb, and calls into the blackness, as if to Lazarus—”Come out!”

And when we hear it, we will rise from out of our stupor, dust cobwebs from our arms, stumble to the door, our eyes blinking in the sunlight … and we will know our day has come.

It’s okay, you can smile. The bastards won’t know what hit ‘em.

crossposted at redstate

For some people, especially those who live and work in the District of Columbia, there is no aspect of life untouched by politics. It surrounds them like a cloud. This leads some of them to constant overanalysis of life, pop culture, and even shopping trends through the harsh lens of partisan politics. They tend to be the same people attracted to the constant unrelenting snark that the internet thrives on, and — if you said it to the subject’s face — is the sort of thing that in the old days would end with pistols and paces (as it should be, Thomas yells somewhere).

I have no idea if Dana Goldstein of The American Prospect is one of these people. But her latest written work of political analysis over at TNR just goes so far over the edge of any guidelines of respect or decorum, it exemplifies what happens when partisan political views warp the prism through which one views the world.

Namely, “Baby on Board” accuses the McCain campaign of “using [his adopted daughter] Bridget as a political football” thanks to a mailer depicting Cindy McCain with baby Bridget in her arms, standing beside a beaming Bangladeshi nun.

The text of the mailer reads in part:

“Cindy cradles little Bridget, a baby she and John adopted in 1993 from Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh. Bridget has been a great blessing to the McCain family. Today, Cindy and John work together to promote adoption and to help women facing crisis pregnancies.”

In these three small sentences, Goldstein finds “code words” and “symbols” of the “religious right” and “anti-choice activism.” She goes on to take several shots at Mother Theresa, and to actually suggest that the Catholic Church and pro-lifers as a whole are blissfully unaware of all of the difficulties associated with adoption. She suggests this is all an effort at playing race-based guilt politics (I’d suggest she take a look at what happened in New Hampshire on the other side of the aisle if she wants to see racial politics at its worst). And she finishes up with the idea that promoting adoption of children born in the Third World, in worlds of terrible poverty, and (in Bridget’s case) with physical disfigurement that makes one an outcast, as “the ugliest rhetorical practices of the pro-life movement.”

McCain has seven children in all, including an older daughter, Meghan, who is rather prominent. But Bridget’s interactions with the press have been careful and limited, sensitive to her. In this campaign as in others, she hasn’t been paraded about or held up as a totem. And if talking to the kids at such a prominent place as Scholastic makes one a political football, well…but let’s leave that accusation to the dustbin it deserves.

In truth, it’s not worth raising a response to the political hackery of Dana Goldstein, whose pro-abortion views clearly tint her view of the world. The response is Bridget McCain herself, who today is safe, and healthy, and loved by a family, because a woman was brave enough not to merely react with hands-off sympathy, but to gather this frail infant up in her arms and never let her go. I can venture this much: Politics was the farthest thing from her mind at the moment she held this ten week old child in her arms.

Cindy took one look in Bridget’s beautiful eyes and said, “That’s my baby, if I leave her here she’ll die.” I don’t think Cindy ever put her down.

My little sister Florence is a few years younger than Bridget. She is thirteen, and she is adopted from DC social services—not exactly as daunting a task as the McCain’s faced in their long struggle with the Bangladeshi adoption services, but still, it took long days of expense and effort.

A few months ago, she got into a conversation about abortion, of all things, with her friends at ballet practice. It’s the sort of thing 12 and 13 year old girls talk about all the time these days.

Florence, without any prompting whatsoever - and never having had a conversation about the issue with my parents, siblings, or me - listened to her friends for a while. And then she interrupted:

“So let me get this straight: you all think someone should be able to make someone like me not exist?”

I love my little sister. I love her not as a “political football,” as a “code word,” as a “rhetorical practice.” I love her because of the girl she is, and the woman she will be. And every day, Florence reminds me that we are loved not because of where we were born, because of who raised us, or because of how we grew up—and that there exists within each of us a spark of the divine, worthy of dignity and meant to be cherished as a gift.

In the real world, not everything in life is political. Dana Goldstein should try visiting it sometime.

crossposted at redstate

>> When it comes to the latest goings on in the South Carolina Republican Primary, it seems clear that this was a last hurrah for the Fred Thompson campaign. The suggested farewell marks for FDT are here. As for where conservatives go now, I think this little poll may be a better indication than I’d like. Sounds like the discussions about the life or death of the Reagan Coalition are going to be needed, after all.

>> How to write stories, lose weight, clean up the environment, and make a million dollars. Well, I’m not sure about that last part.

>> Some knowledge is more useful than others.  This should be useful.

>> Here’s a fascinating discussion of the work of Bob Dylan with Joseph Bottum - it’s well worth your time to read it all. More on this subject here.

>> The Portal meme continues to fascinate me, ever since I got The Orange Box - though I still haven’t gotten to this degree yet. I have no idea how long it took this fellow to hook up the old Commodore 64 to play the theme song, but it was certainly worth it. And this “Day in the life of a Turret” takes the Red vs. Blue phenomenon to a new level. We’ll see how long this thing can keep going.

>> The tale of Sir Norvous. “Ladanius de la Tomlinson sighs and says, “I sometimes think that all you tell me of knighthood, kingdoms, empires and islands is all windy blather and lies.”

Su-Chin: I’m having a little trouble concentrating.
Juno MacGuff: Oh, well, I could lend you some of my atoral if you want?
Su-Chin: No thanks, I’m off pills.
Juno MacGuff: That’s good. I heard this one chick took like way too many behavioral meds and she went to the mall, ripped off all her clothes, dived into the fountain and was all like “ARGH I’M A KRAKKEN FROM THE SEA!”
Su-Chin: I heard that was you.

There comes a point in every moviegoer’s life where you meet a character on the screen who is so real to you, so tangible, and so familiar, that you cannot help but fall in love with her right in that moment—as if running into an old friend for the first time in a long while in a public place, and feeling surprise and joy that this is not someone who just happens to look like that friend, but really them. The world has turned again, and here you are. Let me buy you a drink.

I can speak only for the men in the room who love movies, because I’ve never encountered a woman who felt this way—all the ones I know fall for actors or rockstars as people, and love them in all their roles after and cut out pictures of them from magazines or buy posters of them shirtless or kissing some girl, looking resolute or pissed off or just plain awesome. They say things like “In real life, I think Leonardo DiCaprio is a really good guy, he’s not just dreamy.” I guess some guys do that too—I’m sure, were she still alive, I could be content just watching Grace Kelly clean her ears—but even more than women, the ones I know fall for characters, regardless of the actress. It becomes one more item of comparison. So friends end up comparing the new girl to Anna Paquin from 25^th Hour, or maybe she’s more like Kirsten Dunst from Elizabethtown, or maybe she’s Jordana Brewster from The Faculty, or maybe she’s Elizabeth Banks in every dang role she’s ever had. You get the idea: it’s a solid and immediately recognizable shorthand, and it’s easier to make this kind of recognizable comparison then talk about every quirk a woman has, since most guys don’t really want to hear about that anyway. I certainly don’t unless you’re buying the bourbon.

So maybe you, dear reader, will understand this, maybe you won’t. But if you do love films, and the characters in them born of screenwriter and actor and director, then you will understand what I mean when I say, without any qualm: I love Juno MacGuff.

I don’t consider myself a film buff. I haven’t honestly seen that many films older than the 1970s. I’ve seen a lot more of them than a lot of my peers, yes—but they all tend to be movies of a certain type, or with a famous director. I haven’t even scratched the surface of influential dramas or directors, leaning more toward the popular big names, creators like Hitchcock or Kubrick and talent like Stewart and Grant. When you’re talking foreign films, I’m almost a complete blank, with a few exceptions. I can’t analyze films the way some people can—I enjoy the good ones too much to pick apart what’s being done in them, as a director or an editor. When you get right down to it, I know more about Steve McQueen than Francois Truffaut, and I damn well like it that way. But never in all my years of watching films have I found a character who I recognized so well immediately, and felt so touched by in such a novella of a film.

[As a total aside: What I do have, I’ve discovered, is a slightly disturbing talent to recognize faces of minor character actors and That Guys—a few weeks ago, I recognized the daughter from Signs in a random preview, and the ref from Dodgeball (it’s truly a layered movie, as Ben Stiller says) on a trashy TV show, and ... it’s just odd, I know, but I retain that kind of totally useless information. It makes me good to have for six degrees of separation games, and basically just a useless meatbag at everything else.]

Anyway: as Colleen Carroll-Campbell pointed out recently, there were three amazingly pro-life movies in the space of the past year: Knocked Up, Waitress, and Bella. Having seen them all now, I can safely say they are all funny and genuinely sweet movies, and worth watching (for more on Judd Apatow’s work in particular, read Ross Douthat’s posts here and here). I say “amazingly” not because of the power of the films, but because they aren’t explicitly focused on being pro-life, but convey the basic anti-abortion tenet through good and well-told stories, with humor and occasional grace.

It’s important to note that being anti-abortion means just that in this context—not a statement about Roe, or government funding, or stem cells, or cloning, or anything else. It is anti-abortion in the way that those GE sonogram commercials are (and the party of death can’t even stand those!). It merely means accepting the idea that childbearing is a good thing—that the life growing in a womb is unique and real, a gift and not a curse—and that abortion is, on balance, a bad thing that should be avoided if at all possible.

This is not some rabid pro-life view, or at least is not presented as such—it is merely an idea that, despite NARAL’s best efforts, has overtaken the plurality of the American people and the majority of young people if the polls are to be believed: that abortion is a social ill at best, and should only happen in cases of rape, incest, or when a mother’s life is threatened.

But it also brings to mind this illuminating comment, also from a few years back:

Some of these came to light last summer, when a Newsweek article on the “fetal rights” movement pointed out that the latest reproductive technologies—providing, as they do, the ability to see embryos sooner and cultivating, as they do, an atmosphere in which pregnant women happily scrapbook those early ultrasounds—have created a real image problem for the pro-choice movement. As Kirsten Moore, the president of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, put it, the piece “kind of prompted us to realize, oh my God, our movement’s messages suck.”

Not everybody recognizes that truth yet. Despite what TNR argues in its pompous, dismissive tone, this movement toward favoring life marks a generational sea-change in how films deal with pregnancy as a storyline. Start with Cameron Crowe’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a film that hasn’t aged well generally, which came out the year that I was born, 1982: in it, abortion is an afterthought, taken for granted, with scars that do not last or haunt. In 1987’s Dirty Dancing—a stupid movie that I really, really hate, and I can’t stand the girls who just plain love it—the legendary back-alley abortionist rears his ugly head again, with dire results (that’ll learn ya, anti-Roe fascists). In 2000’s High Fidelity, abortion—while viewed as a negative, in general terms—is glossed over and discussed only in passing (this is a John Cusack comedy, after all). And as recently as three years ago, the most significant film about abortion to meet with critical success was the gung-ho abortionist-vindicating epic of 2004’s Vera Drake—and a host of other productions kept the pro-abortion drumbeat going in recent years, including The Cider House Rules, Citizen Ruth (come on Laura Dern, at least Teachers was watchable), and the If These Walls Could Talk mini-series.

If you asked me to name the most prominent pro-life scene in any major studio movie in 2005, I’d say it was probably in Godfather II, and you’re supposed to feel genuinely conflicted there, anyway. Not any more.

Now we have Knocked Up, Waitress, Bella and best of all, Juno. I can’t even communicate the kind of affection I feel for twenty-year-old Ellen Page’s character. I swear she reminds me of every girl I adored before the age of 18, quirkily smart and devilishly cruel and relentlessly funny, and with a warm goodness that radiated through in spite of the shell they built around themselves. That point she makes about the jocks—that they secretly crave “girls who play the cello and read McSweeney’s and want to be children’s librarians when they grow up” more than the skinny too-perfect forced-to-be-ditzy cheerleaders—is true of the ambitious political geeks, too. Of course, when I went to college, I found out those girls all turned into potheads working at the dull-ass radio station in the basement of the University Center and who had fickle, starved, conflicted hearts. But in this moment, at this age, I recognize Juno MacGuff as an old friend, and it hits me right in the chest.

The moment of truth that comes as Juno seeks her “hasty abortion” is just astounding and unambiguous—one of the reasons the single-issue folks at choiceusa are among the very few who actively dislike it. Let’s leave it to World’s Lynn Vincent to describe the scene:

That seems to be the case with Juno, the film in which a spunky teen (Golden Globe nominee Ellen Page) changes her mind about abortion after hearing about her baby’s fingernails. Inside the clinic, as Juno fills out the necessary forms, she suddenly becomes conscious of all the women waiting with her—nervously tapping their nails, clicking their nails, biting their nails. As the disparate sounds gel into a kind of heartbeat, Juno suddenly realizes her fetus is a human being.

When she bursts out of the clinic, a teen pro-life picketer outside cries, “God appreciates your miracle!” Astonishingly, the pivotal, life-affirming moment passes without a flicker of condescension.

I can’t offer anything more about the film that critics haven’t already said ten times over. The movie has met with the most critical success of any of this crop of intrinsically anti-abortion films—Roger Ebert actually chose it as his top movie of the year, astoundingly. So let me just say that I wish it, and all the young women who see themselves in Juno MacGuff, all the best that life—in all its challenges, tears, laughter and wonder—has to offer.

Juno MacGuff: [yelling through the house] Uh, dad?
Mac MacGuff: Yeah?
Juno MacGuff: Either I just wet my pants… or…
Mac MacGuff: “Or”…?
Juno MacGuff: Or… THUNDERCATS ARE GO!

>> I am amazed at how faithful the Coens are to the original text of No Country for Old Men, which is a pretty convoluted story in its own right. The dialogue is almost verbatim. The two areas where they part with the book noticeably are in the hotel room (anyone who’s seen it will know which scene I’m talking about), and in the order the events leading up to the end take place. They move the scene with young Mrs. Moss to later to emphasize its emotional impact (and they make it ambiguous with the cut, and the absence of a weapon, where as the book just says what happens). The ending has sparked some debate, among film buffs and others, but the point is still made: this is a fantastic and well-made film about living under the shadow of death, knowing what’s coming for us all, and finding it unavoidable, yet still living and going on. Absolutely what we’ve come to expect from the Coens. A simple example: when Llewellyn flees initially, chased by the crazed dog, he swims the river. Functionally, for the story, it’s his River Styx, the dog his Cerberus. It’s truly rare to see a film that echoes of Ecclesiastes and Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” all at once.