Millions, billions, trillions...

I made the mistake of watching the movie millions the other day. I didn't think I would have such a negative reaction to it; the American bishops' committee on movies listed it as one of the top ten films of 2005. Yet it left me unsettled and dissatisfied. I realized yesterday why.

A bag filled with millions of British pounds falls upon a boy who believes intimately in the Catholic saints. I'm particularly fond of the virgin martyrs, he declares to unsympathetic listeners. Most people in the film consider him crazy. The boy's mother has died, whence he begins to experience visions of the saints visiting him. St. Claire of Assissi seems to have taken up smoking cigarettes, which doesn't seem particularly heavenly; one wonders what on earth motivated that. At least they didn't have her butcher the Italian tongue; St. Nicholas of Myra, by contrast, speaks Latin with a horrid British accent.

The events occur under a hypothetical British change to the Euro, so the millions of pounds will be worthless in a few days. The film is punctuated by clips of an old man sitting next to a blonde in a Santa-style sleigh; in these clips, the man encourages British viewers to give as many pounds as possible to charity, or convert them at the banks into Euros. His remarks are punctuated by the cooing and squeaking of the blonde, who is dressed in a red "Santa" robe that shows as much of her cleavage as possible. This may well be par for the course in British advertising culture, but should it appear so prominently, without any indication that this is morally corrupt?

Two of the main characters have professed a desire to give as much money as possible to the poor. One of these makes it her profession; she goes from school to school with a garbage can dressed up as a little robot. The robot asks children to throw their two-pence in the garbage. She encourages them to collect all their two-pence, because while a two-pence in itself is not worth very much, and will be worth absolutely nothing in a few days, many two-pence together are worth a great deal. At this point, the idealistic boy drops £1000 into the garbage robot; this is an important point of the movie.

The idealism evaporates by the end of the film. Everyone, including the two purported do-gooders, goes on a spending binge to try to spend as much of the money as possible. At one point, the two adults (including the two-pence collector) plaster "MERRY XMAS" on the wall of a room using some of the notes that they cannot convert to Euros. Some may find redemption in the young boy's burning some notes on the railroad tracks near the end of the film, but I was disappointed.

Couldn't they simply have walked into some charity office and dropped the bag on the floor? Wasn't that the point of making me watch all those dirty old man videos, or is the entire film an exercise in self-gratification? Surely with two do-gooders as main character, one of them would have managed to get rid of a lot of money that way?

As it stands, the film appears to encourage selfishness, greed, and a dressed-up form of self-gratifying philanthropy that ignores the fact that true saints, such as the ones the boy's vision, give up everything to help the poor. You won't find mention here that Dominic sold his precious schoolbooks to help those who were starving; you won't learn that Francis of Assissi gave up even his clothes to achieve independence from his father; what you'll learn here is that his first act as a saint was to release two doves. The film maintains a focus on the superficial throughout, with a sentimental, feel-good ending to save one from the notion that true charity involves sacrifice.