MTR Strikes Again: The Last Kiss

I took a seminar this past fall entitled "Making Things Right."

Now the theme follows me everywhere.

Today, I watched a movie I had picked up at the store entitled The Last Kiss. I knew nothing about it except that it starred Zach Braff and Rachel Bilson. I figured it for a light chick flick.

Instead, I watched the screen for 115 minutes and found myself not only laughing and enjoying the film, but also staring at the raw honesty depicted on the screen.

The film follows a number of couples, most around age 30 (with the exception of an older couple exquistely played by Blythe Danner and Tom Wilkinson) as their relationships crumble for one reason or another. Yet they are woven together in such a way that the true story is about relationality in general.

The characters are human, none of the Hollowoodizing, junky, fairytalelike characters. These characters make mistakes, yell, cuss, laugh, cry, and slam doors. They are strong, they are vulnerable, they are broken. They seem to truly represent people.

Too often characters in making things right tales seem so far away - too dramatized, or historic, or simply so fantastical that its hard to really identify with them. We take their lines and keep them as our favorite quotes as if they guide our lives in some way. Whether in books or movies, we tend to gravitate towards these characters and hold them up as characters who figured it out. Whatever it is at the moment. Yet, they don't stick. At the end of the day they are simply fantasy. Their wisdom doesn't hold true in real life where relationships are hard, friendships fall away, and the true meaning of family seems startingly confused.

This movie struck me as the opposite. It is a story of these people's relationships at a crucial time in all of their lives. It shows their mistakes, their would-be failures. It shows people succumbing to temptation, confronting failure, being paralized by fear, suffering pain and loss, realizing regret, practicing forgiveness... This film acknowledges that relationships are hard and that sometimes they don't work out. But most importantly shows that when relationships do work it doesn't just happen by magic, they take work and communication and honesty and strength and forgiveness. And sometimes even in relationships that strive for perfection in all these areas still fall apart when something else goes wrong.

At the end of the film, some of them "made things right" in Hollywood terms and some didn't. But that wasn't the point. The point was the journey, the raw honesty, the pain, the struggle, the discovery, and the power of relationships, of friendships, of family. The power of people to love, and to hurt, and to forgive.

I think this film represents the idea that not all things can be made right. At least not in the "fairytale, everyone is happy, everything is just, everything is restored" sense. Yet, I do believe that sometimes the only way to make things right is to realize that the past cannot be. Sometimes coming to terms with that fact and finding a way to deal with the new reality is the only way to make the present right. But whether this also makes the past right...I'm not so sure. I think the movie's message is that it is ultimately a choice.

Will the person wronged forgive and allow the past to be made right in the scope of the present? Will the wrongdoer attempt to make things right? If one of the parties refuses, can the other still make things right? Can things be made right without truth, vulnerability, communication, strength, and life?