Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) had it all: he was a star athlete, young, handsome, and charming. He’s driving a convertible at night along a country road, and wants to show his date, and his best friend in the back (with his date), how amazing it is to drive with the lights out and watch the luminescent fireflies. They are at once enchanted, thrilled, and frightened. As he speeds up to heighten the sense of danger, the others start “freaking out,” begging him to turn on the headlights, and as he does, they all see the combine inexplicably parked on the road, just before they hit it head-on.
Now it is four years later. Chris Pratt is still adjusting to his head injury. He lives in a kind of Halfway House with Lewis, a middle-aged blind man (Jeff Daniels). He gets up every morning and goes to “school,” which consists of occupational therapy sessions with the other “students.” He has trouble sequencing, so he has to write everything down, in order: Wake up. Take a shower, with soap. Get Dressed. Eat breakfast. Go to school.
The simplest tasks frustrate him. He can successfully grasp things with his right hand, but still has difficulty with his left. He has trouble opening a can, or chopping vegetables, so Lewis does most of the cooking. He struggles with remorse about the accident, and guilt about causing the death of his friends. (One girl survived, with her left leg amputated, but he has yet to gather the courage to contact her.) He grieves over the loss of his great personal potential, and his apparently unlimited future. He works as a night janitor in a local bank. Holiday dinners at the home of his wealthy parents merely remind him of how much he has lost and will never regain. They seem so smug in their success, and so condescending to their poor little damaged boy. How does he recover his sense of manhood?
Enter a very clever con man named Gary Spargo (Matthew Goode). He immediately sizes up Chris Pratt, sipping an O’Doul’s by himself at the local watering hole. Spargo first chats up his “mark,” then, from the pool table, sends over his accomplice, Luvlee (Isla Fisher.) Poor Chris is completely infatuated. Spargo enlists him to help in a bank heist they’re planning; they need Chris Pratt to be their lookout.
He easily succumbs to their cynical blandishments. Too late, he realizes that they are just ordinary thugs who are using him. And when everything starts going horribly wrong, Chris Pratt must somehow make some very difficult decisions while under an enormous amount of stress.
Chris Pratt carries a card around that says, “My name is Chris Pratt. I have had a serious head injury.” In a way, we all wear our limitations, some more evidently than others. Redemption is not necessarily in overcoming obvious obstacles. It’s more in developing the integrity of the character within.
Questions For Discussion:
1) Have you ever befriended people who did not have your best interests at heart?
2) How do you deal with guilt? Remorse? Loss of personal capacity?
3) How have you experienced personal redemption?
Ron Salfen is pastor of First Church in Terrell, Texas.
